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Straight talk about the world’s transition from fossil fuels to renewables with energy expert Chris Nelder
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #139] – Vehicle-Grid Integration
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In this lagniappe episode, we switch roles for the first time, with Chris as the guest and Utility Dive reporter Robert Walton as our guest host. Chris summarizes some of the insights he has gained from the past five years of research and writing about electric vehicles and vehicle-grid integration, including the various methods and speeds of charg…
China is both the greatest threat to the global climate, and, very possibly, our greatest hope for energy transition. It consumes more coal and produces more CO2 than any other nation on earth. It also has more installed capacity for wind and solar than any other nation, and the largest long-distance, high-voltage electricity transmission grid. It …
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #137] – Energy and Climate in the Biden Administration
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What will the Biden-Harris administration mean for America’s energy transition, its relationship with the rest of the world, and for global action on climate? Beyond everybody’s policy wish lists, what’s actually likely to happen, and what do this administration’s top priorities need to be to put the U.S. back on track with climate action? In this …
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[Episode #136] – The Economic Superorganism
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As the energy transition proceeds and the world takes more aggressive steps to curb global warming, analysts from many disciplines are questioning how economic growth can be maintained, or if there are limits to growth—a concept first raised in the 1970s—that will also limit the progression of energy transition. Will we run into fundamental limits …
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[Episode #135] – Internalizing Climate Risk
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Climate change poses a host of risks to the global economy. From ‘natural’ disasters causing property damage, to climate mitigation measures rendering fossil fuel assets unburnable, to potential impacts of climate change on agricultural production, energy, food, insurance, real estate, and other sectors, it’s clear that private sector companies and…
Battery storage in the US has grown ten-fold in just five years, and its growth is only accelerating. Just a single utility procurement announced in May of this year was for four times as much utility battery capacity as existed in the entire US five years ago. But battery storage isn’t just getting bigger. It’s also stretching well beyond utility-…
A decade ago, it was very conventional for asset managers to have exposure to the oil and gas sector as part of a diversified portfolio. Calls for them to divest from carbon assets because climate policy could render fossil fuel reserves unburnable mostly fell on deaf ears. But now the oil & gas sector has turned in a decade of underperformance, va…
How did the solar industry grow up so quickly over the past 15 years, and what does its future look like? In this episode, we talk with the founder of the solar team at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, who’s had a front-row seat to the industry’s development, about the many booms and busts it has seen over the past 15 years, and about what we should e…
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #131] – Decarbonizing the US by 2050
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Is it possible to decarbonize the economy of the United States, and get to net-zero emissions by 2050? A team of researchers from 15 countries who are part of the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project think so, based on their deep modeling of the US economy as part of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN). We introduced this work …
In this anniversary episode, we welcome back Jonathan Koomey to talk about some of the interesting developments and raucous debates we have seen over the past year. We’ll consider how expectations have changed for coal and gas-fired electricity generation; we’ll discuss the changed outlook for natural gas appliances; we’ll talk about the growing su…
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[Episode #129] – Deep Decarbonization Policy for the US
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What are the policies that the US needs to pursue in order to achieve its decarbonization targets?By XE Network
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #128] – Energy Basics Parts 7–9 – The Electricity Business and Power Markets
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In this part of our Energy Basics mini-series, we review the evolution of the electricity industry, and explain how wholesale and retail power markets work.By XE Network
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[Episode #127] – Hard-to-Decarbonize Sectors
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What are the solutions to reducing carbon emissions from the “hard-to-decarbonize” sectors that make industrial civilization possible?By XE Network
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[Episode #126] – Energy Basics Parts 4–6 – Electricity, Generation and Grid Management
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These episodes are part of our mini-series on the energy basics, and explain some of the essential concepts in electricity, including what electricity is, how we generate it, and how we manage power grids.By XE Network
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[Episode #125] – Beyond Planet of the Humans
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Why did the new film, Planet of the Humans, get so much about the energy transition wrong, and what are its filmmakers really trying to say?By XE Network
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[Episode #124] – Energy Transition Progress Report
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Will progress on the energy transition continue as the world gets back to work, or will it falter thanks to economies under pressure and vast unemployment?By XE Network
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[Episode #123] – Sustainable Energy Transitions
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What does “sustainability” really mean in the context of energy transition? We review a new textbook that explores these complex questions.By XE Network
Why are utility-scale wind and solar farms increasingly being paired with integrated battery storage systems, and is that really the best way to deploy storage?By XE Network
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[Episode #121] – Winning and Losing the Policy Game
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What are the winning (and losing) tactics in crafting policy to support energy transition, and what do advocates need to do to win?By XE Network
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[Episode #120] – Carnage in the Oil Patch
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How much damage has the oil industry suffered from the coronavirus shutdown, how will it recover, and what are the implications for energy transition?By XE Network
These first three episodes in our mini-series on the energy basics explain some of the essential concepts and terms in energy, including what energy is, why we convert it, and how we use it.By XE Network
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[Episode #118] – Open and Answered Questions
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The Energy Transition Show joins up with The Interchange for our first ever crossover episode!By XE Network
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #117] – Climate Science Part 12b – Improving Climate Modeling
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Two energy analysts ask an integrated assessment modeler to explain why the IPCC’s climate scenarios don’t seem to represent the progress of energy transition.By XE Network
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[Episode #116] – Climate Science Part 12a – Improving Climate Modeling
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Two energy analysts ask an integrated assessment modeler to explain why the IPCC’s climate scenarios don’t seem to represent the progress of energy transition.By XE Network
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[Episode #115] – Wildfire and Transition in Australia
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How is Australia dealing with the reality of climate change in this season of hugely destructive wildfires, and what is the outlook for its energy transition?By XE Network
What does cybersecurity on the grid mean, and what does it have to do with energy transition and climate change?By XE Network
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[Episode #113] – Coal Plant Self-Scheduling
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Fully-regulated utilities can choose to operate their plants at a loss when regulators give them a way to pass those losses onto their customers.By XE Network
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #112] – Climate Science Part 11 – Climate Confusion
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How likely are the various scenarios for global warming, what do they mean, and where is the current trajectory for climate change likely to take us?By XE Network
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #111] – No Coal in our Christmas Stockings
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Transitioning to renewables, and moving heating and transportation to the power grid, will save everyone money while reducing emissions.By XE Network
The transition to electric vehicles powered by renewables is all but guaranteed by the massive energetic advantage they have over conventional oil-burning vehicles.By XE Network
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #109] – Big Oil’s Climate Denial Machine
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Exxon was doing some of the best research on climate change 40 years ago. Why did they then commit to a global climate disinformation campaign?By XE Network
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[Episode #108] – Will Energy Transition Be Rapid or Gradual?
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Fossil fuel incumbents think energy transition will be gradual, while the disruptors think it will be rapid. What can we learn from these contrasting narratives?By XE Network
Energy transition is complex, and understanding it requires expertise in multiple disciplines, so a group of Stanford researchers proposes to study it that way.By XE Network
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #106] – Transition in South Africa
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South Africa could be one of the world’s greatest success stories in energy transition if it can shed its apartheid-era legacy of coal dependency.By XE Network
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #105] – Can Competition Decarbonize Electricity?
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How can electricity markets be used as a tool to decarbonize power supply?By XE Network
Jonathan Koomey returns to the show for another freewheeling discussion about some of the interesting developments over the past year in energy transition.By XE Network
Unless energy transition is wildly successful, the world will have no choice but to depend on local resources when oil production begins its inevitable decline.By XE Network
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #102] – Transition as Wildfire Adaptation in California
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The energy transition provides some of the answers to wildfire risk, including how utilities deal with their own culpability.By XE Network
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #101] – What We Don’t Know About Energy Transition
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In this wide-ranging chat, Chris Nelder and Jonathan Koomey talk about the many things we don’t know about how the energy transition will proceed.By XE Network
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #100] – Teaching Energy Transition
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For our 100th episode, we thought we’d do a little something special: Interview professors from four US universities who are using the Energy Transition Show as coursework, and make the full show available to everyone, including non-subscribers. We ask these teachers about the specific topics they’re teaching, how they’re using the show in their cl…
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #99] – Metals Supply in Energy Transition
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Is the supply of certain key metals—like lithium, copper, nickel, and cobalt—and “rare earth” metals—like vanadium and indium—potentially a limiter on the progress of energy transition? Or is there enough of them to realize our ambitions? Are they being produced in a sustainable way? How will the geographic concentration of these metals affect geop…
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #98] – Why Building Transmission is So Hard
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Building high voltage transmission lines has never been easy, but now it’s arguably both harder than ever, and more necessary than ever, as we seek to unlock the vast potential of wind and solar in the US and ship it to major population centers. But it’s not a business for the faint of heart, as we’ll hear in this incredible story by award-winning …
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #97] – How State Policies Can Drive Decarbonization
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As we continue looking for ways to decarbonize our energy systems, we often have to decide whether it’s better to try reworking our market rules so that the markets will do a better job of procuring clean energy, as we discussed in Episode #90, or whether it makes sense to just mandate the procurement of clean energy resources. The former is a job …
Energy transition is happening quickly and disruptively in the transportation sector. But it is generally an open question whether the transition currently at hand is producing socially beneficial results. As we grapple with a sudden influx of new modes of mobility and business models, and contemplate the dawning of an entirely new mobility paradig…
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[Episode #95] – Powering the world with RE
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Can we run the world on renewables alone? Various researchers have tried to model how a given country might run a grid using mostly renewables, oftentimes finding that carbon-negative technologies, advanced nuclear power, and even coal power plants equipped with CCS will be a part of the solution set. But no one has produced a comprehensive model t…
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #94] – Integrated Decentralized Power Systems
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As more distributed energy resources arrive unbidden onto the power grid, they are increasingly requiring us not to just think about new utility business models, but to radically rethink what a utility might look like. What if millions of distributed resources become the dominant resources, and the grid assumes a subordinate role as a residual supp…
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #93] – Energy Transition in India and Southeast Asia, Part 2
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This is Part 2 of our two-and-a-half hour interview with Tim Buckley, of the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, based in Australia. We featured Part 1 in Episode 91, in which we primarily discussed the future of coal fired power in India. In this second part, we expand on the India story and look more broadly at energy transition…
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[Episode #92] – Financing Coal Plant Retirements
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The coal power sector in the US is continuing to shrink due to poor economics, but this doesn’t mean we’re retiring coal fired power plants quickly enough to reduce carbon emissions at a rate that achieves our climate goals. So what’s the best way to get rid of coal plants before they reach the end of their expected lifespans, particularly while th…
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The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder
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[Episode #91] – Energy Transition in India and Southeast Asia, Part 1
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It has long been assumed that India, China, and other developing countries of Southeast Asia would power their vigorous economic growth for decades to come with coal. We heard over and over that China is building a new coal-fired power plant every three days, and about plans for multi-gigawatt sized coal-fired power plants in India. As long as coal…
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[Episode #90] – How Will Decarbonized Power Markets Work?
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This one is for the grid geeks! With the Green New Deal now a hot topic in the US Congress, while wholesale power markets still struggle to figure out how to accommodate new kinds of resources even as coal plants and nuclear plants continue to retire, the question of how wholesale power markets should work, and how they should value new kinds of as…
