I
The forward momentum of global energy transition has now stagnated, and the deployment of new energy technology has lapsed into becoming an additive rather than a transformative phenomenon. The scholarship on this question is also rather definitive as previous transitions, while ultimately successful at overthrowing one regime for another, left behind plenty of structural dependency on older forms of energy. Yes, coal overtook wood. But wood consumption ultimately went higher as the global economy grew. Oil overtook coal, which hurt coal demand temporarily, until coal stormed back in the 20th century to basically sit alongside oil, reaching successive new highs of consumption. Wind and solar and batteries initially took out lots of old, inefficient power generation, and suppressed the full potential of natural gas growth. But now those new energy technologies have met sustained resistance, unable to penetrate the legacy underlayer of fossil fuel combustion.
Indeed, the history of human energy consumption generally shows not the transformative and revolutionary overthrow of previous energy sources, but rather, the constant building up of successive layers—each new energy source stacking itself upon the others—with all them, however, continuing to grow. This is precisely what’s happened now with global wind and solar. The twin sources, despite their affordability and speed, have at the global level still not even sustainably covered marginal growth in total global power demand. They will. But the far more difficult task of penetrating into legacy power system sources is yet to come.
We in the energy transition community have long held a shared assumption that the attractive economics of wind, solar, and batteries would be sufficient to form a battering ram, if you will, against uneconomic and inefficient fossil fueled power generation. A portion of this thesis has already come true. A bigger portion, however, has not. To be sure, in specific domains—especially where total system demand for power is stagnant—wind, solar, and batteries have actually been able to not just cover marginal demand growth, but have started to attack the embedded crust of incumbent sources, down below. California, the UK, and the EU have hit bedrock in this regard, and for many this understandably proves that power generation can indeed be decarbonized. Fair enough. However, those three domains sum to just a bit more than 10% of global electricity demand. In the rest of the world, and even in domains where wind and solar is growing strongly, some combination of coal or natural gas fired power generation continues to grow.
As mentioned, we have fresh scholarship that directly addresses this challenge in the recently released More and More and More: An All Consuming History of Energy, by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. The book was recently reviewed by the historian Adam Tooze, in the London Review of Books:
When we look more closely at the historical record, it shows not a neat sequence of energy transitions, but the accumulation of ever more and different types of energy. Economic growth has been based not on progressive shifts from one source of energy to the next, but on their interdependent agglomeration. Using more coal involved using more wood, using more oil consumed more coal, and so on. An honest account of energy history would conclude not that energy transitions were a regular feature of the past, but that what we are attempting – the deliberate exit from and suppression of the energetic mainstays of our modern way of life – is without precedent.
This is the argument of More and More and More, the latest book by the French historian of science Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. As he makes clear, historical experience has little or nothing to teach us about the challenge ahead. Any hope of stabilisation depends on doing the unprecedented at unprecedented speed. If we are to grasp the scale of what lies ahead, the first thing we have to do is to free ourselves from the ideology of the history of energy transition.
Without question, the greatest hurdle faced by the current energy transition is economic growth itself. Growth makes for a double hurdle: the new energy source must not not cover all growth, but it must do before it can even begin to scrape away at the legacy-layer. China reflects the problem best, currently, in that despite very aggressive growth of wind and solar, total power system demand growth keeps overwhelming the effort. The world as a whole is far more like China, therefore, than it is like California, or Europe. Renewable energy has been booming for over a decade. But fossil fuels continue to grow.
II
Particularly sobering is that of all the systems we propose to decarbonize, the power system is the easiest to transform. Because wires are intrinsic to power, the global electricity system has its own, built-in distribution network. Accordingly, new generation sources plug in easily to the grid, as old sources exit. Yes, the grid itself needs upgrading in most domains, but that is a far, far easier task than the challenges faced by other sectors like steel, cement, and other industrial processes. So what does it say that the easiest system to decarbonize continues to see fossil fuel growth?
Cold Eye Earth has often used the story of coal to illustrate how this problem has played out in history. For example, because coal was the world’s top energy source coming into the 20th century, it makes sense that the Great Depression hurt coal demand very badly. From 1928 through 1933, global coal demand fell a very significant 26%. You can see that slump quite clearly in the chart below.
At the highs of 1928, the energy content represented by total coal consumption was 5.4 times the energy content consumed in oil. Although the personal automobile was undergoing adoption at the time, and oil consumption was clearly rising, oil remained very much coal’s junior—and as a result, the Great Depression merely dented oil consumption.
The next challenge coal would face arrived with WW2. Petrol largely powered the US war effort, and while coal was needed for production, the long expected “transition” from coal to oil started to make some real progress during this period. For example: while global coal use was 5.4 times oil in 1928, ten years later this ratio fell to 4.3 in 1938. By 1958, the ratio would fall to just 1.4, and as the chart below shows, oil’s march to top global energy resource was almost complete by that time.
Now, the great length of time it took oil to overtake coal is of less importance to our discussion than the fact that once coal was overtaken it began to grow again. Notice that from the time oil first arrived on the scene in the early 1900’s, global coal use fluctuated alot but mostly kept oscillating between 750 and 1000 Mtoe (million tonnes oil equivalent—a measure of heat content). After the war, with the West starting to boom, coal began to grow, first reaching 1500 Mtoe in the early 1960’s, and 2000 Mtoe by the early 1980’s. Yet another observation: the rate of coal growth during this period is not quick, but it’s steady. This is another characteristic of current era: new energy sources have clearly slowed the growth of fossil fuel demand, but nothing yet is sustainably halted.
Now let’s turn to coal in this century, when coal gave the world not one, but two big surprises. The first shock occurred when China and Asia, undergoing an industrial revolution, called upon coal so heavily that from 2010-2013, global coal consumption soared so high it almost caught up again, in energy content terms, to oil.
Why did coal, which supposedly was overthrown by oil, storm back so aggressively? Well, one answer is that while the OECD was transitioning to oil, those western countries still needed lots of heavy industrial production, and much of this production then migrated to China. Another answer comes from the previously cited book by Fressoz, in which the author collects myriad examples of how a world driven to even higher levels of economic growth in the oil age, mostly explains how the world nearly resurrected fully a new coal age. Tooze, in his review of Fressoz, writes further:
More wood is used today, including for firewood, than ever before. As Fressoz points out, anyone who claims that the dawning of the coal age in the 19th century freed us from our reliance on organic materials has never been down a mine. Miners traditionally preferred timber pit props to hold up mineshafts not only because they are cheap and flexible, but because their creaking gives early warning of a failure. Survival as a coalminer depended on being a competent carpenter. Mines needed forests. As recently as the 1990s, mining in China was shaped by the scarcity of timber for pit props, which forced miners to dig tightly bunched, one-man shafts straight down to the coal seam instead of excavating extended galleries underground.
Wood is bound up not just with coal, but with hydrocarbons too. The first oil rigs were made of timber and so, until the 1910s, was the ‘barrel’ of oil. Standard Oil was once the world’s largest cooperage. Wood fibres married with hydrocarbons were the great hope of the early promoters of plastics. In the siege economy of Nazi Germany, pundits imagined a future based on synthetics derived from cellulose. It is a rich-world conceit to imagine that firewood is obsolete. In Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is projected to become the world’s largest city by 2075, an estimated 4.8 million cubic metres of wood fuel and charcoal are used each year.
What is true of wood is also true of coal, which far from being displaced by the ‘age of oil’ is today consumed in greater amounts than ever before. The UK’s gaping trade deficit is fed by imported manufactured goods which contain the equivalent of tens of millions of tons of coal, burned mainly in Asia. Even in the US, peak coal production wasn’t reached until 2008, driven by a new generation of giant open-cast pits created in Wyoming in the 1970s. Oil and coal weren’t substitutes but complements: without vast supplies of diesel fuel, the monstrous mining machinery would have been paralysed.
Coal’s coup de grace was of course delivered in just the past several years, when consumption hit new all time highs in 2022, 2023, and again last year after “peaking” in 2014. As Cold Eye Earth has pointed out, this is another way of seeing the folly of trying to call peak emissions globally, and especially in high growth economies of the Non-OECD.
III
A straightforward conclusion to draw is that the type of energy transition which most hope to see—a transformative replacement of fossil fuels on an accelerated pace—requires not just new, economically viable clean energy but a willingness to hurt and disable legacy energy infrastructure. Without that commitment, transition will play out at a long and leisurely pace. New wind and solar will eventually cover all marginal growth in power, electric vehicles will cover all new sales of cars, and innovation will steadily work its way through shipping, steelmaking, and other industrial and commercial processes but again, on an even slower timeline.
Previous energy transitions were not guided by policy but economics, and on a free market basis you are simply not going to dislodge working natural gas and coal plants or working trucks and cars. More bracing is the thought that wind, solar, and batteries which become ever more affordable will be the spearheads to help economically improve many parts of the world, which will ultimately drive more economic growth, and potentially demand for “all of the above” energy. It’s now clear that many thinkers in this area have been lugging around the assumption that new energy technology, once it covers all marginal growth, can rather easily get to work on the underlayer. We should now consider that energy transition is stymied at that juncture, instead.
Do we have any examples of extremely aggressive transition policy, one that has quickly transformed a market segment, or sector? Well, China’s EV adoption comes to mind. EV represented just 5% of the country’s total vehicle market in 2020, but as of 2024, that share has done a moonshot to 40%. That type of market change will have certainly injured a number of industrial concerns, deeply tied to the internal combustion engine (ICE) supply chain. There are also concrete indications that China’s road fuel demand is flattening out. Not a decline, of course, but that is quite encouraging. If China follows that up by actively shutting down viable coal and natural gas power capacity, and goes even harder for wind, solar, and batteries, then China would join Europe as the second big domain to actually achieve decarbonization progress in power. If not, then wind and solar—even in China—will wind up as a new layer of power on top of the existing system.
Indeed, the accumulation effect should now be our operating framework for transition, until very bold and significant steps are taken.
—Gregor Macdonald