The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder

Rory Johnston, independent oil market analyst and founder of Commodity Context, breaks down a new global energy crisis after attacks closed the Strait of Hormuz. He explains massive supply shortfalls, why strategic oil releases failed to calm markets, the cascading effects on gas, fertilizers and economies, and how this shock could accelerate renewables and reshape winners and losers.

Lauri Myllyvirta, co-founder and lead analyst at CREA focused on China's energy and air pollution trends. He unpacks why China added massive coal capacity in 2025 while coal generation fell. He explains capacity payments and perverse incentives. He covers the scale of new solar, wind, storage and how clean builds met demand growth despite a growing coal fleet.

Lord Adair Turner, co-chair of the Energy Transitions Commission and former UK Climate Change Committee chair, offers high-level techno-economic perspective. He discusses how the shift reshapes geopolitics. He explains why green hydrogen forecasts fell and outlines Europe’s green industrial policy challenges. He highlights China’s electrification edge and the mid-transition problem of ‘double banking’.

Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard Law School’s Electricity Law Initiative and expert in electricity regulation. He walks through dozens of Trump administration actions that halted renewables and forced aging fossil plants to keep running. Short legal lessons explain the DOE’s emergency power claims, why courts are pushing back, and which interventions might survive litigation.

Carter Lavin, a climate and transportation organizer with 15+ years training groups and the author of If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight, breaks down how to turn big goals into concrete local campaigns. He talks about translating visions into asks. He explains power mapping, coalition building, and balancing inside and outside tactics. Practical advice for joining or starting effective advocacy.

Nobuo Tanaka, former Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, shares his insights on Japan's critical energy dilemma. He discusses how Japan, heavily reliant on energy imports, navigates between remaining a petrostate or embracing an electrostate future. Tanaka delves into the evolution of energy security, the impact of the U.S. shale revolution, and the challenges Japan faces post-Fukushima, including public distrust in nuclear power. This conversation highlights Japan's unique position in the global energy transition landscape.

In this enlightening discussion, energy analyst Nick Fulghum of Ember tackles the pivotal findings from the Global Electricity Review 2025. He shares that renewable energy plus nuclear has surged past 40% of global electricity, with solar leading the charge by adding 474 TWh in 2024 alone. Fulghum also highlights how countries like India and China are rapidly decoupling from coal while demonstrating that solar is essential in curbing fossil fuel growth. With batteries scaling quickly, he argues that a near-term peak in power emissions is achievable as renewables continue to dominate.

In November, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released its annual World Energy Outlook (WEO) report. It was greeted with cheers from the fossil fuel industry and jeers from energy transitionistas, but there is much more to the report than either camp’s narratives suggest. So Chris returned to IEA headquarters in Paris to discuss the WEO with lead author Tim Gould, as he has done for the past two years (Episode #215 and Episode #248), to get the story straight from the source. What he found is that the revived Current Policies Scenario (CPS) shows what could happen if the energy transition is stopped in its tracks and fossil fuel demand continues to grow, as the Trump administration has stated it would like to see. While other scenarios explore continued progress in energy transition consistent with recent reports, where oil demand still peaks around 2030, and coal demand falls before the decade ends. The report’s updated global data tells another story. The oil industry spends $550 billion annually on upstream development, and 90% of that just keeps production flat. Meanwhile, 45% of new heavy freight trucks sold in China this year run on electricity or LNG, not diesel. And in the Middle East, solar is increasingly displacing oil for electricity generation and desalination of water. In Saudi Arabia alone, this could free up over a million barrels of daily consumption. In fact, in this year’s report, IEA declares that “the Age of Electricity is here.” For the first time, more than half of all energy sector investment is flowing into electricity. Renewables grow “faster than any other major energy source in all scenarios.” The picture is clear: the energy transition is still going strong.

South Africa has earned a reputation for having an old, backward, and unreliable electricity system more dependent on coal than any other country with a similarly sized economy. With an aging fleet of coal-fired power plants owned by a century-old utility that has actively resisted the energy transition, its grid is ripe for modernization. South Africa is also blessed with largely untapped wind, water, and solar resources that could meet all of the country’s energy needs several times over. Few countries better exemplify both the challenge and opportunity in the energy transition. That transition is now under way, both through deliberate official reforms and through an uncontrolled explosion of solar and batteries that customers are installing on their homes and businesses. Over seven gigawatts of behind-the-meter solar and storage now operate in a country whose grid demand rarely exceeds 30 gigawatts, all deployed with zero subsidies. To explore this story, Chris traveled to South Africa in September 2025 for a six-week research trip. He recorded numerous interviews with people closely involved in the country’s energy transition, which we are featuring in a new miniseries. We begin with Anton Eberhard, Professor Emeritus at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business. For more than 35 years, Anton has worked to modernize and liberalize South Africa’s power sector in pursuit of a more equitable, just, and clean energy system. His commitment to justice runs deep: in 1977, he became one of the first white South Africans imprisoned for refusing conscription into the apartheid military. After his release, he pursued a PhD in solar energy around 1980, doing fieldwork in remote Lesotho villages long before renewables were economically viable. In this conversation, Anton recounts the evolution of South Africa’s power sector alongside his own personal history. He explains why Eskom, once named the best utility in the world, saw its energy availability factor plummet from over 90% to as low as 40% at the height of the country’s power crisis. He describes the political economy keeping coal interests entrenched, his role in the groundbreaking 1998 white paper whose proposed reforms are only now, 27 years later, being implemented, and why structural changes remain critical for accelerating the energy transition. This will give you the essential context for the rest of our South Africa miniseries, and contains many universal insights that may be useful to understanding the energy transition wherever you live.

What is the role of distribution utilities in the energy transition? Consider this paradox: Marc England, CEO of Australian distribution utility Ausgrid, has two batteries at his home but no solar panels. Instead, he buys grid power at 5 cents per kilowatt-hour during midday solar surplus, stores it, and then sells it back to the grid when prices are high, sometimes making $100 profit in a single day. Similarly, over 100,000 customers in Australia have installed batteries in their homes under a federal incentive program in just the past three months. But commercial players aren’t building battery arrays on his network, despite slashing connection charges. And every time he flies into Sydney, he sees miles of empty warehouse rooftops that could host far more solar capacity if tariffs and other regulatory structures were reformed. These market dislocations are part of an ongoing debate about who should build and own distributed energy assets (DERs). Should distribution utilities do it in order to maximize their integration? Or should they primarily provide a platform for consumer-owned DERs to connect and transact on an equal footing with utility-scale systems? Is it more practical and cost-effective for distribution utilities to build assets like battery storage systems and public EV chargers, especially where private-sector companies are not, or would it be cheaper and faster to maximize customer investment and rebuild the grid from the bottom-up? For this conversation, Chris traveled to Sydney, Australia to debate these questions with Marc England in person. As Chris discussed with grid expert Lorenzo Kristov in Episode #205 and our Australia 2024 miniseries, there’s no perfect answer, but these market structure questions will partly determine the speed of our response to climate change.