The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder

Over the past decade, China has transformed from a heavily coal-fired country to the undisputed global leader in the energy transition. The pace keeps accelerating: In April 2025 alone, China installed more solar than Australia has in its entire history. By 2030, as little as one-seventh of China’s projected spare solar manufacturing capacity could electrify everyone without power in 88 low-income countries. Yet, this progress has not been recognized by much of the West, which still fixates on headlines about “building three coal plants a week” while missing that China is getting far ahead of US decarbonization efforts. China’s vast exports of energy transition solutions are rapidly decarbonizing other emerging economies, while the nation’s share of global clean energy patents jumped from 5% in 2000 to 75% today. Chinese companies now spend ten times more on electricity R&D than US companies and match the combined energy R&D spending of the US and EU together. The innovation advantage has flipped. To understand China’s oversized role in the energy transition, Muyi Yang and Sam Butler-Sloss of Ember join us to break down their report China Energy Transition Review 2025. We’ll review how China is routinely beating its own transition targets by three to six years. We’ll hear how Chinese firms have announced over $200 billion in overseas clean tech manufacturing investments, surpassing the scale of US investment abroad under the Marshall Plan. Solar, batteries, and EVs are growing three times faster than China’s overall economy, hitting nearly 10% of GDP. Chinese solar exports to Namibia, Cambodia, and similar countries now exceed the entire centralized power generation capacity of those countries. The result: what took decades with old energy is happening in years with solar. China’s enormous commitment to the energy transition is a strategic path to economic growth and economic and political power, and it heralds the end of fossil fuel’s dominance of the global energy system by 2030.

For our 10th anniversary, we reflect on our work so far, and consider what the next ten years might require. Whereas we spent the past decade focusing on techno-economic subjects, like explaining climate science and climate policy, and showing that energy transition technologies are practical and affordable, the next decade is likely to be far more political. We no longer need to justify the concept of the energy transition. Our job now is scaling up solutions and overcoming the resistance to them. To help us explore this pivot, we welcome back Kingsmill Bond from Episode #152, along with his frequent co-author Daan Walter. Both are with energy transition think-tank Ember, where along with Sam Butler-Sloss they’ve published reports that clearly articulate what many observers are missing: an “electrotech revolution” reshaping geopolitics. They reveal staggering data: 70-80% of car sales in developing economies like Nepal and Ethiopia are already electric, while China’s fossil fuel demand dropped 1% for the first time ever. Nearly every nation has 10-1000x more renewable potential than needed for its energy independence. Developing economies are seizing that opportunity while developed economies sabotage their own electrification by resisting change and taxing electricity at three times the rate of gas. So join us to celebrate our 10th anniversary! And get ready for an even faster decade of the energy transition as countries choose to lead in the electrotech revolution, or get left behind.

Alaska is an energy superpower with more untapped renewable resources than most countries. Yet its largest population, in the Anchorage area, faces a real risk of blackouts beginning in 2027 due to declining gas supply from the nearby Cook Inlet gas field, which is likely to force this historical major supplier of oil and gas to import LNG to keep its residents warm and keep the lights on. A key part of getting ahead of the crisis is addressing transmission dysfunction so severe that it turns 6-cent renewable electricity into 20-cent retail power due to ‘pancaking’ tariffs. In this episode, we explore Alaska’s sole electricity transmission grid, which connects most of the major population centers along what is called the Railbelt. We learn about how Railbelt utilities are part of a system that’s overbuilt, unoptimized, unnecessarily expensive, and slow to change. For example, four rural electric cooperatives built more than $1 billion in unnecessary gas generation between 2012-2016 while knowing gas supplies were declining. Despite sitting atop an estimated 18 gigawatts of tidal energy potential in Cook Inlet alone, the four Railbelt cooperatives lack economic dispatch coordination, wasting tens of million annually through inefficient scheduling of gas-fired generation. The Railbelt utilities could transition away from their dependence on gas and toward the vast renewable resources surrounding them, but it would take a kind of political leadership that is currently lacking in the state. We dive into how the regulatory agencies could help Alaska transition to renewables, as well as why they haven’t done so thus far. We also take a quick look at the future of Alaska’s famous oil pipeline, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), and some of the expectations for nuclear power in the state. This episode is the third and final part of our miniseries about the energy transition in Alaska.

Most people probably think of a “microgrid” as a campus or neighborhood that can “island” itself and run independently when needed, but otherwise stays connected to the main grid most of the time. But in Alaska’s remote communities that aren’t even accessible by road, residents depend on microgrids for their very survival in extreme conditions. For this episode, Chris traveled to Kotzebue, Alaska, a community above the Arctic Circle that has become an international leader at integrating renewable energy by pioneering wind-diesel hybrids, innovative wind-to-heat technology, and Arctic solar systems that achieve remarkable performance. We explore how Kotzebue is using innovative approaches to energy transition solutions to lessen their dependence on diesel fuel while improving the health and welfare of their people. This episode is part of our miniseries about the energy transition in Alaska.

In October 2024, Chris visited the world’s first all-electric farm while traveling across New Zealand. In today’s episode, we speak with the farm’s owner and founder, Mike Casey. In addition to operating the farm, Mike is CEO of Rewiring Aotearoa, a sister organization to Rewiring America. Rewiring Aotearoa works to advance New Zealand’s energy transition by encouraging residents to deploy renewables and export excess power to the grid, and to replace their fossil-fueled machines with electric ones. Mike travels extensively across Australia, New Zealand, and major cities across the globe as an evangelist for electrification, encouraging communities to electrify and go solar. His farm serves as a real-world demonstration of these principles in action. Because Mike’s work is so inspirational and universal, we’re making this episode one of our occasional lagniappe shows, available in front of the paywall for all listeners to enjoy in full. We invite you to share this episode widely! And we hope Mike’s inspiring message of electrification and transition will inspire you to support the show and explore more stories like this in our members-only back catalog.

In the summer of 2025, Chris traveled to Alaska to explore the state’s unique energy transition story by interviewing some of its energy experts. Like every place, Alaska has a unique set of challenges and opportunities in the energy transition, and can offer insights drawn from its experience to the rest of the world. Alaska’s extreme conditions and remoteness make it a proving ground for a wide array of energy transition solutions, as it grapples with a melting permafrost, supply chain constraints, dependence on federal support, and declining fossil fuel production in an age of climate change and climate action. The state’s greatest energy need is for heat during its long, very cold winters that typically last eight to nine months. In this conversation, Aaron Cooke, an architect and project manager at NREL’s Alaska Campus in Fairbanks, joins us to discuss the lab’s research on building techniques designed to retain warmth while ensuring healthy indoor environments. Their work tests designs to construct buildings that are comfortable, healthy, durable, and affordable in harsh climates, all while contending with logistical challenges, cultural needs, and climate adaptation.

Nic Fulghum, an energy analyst and lead author of Ember's Global Electricity Review 2025, brings compelling insights on the rapid progress of the energy transition. He reveals that solar is growing faster than any energy source in history, electrification is dramatically reducing fossil fuel demand, and global power-sector emissions may be peaking. With renewables and nuclear now over 40% of the energy mix, Fulghum's data challenges skeptics and highlights the accelerating shift towards clean energy.

Mike Grunwald, a veteran reporter and author of 'We Are Eating the Earth,' dives deep into the truths about bioenergy. He questions whether biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel truly offer carbon-neutral benefits, especially when it comes to land usage and deforestation. Grunwald shares insights from his global research, revealing that many bioenergy solutions have unintended consequences that undermine their environmental claims. The conversation also highlights the political dynamics influencing biofuel policies and challenges the narrative surrounding agricultural practices and climate change.

On April 12, the British government took control of British Steel under an emergency authorization in order to prevent its last blast furnace from shutting down. Blast furnaces produce primary steel from iron ore and account for about 93% of global primary iron production, but they also generate large amounts of CO2. Alternative, low-carbon technologies are expected to replace them as the energy transition proceeds. But retiring a technology—especially one as critical to national security as steelmaking—and replacing it with another is a process that should be conducted carefully and deliberately…not on an emergency basis. This kind of “mid-transition” problem is one our guests have studied in depth. Emily Grubert is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences at the University of Notre Dame who previously joined us in Episode #185 to discuss the mid-transition. Joshua Lappen is a historian and engineer working as a postdoctoral research associate with Emily at Notre Dame. In this conversation, we review the facts of the British Steel takeover, including why letting the blast furnace shut down was deemed to be an unacceptable risk. We examine the options for decarbonizing steelmaking that will eventually displace blast furnace technology. And we consider what impact Trump’s global tariff war may have on the transitioning of steelmaking, and what some of the geopolitical implications of that may be for the steel industry in Britain, and the world.

This episode is the final part in our miniseries about Australia’s energy transition. In late 2024, Chris traveled to Australia and recorded interviews with a wide range of experts who are intimately involved in the energy transition there. We featured some of them in the earlier episodes of this miniseries, namely, Episodes #234, #235, #246, #247, and #249. In this episode, we take a close look at South Australia, where rooftop solar alone already powers the entire state grid at times. By 2027, South Australia plans to operate with 100% variable renewable energy, making it the first gigawatt-scale grid in the world to achieve this milestone. The challenge? SA Power Networks, the distribution grid operator, doesn’t control generation, transmission, or metering, and doesn’t buy or sell electricity. This means South Australia must figure out how to maintain a stable, reliable grid consisting largely of customer-owned energy resources. In this conversation, James Brown, Head of Network Strategy at SA Power Networks, explains how his team of engineers and stakeholders are finding innovative solutions to meet this challenge. Their approaches will offer valuable lessons for grids worldwide as they, too, transition to electricity systems almost entirely powered by variable renewables.