Welcome to the anarchists who have joined (and thank you for the external validation). If you’re new and like what you’re reading, check out our manifesto, the tenets of good energy policy, or why I think the UK is screwed.

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I drove home from France on Sunday. Fourteen hours, a Land Rover, two dogs in the back. The puppy is ten months old, which means a stop every 2-2.5 hours. I saw nearly every service station and most of the aires between Hossegor and London.

Somewhere around hour eight, I was eating a(nother) baguette beside the EV chargepoints and it occurred to me that I have zero FOMO about not owning an EV.

I should drive an EV. I work in energy. I opine about decarbonisation. I’ve sold a shit-tonne (technical measure) of residential EV chargers.

I know the benefits and the savings maths inside and out. I’ve worked at four companies with EV salary sacrifice schemes. One even actually leased EVs. I’m just… indifferent. Not hostile, but unmoved.

I live in central London, which means I rarely drive. The few times I do, it’s this kind of trip: long-distance and motorway-heavy. We own our car and have no payments, so there’s no burning incentive to switch.

If I commuted, I’d probably have one. The savings’ maths definitely math for daily use and I could have a home charger. Even public charging is cheaper than petrol now and there’s no end in sight re: Iran. But it would be a change driven by logic, not desire.

[One valid barrier: I hate touchscreens in cars (people with nails know) and EVs are riddled with them. I’m firmly on Team ‘Bring Back Buttons’, with Captain Jony Ive. 🫡]

I’ve looked, but there’s no killer EV for me. Nothing that I want to drive. Most cars look the same. If I was commuting every day, I’d likely have a MINI Cooper because it has personality. (I was genuinely interested in the electric Porsche Boxster, but RIP.)

Cars have unlocked personal freedom, given us iconic marketing, and defined 126 years of dining recommendations. But why does this transition feel less like the rise of an exciting future and more like a begrudging inevitability?

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is the infrastructure dying?

Recently, EO Charging entered administration. PwC was appointed, 69 of 93 employees were made redundant, and an accelerated sale process failed to find a buyer.

It is not an isolated event. Reporting for the Forecourt Trader, Hugo Griffiths observed that “Losses in the chargepoint sector are the rule, not the exception.”

In 2024, Fastned’s UK arm, Osprey Charging, Blink Charging, and Char.gy all posted losses between £5 to £10 million. In 2025, Gridserve lost over £80 million while InstaVolt lost £8.5 million, an improvement on the £15.6 million it lost the year before. Even the majors can’t make it work: BP Pulse lost £66.4m in 2024, while Shell EV Charging Solutions lost £8.4 million.

The reason is partly structural and partly absurd. Structurally: infrastructure has a J-curve cash profile, so losses are to be expected for a time.

Absurdly: UK rules changed in 2023 to base charges on the size of the connection rather than the power actually used. Osprey reported one site where annual standing charges jumped from £87 to £33,651, a 38,579% increase.

Translation: the faster you build, the faster you go broke. Another fabulous example of the hypocrisy of UK energy policy.

(There’s a separate layer to this: public charging is taxed at 20% VAT while home charging is taxed at 5%, meaning the third of UK households without driveways pay a structural penalty for being poorer or living in flats.)

“but EV sales are up”

Yes. New EV registrations in the UK hit a record in March 2026, and full battery-electric vehicles now make up roughly a quarter of new car sales.

The headline growth is real, but it’s heavily fleet-driven, propped up by salary sacrifice schemes, and underwritten by a ZEV mandate that fines manufacturers who don’t sell enough EVs.

We must consider the public price tag. The UK has committed roughly £8 billion in direct EV subsidies — vehicle grants, charging grants, manufacturing support, infrastructure funds — plus roughly £5-6 billion a year in ongoing tax expenditure on salary sacrifice and Benefit-in-Kind exemptions.

Strip the policy scaffolding out and the retail demand picture looks more wobbly. While the growth is impressive, and the global transition has apparently reached a tipping point, carmakers still took a $50 billion loss on EVs.

For now, the relevant point is this: even with a mandated demand floor and £8 billion in direct subsidies, the folks building the charging infrastructure are still going broke.

graveyards with intermittent visitors

According to Zapmap, the average UK public charger is used 11% of the time. Rapid and ultra-rapid chargers — the expensive ones, with the worst standing-charge exposure — handle roughly four sessions a day, averaging 37 minutes each. (McKinsey reckons public charging needs around 20% utilisation to be profitable.)

There are now considerably more EV charge points than fuel pumps in the UK, but this isn’t Field of Dreams. They don’t come just because you’ve built it. Imagine a hotel running on 11% occupancy. Death sentence.

The infrastructure is going broke because utilisation is too low. Utilisation is too low because not enough people are buying EVs. Not enough people are buying EVs because they’re worried about charging infrastructure. The charging infrastructure is going broke because…

You see the problem. New petrol and diesel car sales are banned from 2030, and we’re in a doom loop.

We keep trying to subsidise our way out of this, but the only way out of a doom loop is from the outside. Demand follows desire, not subsidies.

Take a quick look back at history and you’ll realise we’ve seen this before. Purpose-built petrol stations started popping up in the 1940s, peaked in the early 1980s and have been declining ever since.

The 1970s energy crises pushed margins to the point where service station owners stopped selling fuel altogether because vehicle maintenance was more profitable than the pumps. Then American retailing giants J.C. Penney and K-Mart fell. They had the scale, the locations, and the customers, but fuel margins were too thin to compete.

All three of the now-top operators — Southland (7-Eleven’s parent), Circle K, and NCS — entered bankruptcy in 1991. They survived only by restructuring around the same model: convenience stores.

It took the industry over 40 years, but they finally figured it out:

it’s never about petrol

Ask anyone who has ever run a forecourt — Shell, BP, PetroCanada, Couche-Tard, the people behind every Buc-ee’s in Texas — and they’ll tell you the same thing. The actual business is coffee, sandwiches, lottery tickets, chocolate bars, energy drinks, hot food, and clean toilets.

Margins on petrol are 2-5p per litre. Margins on a flat white and a pastry are 60%.

Buc-ee’s became a cultural phenomenon because of BBQ sandwiches and famously clean bathrooms, not because of the pumps. This is, at its core, a retail hospitality business.

Now look at who’s building EV charging.

The CEO of InstaVolt spent 26 years in energy services and energy efficiency. The chairman co-founded an energy efficiency firm. The CFO came from Vauxhall and Vodafone. The largest shareholders sit on the board having previously worked in infrastructure private equity, with portfolios in fibre networks and power generation. There is exactly one retail veteran on the entire board — the ex-Tesco and Morrisons CFO — and he joined as a non-exec in 2022.

This isn’t a criticism of any individual. These are capable people who’ve spent their careers thinking about networks, throughput, and yield. They’re running EV charging as if the goal were laying cable. It isn’t.

The goal is delighting someone with a Tesla and 25 minutes spare so they come back next week.

The capital structure reinforces this. Infrastructure private equity and pension fund debt are the cheapest money available, but you don’t build Buc-ee’s with infrastructure debt. You build a substation, so we are getting substations: sited where the grid connection is cheap, optimised for kW delivered, marketed on reliability and speed.

Nobody has ever fallen in love with a substation. A Buc-ee’s sandwich, however? Lust.

It harkens back to Rory Sutherland’s “make the train journey more desirable rather than faster“ example: “If you give engineers a problem, they will define it in terms that are most amenable to being solved by engineering.”

To be fair, the valid difference in EV charging is that it’s possible to embed charging infrastructure within the fabric of a community. But those efforts are struggling too.

A few operators have spotted the problem. BP converted a filling station forecourt with an M&S Food Store and a coffee shop to EV-only charging, and reported that they are hitting utilisation rates that weren’t expected until 2030.

Fastned runs flagship sites in Belgium with restaurants, outdoor play areas, and ‘nature-inspired’ solar canopies. Gridserve has built the UK’s most ambitious electric forecourt at Braintree with meeting pods, kids’ zones, EV Gurus, even puppuccinos.

They are thinking differently. They are also losing money — Fastned €27m last year, Gridserve £80m. The question is: can they hang on until enough people buy EVs?

V2G, or: the same mistake one layer deeper

A brief detour, because this is not exclusive to public charging.

Vehicle-to-grid is the idea that EVs can sell electricity back to the grid at peak times, turning your car into a mobile battery. It’s often pitched as the demand unlock for EVs: buy the car, earn yield from the car, fall in love with the car.

Because everyone’s chasing that “Paradise By the Arbitrage Potential.”

V2G is the same category error as charging infrastructure, displaced one layer further into the system. The people building it think the transition is a yield curve problem.

Sigh.

you can’t legislate desire

The 20th century didn’t make people fall in love with cars by mandating them.

It built Route 66, the drive-in, the Michelin Guide, the road trip movie, the Cars franchise that made an entire generation of children car-fluent. Modern hospitality is, in large part, a century of infrastructure invented to give drivers reasons to stop.

Somewhere in the EV transition, we’ve forgotten that the car is a vehicle for belonging, not transport. We’re trying to swap the engine and pretend that everything else is identical. That’s a substitution, not a transition. Substitutions aren’t sexy.

(You know what is sexy? Something that’s banned. We’ve learned nothing from Prohibition.)

There’s an argument that the car itself is losing its place in society. But in an era when train journeys are ridiculously expensive and people are questioning the ethics of flying, this should be fertile ground to re-energise (pardon the pun) the road trip.

But wait, you gasp. THE RANGE ANXIETY. The research says people have range anxiety, so the advertising focuses on range anxiety, which reinforces that range anxiety exists.

Do you know how many times I’ve run out of petrol? Plenty. Fuel gauges used to be vague approximations, and I was broke. (Once, famously, when I picked my ex-husband up from the airport. It wasn’t the reason for the divorce, but it was probably a contributing factor.)

I don’t have “petrol anxiety.” I still play gas tank roulette.

Hitting 0% charge is a bigger deal than running out of gas, but I also know that logic has no chance when faced with emotional longing.

Rather than fearing long distances, EVs could unlock guilt-free travelling, with charging infrastructure that leads you to experiential destinations. Range shouldn’t matter, because there are gorgeous, entertaining, or delicious stops every couple of hours anyway. (I mean, we’re already starting to electrify Route 66.)

Or, do we need a resurgence of the motoring club, à la the Royal Automobile Club? RAC patrolmen used to salute members as they drove past. They had RAC-specific roadside assistance boxes (members had keys) and also introduced star-based hotel rating systems alongside the AA in the early 20th century.

(France rated food, Britain rated hotels. Read into that what you will.)

This is what I’m pondering: what would make me feel like I’m genuinely missing something by not having an EV?

I’ve made energy policy my lane, but policy can’t save us here. The transition needs cars worthy of desire and charging worth visiting. This is a creative problem, not a policy problem.

I’ve been working on a multi-part series to explore:

• Part two: how the car actually won, and what we can steal from a hundred years of motoring culture

• Part three: winners & losers — Norway, China, and cautionary tales of policy without demand

• Part four: a vision of what a desire-led approach means for infrastructure

For now, the question that started this.

The infrastructure is dying for lack of people. The people are missing for lack of confidence. The confidence is missing for lack of desire.

What do drivers desire?

📚 recommended reading

If you’re an EV nerd in the UK, by is a must-subscribe.

Welcome to the anarchists who have joined (and thank you for the external validation). If you’re new and like what you’re reading, check out the manifesto and the tenets of good energy policy.

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The OECD confirmed what anyone paying attention already knew: the UK is the most exposed advanced economy to energy price volatility.

Not among the most exposed. The most exposed.

The Strait of Hormuz crisis made this concrete. Once again, the UK energy market is working exactly as it was designed.

how we got here

The UK’s energy vulnerability isn’t a single policy failure. It’s a structural condition built up over thirty years of decisions that were each, individually, defensible and collectively, catastrophic.

Here are the high (low?) points.

Supply.

North Sea gas production peaked around 2000 and has been in decline ever since (partly geological, partly political, partly economical).

The UK went from net exporter to net importer in less than a decade and as usual, responded with vague hand-waving that “the market will sort it.”

In a surprise to absolutely no one: markets optimise for cost, not resilience. (See also: privatisation of UK water.)

The result: significant dependence on LNG imports and pipeline gas from Norway and continental Europe. Most buffer this import risk by building ample strategic storage.

The UK has chosen an, err, different approach.

Infrastructure.

The UK has 90-days worth of oil reserves, which is an IEA requirement for net-importing countries.

The gas storage capacity is embarrassing and irresponsible. We still act like an exporter. We have about ~3 bcm of storage, which could equate to 10-13 days of winter demand in the best possible operating conditions.

Comparatively, Germany holds ~90-days.

When Centrica closed the Rough (~3.3 bcm) storage facility in 2017, there wasn’t a move to replace it because there’s was a belief that interconnectors and spot markets could substitute for storage. They can, when times are good. They cannot when (1) every European country is pulling on the same system simultaneously, and (2) gas tankers are paralysed in the Middle East.

This is not a theoretical risk. It happened in 2021. It’s happening again, RIGHT NOW.

Japan and South Korea have zero pipeline connections and are entirely dependent on LNG tankers arriving continuously.

Japan holds the world’s largest LNG storage capacity; South Korea the second largest.

Both governments treat storage as the direct corollary of import dependence, a lesson the UK has failed to internalise.

Market design.

UK electricity is priced at the margin. The last unit of power dispatched sets the price for everyone. In the UK, that marginal unit is a gas-fired generator between 15-49% of the time.

This means that when gas prices spike, electricity prices spike, regardless of how much of the grid is running on wind and solar.

In a system where 60% of generation is already renewable, electricity consumers are fully exposed to global gas markets.

The wiring is broken.

the receipts

In 2022 - 24, the UK spent £78B managing the consequences of its energy policy. It’s safe to assume that the consequences of the US and Israel invasion of Iran will cost *at least* the same, because nothing has structurally changed.

The UK spends another £2.5B every single year on the permanent infrastructure of fuel poverty: schemes that exist because energy is structurally unaffordable for millions of households. It has also committed £17-18B over 5 years to make homes more efficient.

Not a single pound of that will buy the UK a more resilient energy system. We have consistently chosen to spend that money on managing consequences instead.

crisis interventions (2022-24 - reactive)

£78.2B (about 1.5% of GDP) spent purely on managing the consequences of structural failure (Source: OBR)

ongoing fuel poverty programmes (recurring, partially reactive)

£2.5B every year - the permanent costs of having structurally expensive, volatile energy. And yes, I know ECO’s been cancelled but I assume it has to be replaced with some other spend as part of the Warm Homes Plan.

forward-looking programmes (Miliband’s vision)

~£17-18B over 5 years… from a government in a perpetual and persistent cash crunch.

two case studies in wilful blindness

Storage.

Rebuilding Rough or its equivalent of ~3.3 bcm in storage would cost somewhere in the region of £2-3 billion. Of course, that still doesn’t get you close enough.

UK annual gas consumption is roughly 64 bcm and current storage capacity is ~3 bcm, so we need about 13 bcm of new build to hit Germany’s comparable 90-days.

Germany’s storage was built predominantly using onshore salt caverns and depleted onshore fields — the cheapest geology for this purpose, roughly £150-400M per bcm.

Sadly, the UK is not geologically blessed. Suitable onshore sites (Cheshire, Yorkshire, Teesside salt caverns) could realistically hold 5-8 bcm. Beyond that, you’re into offshore depleted North Sea fields which run closer to £500M-1B per bcm.

(Snam’s dCarbonX proposed 1.4 bcm facility is priced at roughly $1B, which tracks to that range.)

A realistic blended programme (onshore where geology allows, offshore for the rest) puts a full 90-day UK build at £15-25B over 10-15 years.

It’s genuinely harder for the UK to achieve 90-days of storage than it is for Germany; there’s a real physical constraint, not just a political excuse. A more achievable target (say 45-60 days) would cost roughly £8-12B and would still represent a transformation from the current position.

the inconvenient truth

The cynics (myself among them) will say that there would still be a crisis bill, even with 90-days of storage. And they would be correct. Let’s imagine the UK had 90-days worth of storage before the energy crisis:

Scenario A — Private storage, market-priced (current UK structure)

A private operator (e.g. Centrica) has no obligation to release stored gas at cost. They sell at market rates. The physical presence of 16 bcm would moderate panic and reduce some price pressure (studies on storage buffers suggest 20-30% price moderation in supply-constrained markets), but the spike still occurs.

At 25% lower average crisis prices (~£130/MWh vs £175/MWh):

• Typical household bill: ~£3,300 instead of £4,200

• EPG subsidy gap per household: £800 vs £1,700

• Household bill support saving: ~£12-14B

• Business support proportionally reduced: ~£3-4B saving

• Total crisis cost: ~£55-60B. Saving: ~£18-23B.

Scenario B — Government strategic reserve, deployed at cost

If the government owns the reserve and releases gas at pre-crisis prices (which is the whole point of a strategic reserve) it can directly moderate market prices and reduce the subsidy gap.

At crisis prices moderated to ~£80-100/MWh (still elevated, but heavily buffered):

• Typical household bill: ~£3,000-3,200

• EPG subsidy gap: ~£500-700/household

• Household bill support: ~£8-12B

• Business support: ~£3-5B

• Total crisis cost: ~£15-25B. Saving: ~£53-63B.

Even the top end of £25B spent over a decade is less than the £78B spent on the last crisis bailouts in two years, and we can assume this current one isn’t going to be cheaper.

But storage is not the full picture.

Pre-Ukraine war, Germany had 90 days of storage, filled to 90% capacity before the crisis hit, and still spent more than €150B on interventions. Why?

Pricing.

Storage doesn’t fix pricing. The gas price spike still transmitted to electricity prices for every unit consumed, regardless of where the gas came from. Having the storage gave them physical security but the market mechanism still amplified the price shock into every household bill.

This is where the UK’s actions have been particularly egregious.

The UK has some of the highest electricity prices in the world, and the ‘spark gap’ (the ratio of electricity to gas prices for consumers) is the highest among 25 large economies.

It’s an affordability and an economic problem. Energy UK found that almost 90% of companies have seen energy bills rise over the last 5 years and four in 10 had reduced investment as a result.

In July 2025, the government concluded the Review of Electricity Market Arrangements (REMA), a multi-year, multi-hundred-page examination of exactly why UK electricity prices are so volatile and so disconnected from the actual cost of generation.

The review identified the problem with precision. It then decided not to fix it.

Marginal pricing was explicitly examined and explicitly retained. The government’s reasoning centred on transition risk: changing the pricing structure would be complex and disruptive.

This is true. Independent analysis estimated the costs of reform to be £2-£7B:

• System and IT changes (trading platforms, settlement systems via Elexon): ~£500M–£1.5B

• Transition support / stranded asset compensation for affected generators: £1–5B depending on reform depth

• Ongoing regulatory and operational changes: ~£100–200M/year

You know what’s also complex and disruptive?

Spending £78 billion on crisis bailouts every two years, and paying ~£2.5B every year to fund fuel poverty programmes, with essentially no measurable progress on improving fuel poverty.

The UK is not short of money. It is short of willingness to spend that money at the right end of the problem.

If the UK tackled both storage and pricing reform, we would spend about £32B and save ourselves about £70B in panic spending every time there’s an energy crisis.

(To be clear: by reform, I mean paying generators closer to their actual cost of production and passing consumers a blended rate, rather than pricing every kilowatt-hour as if it came from a gas plant.)

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enter Miliband

To be fair to him: Ed Miliband didn’t build this mess. He inherited a system that was already structurally exposed.

Our manifesto is clear on this: energy systems are inherited, not chosen. No society votes its way out of an energy system overnight.

Miliband didn’t choose the starting point.

The problem is what he’s doing with the inheritance.

Pricing reform inaction is clearly on him.

Clean power by 2030 is the right destination. Offshore wind at scale, a revived nuclear pipeline, the end of new North Sea licensing… directionally, this is correct. The UK needs to get off gas. The long-term logic is sound.

But the manifesto is equally clear: targets are theatre, not strategy.

(as a reminder, here’s the full manifesto 👇🏻)

A target tells you where you want to be. It says nothing about how you function while you’re getting there. The UK will be running on significant volumes of gas through the mid-2030s regardless of what the 2030 target says, because energy infrastructure does not adhere to political timetables, because Hinkley Point C won’t come online until at least 2031, because the heating and transport systems being electrified are in the middle of a decade-long transition that can’t be accelerated by press release (oh, and no one can afford it).

During that window, every Hormuz-type event, every cold European winter, every Norwegian production outage hits the same structural vulnerabilities. The storage isn’t there. The pricing mechanism isn’t fixed. There’s no buffer.

More troubling than the timing gap is the category error. Judge energy by function, not virtue is the manifesto’s third principle, and it’s the one Miliband is most consistently violating.

The 2030 clean power target is a values statement dressed as a plan. Treating gas as the enemy of the transition, rather than the fuel that runs the transition, produces policies calibrated for the destination while ignoring the journey.

A system that collapses under stress is not liberating, no matter how virtuous its intent. Resilience — the manifesto’s highest principle — is not a feature of the 2030 plan.

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a note on North Sea drilling.

The “open up drilling, cut bills” argument gets trotted out every time there’s an energy crisis, and it fails our manifesto test almost immediately.

UK gas trades at international prices. Domestic production doesn’t create a domestic price, so more North Sea gas does not mean cheaper bills. The UK isn’t Norway, which built Equinor, established a sovereign wealth fund, and created a domestic pricing structure specifically to capture national benefit from national resources.

The UK privatised everything and then was surprised when producers behaved like private companies.

There’s also the small matter of the windfall tax, which pushed total North Sea taxation to 75% and triggered explicit investment reductions from BP, Shell, Harbour Energy, and TotalEnergies.

You cannot simultaneously demand new long-cycle exploration investment and maintain a punitive, politically unstable tax regime. The two objectives are fundamentally incompatible.

(So is retaining expensive and volatile electricity pricing while demanding electrification and pinning your economic hopes on energy-intensive AI data centres, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

That said: the manifesto’s ninth principle is reject purity tests.

There is a narrow, honest supply security argument for the transition decade. The UK will burn gas for another 10+ years regardless. Marginal additional domestic production modestly reduces that exposure.

If you’re serious about it, fix the investment conditions, be honest about the timeline, and stop pretending it will cut bills. But it is one tool among several and it substitutes for nothing on the non-negotiables list below.

the non-negotiables

If Miliband is going to pursue a clean energy agenda (and he should) there is a minimum floor of structural fixes without which the agenda fails on its own terms.

These are not alternatives to decarbonisation, they are the pre-conditions for surviving it.

Strategic gas storage. Now, not eventually. The UK needs a buffer that can absorb a supply shock without triggering a national emergency. This is not a fossil fuel argument. It is a physics argument: the UK will burn gas for another decade at least, and burning it without a buffer is reckless.

Pricing reform. The REMA decision needs to be revisited. Reforming pricing is complex. It is less complex than explaining to people why electricity bills spiked again on a day when the grid was running 80% on wind, or budgeting £70-80B for energy crisis funding every 2 years.

A consumer transition mechanism that doesn’t require capital. Heat pumps, EV chargers, home insulation… the entire electrification pathway assumes households have £5,000-15,000 to invest. The households most vulnerable to energy are the least able to fund the transition. Without a financing mechanism that doesn’t require capital outlay, the clean energy agenda is structurally regressive.

(oh, what’s this? an option for funding?)

Dispatchable capacity. Wind and solar are the right answer for the long run. They are not dispatchable: they cannot be switched on when the grid needs them. The gap needs to be filled by something that can. That means nuclear, and it means Hinkley and Sizewell need to be treated as national infrastructure projects, not managed as procurement exercises.

the bill we’re about to get

The UK is not a poor country making hard trade-offs with limited resources.

It is a wealthy country that has consistently chosen to pay for the consequences of a broken energy system rather than fix the system itself.

Miliband’s direction is correct. His plan, as it stands, will deliver a cleaner grid in 2035, assuming everything goes to schedule, assuming no further supply shocks, assuming consumers can fund the transition, assuming Europe has surplus power available whenever the UK needs it.

None of those assumptions are safe. We live in a volatile world.

The energy anarchist position is not that clean energy is wrong. It is that energy is the operating system of civilisation, and you do not upgrade an operating system by announcing the target version while leaving the security vulnerabilities unpatched.

Fix the storage. Fix the pricing. Insure the journey.

Welcome to the anarchists who have joined (and thank you for the external validation). If you’re new and like what you’re reading, check out the manifesto and the tenets of good energy policy.

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A key follow-on to the recent Warm Homes Plan announcement is the Green Home Finance Strategic Partnership, meant to unblock green finance.

The Green Finance Institute primarily builds coalitions around shared goals and defines frameworks (Green Home Finance Principles, the Green Mortgage Hub) and the Partnership is its latest vehicle.

But it’s time for some real talk.

I’ve counted at least 30 distinct partnerships, task forces, councils, working groups, products, and initiatives in the last ten years whose explicit aim includes some version of unblocking green finance. There’s no shortage of good intentions.

And yet.

Expecting that this partnership will be the magic alchemy that finally delivers a revolution feels naive. Not because the people involved aren’t smart or committed, but because the structural problems that dampened every previous attempt are still present and unaddressed.

We don’t need another partnership. We need a proper reckoning with what a real green finance system actually requires.

the pattern

The UK has a reliable playbook for home decarbonisation finance. Announce a scheme, rush to delivery, skip the structural groundwork, watch it collapse, commission a review, absorb the recommendations, and repeat.

The post-mortem on the Green Homes Grant Voucher Scheme noted, with impressive British understatement: “We are not convinced that the Department has fully acknowledged the scale of its failures with this scheme. […] It is a matter of concern that green homes schemes have repeatedly been short term and have underdelivered on over-optimistic promises on green targets and job creation.”

The underlying reason isn’t organisational, and the UK does not lack green capital.

It’s structural.

The UK has treated home decarbonisation as a consumer lifestyle choice, funded by grants, delivered through supplier schemes, and backstopped by the government. This guarantees three outcomes: low uptake, endless pilots, and permanent subsidy dependence.

Then there’s the political reality. A growing share of people no longer reject climate science, they reject the bill. Roads are potholed, councils are bankrupt, the NHS is stretched, and taxpayers are being asked to underwrite heat pumps, EVs, and green finance experiments. The backlash is not irrational.

New York is currently debating whether its Climate Act is financially survivable. The state’s own analysis projects $4,000 in additional household energy costs. Governor Hochul’s budget director is publicly hinting at rolling back the law.

This is not a fringe revolt. It is a progressive state discovering that political will and structural design are not the same thing.

If the affordability problem isn’t solved structurally, the political and public support for net zero collapses. Finding a funding model that doesn’t land primarily on bills or rely entirely on subsidies is existential for the transition itself.

There is a second failure mode sitting alongside. The entire supply side (manufacturers, installers, heat pump companies, insulation providers) has spent years waiting for consumer finance to unlock mass demand. The theory is seductive: reduce the monthly cost, reduce the friction, watch adoption climb.

So the push is always the same. More finance products. Better rates. Longer terms. The problem is that consumer credit only meaningfully moves demand when the interest rate approaches zero.

As the former Commercial Director for the UK’s largest installer of low carbon tech, I lived this firsthand. Researchers also looked at 13 financing instruments across the EU and explicitly confirmed that consumer finance with market-rate interest does not drive retrofit uptake.

Charge anything close to an unsecured market rate and you get negligible uptake. So you subsidise the rate. Suddenly you haven’t built a finance market, you’ve built a hidden grant with extra paperwork and a credit check.

my green finance vision board

Full disclosure: this will horrify some folks who have UK Green Deal PTSD or experienced the US’s PACE debacle. Stay with me until the end. I hope to ease your anxiety… or at least give you cannon fodder for yelling at me in the comments.

What would durable, market-based green finance look like?

Obviously, there is no silver bullet; the right answer is obviously a multi-layered system. In this piece, I’m focused on a solution for dispersed, owner-occupied homes.

In a perfect world, this sits alongside things like robust district heating and heat network projects, the UK’s version of Energiesprong for retrofitting social housing, and other initiatives targeting renters.

First principle: Don’t use public money where private money works.

We must stop using public money to subsidise every element of this transition.

Sentiment towards net zero is changing, and even the UK’s top climate chief warns that the government will lose public support if they don’t figure out how to distribute costs fairly.

One of the criticisms of the Boiler Upgrade Scheme is that it funnels public money towards people who are more likely to have afforded a heat pump. This is valid. It’s public money transferred directly to (arguably) asset-rich homeowners, with no obligation to repay.

We should seek to use private capital, without subsidy, where it makes sense so we can concentrate public money where it’s needed and where private capital cannot go: social housing, private renters, the hardest-to-treat, and most vulnerable stock.

Rather than spreading grants thin across all housing types and achieving nothing at scale anywhere, build deliberate segmentation.

Second principle: Attach the finance to the property, not the person

Humans have annoying habits. They move, remortgage, lose their jobs, divorce, and die. All of these events create default risk in consumer credit models, which is why green loans carry high interest rates.

A property-linked energy upgrade charge that

• attaches to the property title

• sits junior to the primary mortgage (this is important for reasons I’ll explain later)

• transfers to the next owner on sale

• collects via a ring-fenced statutory channel

produces something that looks far more like infrastructure debt than retail credit.

This changes the asset class. Default risk drops; bundle thousands of these together and you have exactly the kind of steady, boring, long-duration return that pension funds love.

Imagine that your boiler is dying. You want a heat pump but don’t have £15,000 in cash. Under this model, the upgrade attaches to the house, not to you. If you sell in five years, the next buyer takes on the remaining charge. Just like they inherit your kitchen design choices.

This also helps to remove the “I’ll wait until I’m in my forever home” objection to installing a heat pump or solar panels that I’ve seen time and time again.

Third principle: Cash before carbon

A credible system sizes repayments so that energy bill savings materially offset servicing costs, and household cash flow doesn’t spike on day one.

If an upgrade cannot plausibly neutralise household cash flow over the life of the asset, it is not a finance problem. It is a technology or deployment problem (or perhaps a structural energy pricing problem 😬), and it should definitely not be scaled with public money.

(If one was being pedantic, she could argue that mass electrification is an insane policy unless the spark gap is closed… but that’s another topic for another day.)

If we believe that low carbon tech increases property values (Rightmove’s 2023 Greener Homes report was bullish on this; the 2025 version is more tepid) and materially decreases energy bills, this math should math.

Fourth principle: Risk sits with private capital

Investors receive yield because there is risk.

The UK has developed an embedded assumption that government should underwrite adoption risk, guarantee performance, and absorb the downside, while private actors claim the upside.

That is not transition finance. It is risk laundering, and taxpayers should be considerably angrier about it than they are.

Public money is justified only where the state captures upside, or where risk is genuinely uninsurable and temporary. IMO, most UK green finance fails both tests.

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learning from others

Deep breath. The closest real-world model for this is the US Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programme. PACE attaches finance to the property tax bill; non-payment is treated as tax arrears, not loan default.

PACE unlocked billions in private capital and proved that consumer demand for deep retrofit surges when you remove the upfront barrier and attach the debt to the property rather than the individual.

It also produced significant fraud due to mis-selling and a mortgage market fiasco.

In many US states, property taxes are senior to the mortgage, which means a random solar panel installation could hold super-priority lien status. Mortgage lenders revolted. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac eventually barred PACE-encumbered properties. Many people lost a lot of money.

Obviously, we should not copy this like-for-like.

Placing the charge junior to the mortgage calms lenders, but it is not a costless concession. A junior lien removes the enforcement security that made PACE-style instruments cheap to fund. The pricing only holds if something else compensates for it: a statutory collection channel, with teeth, that makes default genuinely difficult and expensive.

Collect via council tax billing (or an equivalent statutory mechanism) means the instrument could likely stay fundable at infrastructure-debt pricing. Leave collection to a retail lender and you reintroduce the default risk that we are trying to price out.

This should take care of the mortgage fiasco risk. Now onto the fraud.

The UK does not have a brilliant track record. Where do we look for exacting technical rigour? Enter Germany.

Germany’s KfW renovation loans are tied to engineering standards. An Energieberater produces the technical plan. The bank grants the loan based on it. The consultant supervises the renovation and verifies completion. If the building doesn’t meet the target Effizienzhaus standard, the repayment bonus is reduced or reclaimed, and KfW performs random audits. Falsified paperwork triggers financial penalties for both homeowner and consultant.

Does this add friction and slow it down? Yes. (German is behind on its efficiency targets; analyses blame property owners for behaving economically irrationally. The nerve.)

Does it reduce fraud? Also yes.

A UK system must borrow both things: the structural property-linkage from PACE, and technical gatekeeping discipline from Germany. We need to fundamentally change the implementation errors of the past.

Some potential reforms to consider:

• Finance should only available for pre-approved retrofit pathways, from genuinely accredited installers who are audited properly. (Does giving this responsibility to the monopolistic MCS fill me with dread? Yes.)

• Every project should require scoping and sign-off from an accredited retrofit coordinator who is audited, held accountable for long-term performance.

• Disbursements should be staged (something like 30% on design approval, 50% mid-installation, 20% only after verified performance).

• Stress test the incentive loopholes: retrofit coordinators shouldn’t work on commission; installers cannot recommend finance providers; finance providers cannot recommend installers.

the implementation reality

Politicians want big targets for headlines and quick wins, but fail to acknowledge operating realities. It’s how £50 million was spent on the Green Homes Grant administration before scrapping it within two years.

To make a property-linked energy charge real in the UK, we need approvals across law, finance, regulation, and politics. Miss one and the whole thing collapses into another Green Deal-shaped crater.

1. Primary legislation. Parliament must create a new statutory charge attached to property. A legal instrument that runs with the land, is registered at the Land Registry, transfers automatically on sale, survives borrower bankruptcy, and has clearly defined enforcement rights. Without this, we have unsecured credit wearing a cape. Fail.

2. The seniority negotiation. Decide where the charge sits relative to the mortgage: senior, pari passu, or junior. If it’s junior, pricing rises. In the UK, we need HM Treasury, UK Finance, major lenders, and possibly the Bank of England to agree on a workable hierarchy. If it’s senior, lenders revolt. If it’s unclear, nobody touches it. Fail.

3. FCA regulatory treatment. The FCA determines whether this is regulated credit, a tax-like levy, or a new category entirely. If this ends up classified as standard unsecured consumer lending, the interest rate economics collapse immediately. Fail.

4. Collection mechanism. This is a load-bearing detail. Low default rates require a collection channel that is low-friction and difficult to ignore, so it’s a prerequisite for cheap finance. The logical candidate is council tax billing, or a similarly statutory mechanism. That requires DLUHC approval, local authority buy-in, and system changes. Basic direct debit? Fail.

5. Treasury’s quiet backstop. Full state subsidy is neither necessary nor desirable. But we probably requires one of: first-loss protection, a partial guarantee, or eligibility for infrastructure-style capital treatment. That requires Treasury sign-off. No support? Fail.

6. PRA capital treatment. Banks need regulatory clarity on capital weighting, risk treatment, and balance sheet impact before they will originate at scale. If holding property-linked retrofit charges consumes disproportionate regulatory capital, banks will not participate regardless of the policy rationale. Fail.

7. Land Registry integration. Less glamorous, but genuinely critical. The charge must appear clearly on title, be automatically searchable, be visible during conveyancing, and transfer without friction on sale. If conveyancers treat it as a defect or an anomaly that requires resolution, transactions stall. Fail.

8. Quality governance. If installation quality collapses, the financial model dies politically and possibly legally. Mandatory technical assessment, certified design, post-install verification, performance sign-off, and clear dispute resolution are not optional extras. They are the mechanism that prevents this becoming a(nother) national scandal. Double fail.

9. Political cover. Cross-party support. Explicit messaging that this is not a Green Deal reboot. Mortgage lender reassurance in public. Clear differentiation from grant chaos.

10. Capital markets architecture. Securitisation framework, standardised documentation, pooled issuance, and visible demand from long-duration investors. Pension funds and insurers need to see “predictable, inflation-linked, boring.” If they see “policy risk, political volatility, unclear seniority hierarchy,” they walk and they don’t come back. Fail.

This is not a policy tweak. It is a structural market creation of a new asset class. None of it is impossible, but it is not easy nor quick.

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why this isn’t the green deal 2.0

UK folks are probably convulsing at this point. Thanks for sticking with me.

The Green Deal tried to bolt consumer credit onto energy bills and hoped savings would magically cover repayments. It was not infrastructure finance. It was awkward retail credit dressed up as green policy, with optimistic assumptions standing in for underwriting discipline and political enthusiasm substituting for legal architecture.

The property-linked model described here is different in every structural dimension.

• It is legally defined property-linked infrastructure, not consumer debt.

• It sits junior to the mortgage and is transparently recorded on title registers.

• It is priced as long-duration asset finance, not retail credit.

• It does not rely on hypothetical bill savings; performance is contractually verified before the final disbursement is released.

The repayment logic is: “This improves the property. The property carries the charge.”

Not: “Trust us, your bill will magically fall.”

One more distinction worth making. The Green Deal was killed partly by the political environment, partly by weak design, and partly by the absence of any institutional infrastructure to support it.

A properly built property-linked system, once established, has a self-reinforcing quality: the asset class becomes familiar, lenders build origination capability, insurers understand the risk profile, and the political cost of dismantling it rises.

That is how you build something that outlasts the government that created it.

Warm Homes Plan: a live diagnostic

The Green Home Finance Strategic Partnership has organised itself into working groups and the chairs are credible. Could this finally be the right vehicle for proper reform?!

Working Group 1 (chaired by UK Finance) focuses on innovation and incentives. I firmly believe that if a green finance solution cannot be explained without mentioning “innovation”, it is not finance. It is marketing.

But alas, if they go down the asset class creation route, UK Finance is the right institution for the seniority negotiation, PRA capital treatment, and the conversation with mortgage lenders about where a property-linked charge could sit in the hierarchy. These are checklist items 2, 5, and 6, which are the most technically fraught and politically sensitive.

Though, resolving the lien hierarchy requires HM Treasury and the Bank of England at the table, not just the banking trade body. This group also needs to tackle the primary legislation in checklist item 1.

Working Group 2 (chaired by GFI) focuses on shaping “government-backed loan initiatives”, which worryingly sounds like an improved Green Deal. If WG2 produces a better-designed loan scheme rather than a statutory property-linked instrument, it will have done useful work in entirely the wrong category.

If they decide to look at property-linked products, this is the natural home for FCA regulatory treatment and capital markets architecture (checklist items 3 and 10).

Working Group 3 (co-chaired by Nesta and the Finance & Leasing Association) focuses on driving demand and standardised consumer journeys.

With the deepest respect to the people working on this: I’ve sat in many cross-party discussions about standardising consumer journeys for decarbonisation. I have yet to see one yield real-world impact.

A smoother application journey doesn’t change the underlying economics. And as argued above, consumer finance at any rate that resembles a market rate does not move demand.

The item this group should be addressing is the collection mechanism: what statutory channel makes default rare enough to price the instrument as infrastructure rather than retail credit.

Working Group 4 (chaired by Energy UK) focuses on enhanced consumer protections and standards as they relate to finance. This maps to checklist item 8 — quality governance. Energy UK is a reasonable chair. The output to watch for is whether the standards framework has teeth: mandatory independent verification, financial consequences for non-compliance, and audits.

The 98% non-compliance rate on previous schemes happened under a voluntary regime, just saying.

the awkward truth(s)

The first: Finance cannot rescue unviable economics, and producing a cash-neutral deep retrofit is really fucking hard.

Recent academic analysis of 44 deep renovation scenarios across German housing types — using KfW’s own model, in the country with the best-run retrofit finance system in the world — found that none of them pay back in monetary terms over 25 years. Why?

1. Official energy performance ratings systematically overstated actual household consumption (by 30 to 40 percent), which skewed savings calculations.

2. Construction costs up 43% since 2020.

3. Finance costs up ~300% since 2021 (from 1% to 4%).

For targeted interventions (like a heat pump replacing an end-of-life boiler), the economics are manageable and property-linked finance probably works as described.

For whole-house deep renovation, the honest answer is that debt financing alone probably cannot close the viability gap. This doesn’t mean we should abandon the model; we must be precise about which upgrades the model can and should fund without subsidy and which ones it cannot.

The second: Even free money does not automatically produce demand.

You can build the perfect financing instrument, but most households do not wake up craving a deep retrofit. Trust, hassle, change anxiety, prioritising other things, and plain behavioural inertia matter just as much.

(Also, fewer people can even think about any upgrades. Nearly half of Britons have less than £25 in spare cash at the end of the week, and nearly two-thirds of adults are cutting back on essentials like food and heating.)

the verdict

The Green Home Finance Strategic Partnership is at a fork, and it needs to pick a path.

Option one: optimise what already exists. Better-designed consumer loan products, a government backstop, reduced friction, ‘best practices’ for consumer journeys delivered in a nice downloadable PDF. Feasible. Deliverable within the current working group structure. A ‘quick win.’

A government-backed consumer loan also uses public money where private money could work. It follows the person, not the property, so all the default risk remains. Its economics depend entirely on the subsidy lasting. And with a state guarantee behind it, risk sits with the taxpayer while lenders and private actors retain the yield.

You get one or two nice press releases before obscurity.

Option two: build a new asset class. Statutory property-linked charge, junior to the mortgage, collected via council tax billing, structured for long-duration institutional capital.

You won’t get a quick win within 12 months, but you will get something that will probably endure for decades, safe from changing political whims. And you’ll break the generational curse of retrofit scandals.

The working groups as currently scoped could deliver option two, but only if their mandates are stretched. “Innovation and incentives” needs to mean primary legislation and lien hierarchy resolution, not product iteration. “Consumer journeys” needs to become the statutory collection mechanism question. If HM Treasury and the Bank of England are in the room, not just the usual industry suspects, this Partnership is different from the previous thirty. If they don’t, it isn’t.

The UK’s switch from coal to natural gas is described as “the greatest peacetime operation in the nation’s history.” In under a decade, 40 million appliances were converted in 14 million homes.

Believing we can deliver the transition that will define the next century of heating by dressing up unsecured consumer lending in a prettier coat is naive.

It’s time to do the hard thing.

I’m a couple of weeks behind, but I’ve been waylaid with an unexpectedly emotional attachment to the Olympics (and other stuff). We’re back to regularly scheduled programming. I’ve got a hot take on green finance baking for Monday, but in the meantime - my nerdy gossip.

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full anarchy: blind item of the week

SPOTTED: A certain Midwestern power utility is currently watching its former CEO argue, in open court, that paying $4.3 million to a lawyer shortly before he was appointed to regulate the company was just standard industry practice.

The lawyer in question, now dead, found the arrangement equally unremarkable. He did not survive to offer his own testimony, which is proving moderately inconvenient for the defence.

Of course, this company also believed that funnelling $60 million through dark money groups to an organisation controlled by the sitting House Speaker in exchange for a law bailing out two nuclear plants and two 1950s-era coal plants that couldn’t compete on the open market is also standard practice.

The result: ratepayers have paid approximately half a billion dollars since 2020 to subsidise plants the market had already sentenced to death.

The company settled with the Department of Justice for $230 million.

The Speaker is in prison.

The former CEO is now asking jurors to believe he had no idea any of this was unusual.

Formal request for Ryan Murphy to immortalise this in the style of American Crime Story meets All’s Fair.

ESG’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Vanguard has agreed to pay $29.5 million and gut most of its ESG-related shareholder activism to settle an antitrust lawsuit brought by 13 Republican state attorneys general.

Some background: Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street collectively manage tens of trillions of dollars in passive funds: index funds that, by design, must hold whatever stocks are in the index. They can’t sell. But they can vote.

The core allegation: The Republican AGs argued these three firms were using their outsized voting power, which was built on money from ordinary investors who just wanted to track the S&P 500, to coordinate a climate agenda: restrict capital to fossil fuels, pressure coal companies into cutting production, etc.

The AGs argued that coordination, on behalf of investors who never asked for it, amounted to market manipulation.

Vanguard settled. BlackRock and State Street haven’t yet.

The settlement terms are worth sitting with. Vanguard can no longer use its shareholdings to direct portfolio companies’ business strategies, nominate directors, or file shareholder proposals on ESG grounds.

It must also extend proxy voting rights to investors in funds covering 50% of its US equity assets, meaning investors get to decide how their shares vote, rather than Vanguard deciding on their behalf.

I didn’t have Ken Paxton as a champion of market integrity on my 2026 bingo card. But let’s be honest: ESG as practised by the largest passive fund managers was mostly not working anyway. It was a way for large institutions to perform climate values without actually committing to them.

The settlement didn’t kill something that was working. It killed a wrapper that was already splitting at the seams, and replaced a vague, implicit climate commitment with — well, we’ll find out.

🏆 Winners

Ken Paxton and the Republican AG coalition. They found a genuinely interesting legal weapon (antitrust law) and used it effectively. Even if you hate the players, respect the game.

Passive investors who want passive management. Vanguard was supposed to track indices. The settlement returns it to roughly doing that.

The “honest capital” camp. Investing under explicit mandates rather than being laundered through mainstream passive funds is a cleaner system. Explicit is better than implied (even if it’s harder to sell).

💔 Losers

The idea that ESG was ever a coherent investment thesis. It wasn’t. The settlement didn’t kill something that was working.

BlackRock and State Street. Vanguard just handed the AGs a $29.5 million precedent. The litigation against the other two continues.

Anyone who used ESG ratings to attract capital and meant it. The settlement further erodes the credibility of ESG as a category, which closes a financing channel that some genuinely useful projects were using.

💥 Anarchy Opportunists

Dedicated green funds with honest mandates. The money implicitly “ESG-aligned” inside passive funds has to go somewhere. Funds that say explicitly “we invest in the energy transition” and mean it are now better positioned than funds that were vaguely gesturing at it.

Retail investors. Proxy voting rights being extended at scale is a structural change buried in this settlement. Probably not what Paxton intended.

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🧾 UK energy bills down £117 — let’s look at the receipts

There were some *cough* other things happening in the UK this week, but amidst the chaos, Keir Starmer announced that energy bills are coming down by £117 from 1 April.

The Ofgem price cap drops from £1,758 to £1,641. The Prime Minister says this is “because of the actions this Government took at the last budget.”

Sure, Jan. Let’s look at what actually happened.

The government removed the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) scheme from bills, saving households roughly £150. ECO was the latest iteration of a programme meant to fund insulation and heating upgrades for low-income households. It was also, by any honest reckoning, a disaster: a 98% non-compliance rate for external wall insulation, a trail of botched retrofits. And this is only the latest interaction of failed attempts. ECO deserved to be cancelled.

But the government is taking credit for removing a failing programme — and using the resulting bill reduction as evidence of policy success — while simultaneously promising to spend billions on the Warm Homes Plan, its replacement, which has not yet delivered a single retrofit and is still very fuzzy on delivery.

We are booking a win today against a commitment to spend considerably more tomorrow, in exchange for outcomes that ECO, by the way, was also supposed to deliver.

This is not a policy triumph.

Network costs went up by £66 — because the grid genuinely needs upgrading and that cost has to live somewhere. Correct and honest. Fine.

Wholesale gas prices fell by £38. The government did not cause this.

Bills remain 40% above historic levels. The long game here is the Warm Homes Plan actually working, which requires it to avoid ECO’s fate: mass deployment of a complex technical intervention through a fragmented supply chain, overseen by a new agency, at speed.

The UK has a well-documented track record on this type of execution challenge. It is not a reassuring one.

Scores, please.

💚 Social Outcomes: 🟡 Meh, 5/10

£117 is real money. Bills are still 40% above historic levels. Fuel poverty is structural, not solved.

🕹️ Technology Outcome. ⚪️

Not applicable.

💷 Economic Outcome: 🔴 No points to Gryffindor.

Removing a failing cross-subsidy and calling it a win, while committing to spend more on its replacement, is circular accounting. The Warm Homes Plan will cost significantly more than ECO.

Wholesale prices did fall…primarily due to the weather.

🛡️ Security Outcome: 🔴

Bills are still driven by wholesale gas. Nothing here changes that structural exposure.

🌲 Environmental Outcome: 🟡No winning yet.

ECO deserved to go. But removing it before the Warm Homes Plan is operational creates a real gap.

🏃Temporal Outcome: 🟡We’re playing high stakes.

Everything now depends on Warm Homes Plan delivery. History suggests some humility is warranted.

🇬🇧Political Outcome: 🟢

I’ll give them the win, just because it was the only bright spot in what was otherwise a terrible week for the Labour Government. Clean headline. Effective framing.

Anarchist verdict: A modest, real bill reduction — funded partly by cancelling a programme that failed by the government’s own metrics, and partly by a gas price movement nobody in Downing Street engineered. The ECO removal was the right call. The victory lap is not.

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📚 anarchist read of the week

is a former colleague and I genuinely love talking energy and politics with him. He’s now the Director of Research at Orennia. This week, he traces what the Trump administration’s cheerleading for a weaker dollar means for energy.

A weak dollar is, as he puts it, just another tariff — hitting the cheapest, fastest-to-scale sources of new power at precisely the moment the AI buildout is screaming for them. The closing line is the whole argument in nine words: “When artificial price anchors break, reality sends the invoice.” Delish.

Insider

Energy and the Collapsing Dollar

In the middle of the Vietnam War, sitting in the Oval Office, President Richard Nixon faced an impossible decision: crash the American economy or break the global financial system…

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2 months ago · 9 likes · Aaron Foyer

The weekly summary of the energy news that caught my eye this week. Also, ICYMI: we set out seven tests that any ‘good’ energy policy should survive.

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full anarchy: blind item of the week

SPOTTED: another earnest, middle-power energy darling quietly cozying up to Daddy China.

Official line: a “technical” power trading agreement. Unofficial reality: Maybe watching Canada flirt with Beijing while Trump live-tweets his feelings made this feel less taboo.

The irony: this tentacled brand built its cult following on fighting the system… only to discover the system has very competitive pricing and enormous generation capacity.

Not a scandal. Not a betrayal. Just another reminder that in the great power competition, middle powers don’t pick sides; they pick suppliers.

Daddy China doesn’t do romance. He does capacity.

gas generation goes insane mode

A new report shows a record boom in gas-fired power projects worldwide. Planned gas capacity under development is roughly 50% larger than today’s total, with around 252 GW of new plants tied to AI demand globally. A third of that is in the U.S.; China, Vietnam, Iraq and Brazil are also major developers.

Political support for rapid data centre expansion and weakened clean-energy efforts are helping drive this build-out. If all these projects are built, they’d potentially double U.S. annual emissions.

The same forces that are driving Canada and other middle powers into strategic economic flexibility with China are now driving the U.S. deeper into legacy gas lock-in under the banner of our AI technology futures.

Our technology boom is being served by the energy status quo, not a genuinely modernised grid. It’s inertia in a fancy hat.

🏆 winners

Utilities and grid operators
New dispatchable capacity that ostensibly helps meet booming demand from AI data centres. More gas plants = fewer “lights out” headlines (for now).

Tech titans with cheap power needs
Site projects near gas (like Texas, Louisiana) to avoid supply intermittency headaches, at least until someone asks how heatwaves and drought affect gas infrastructure.

Gas developers, exporters, and traders
Drillers, pipeline and LNG infrastructure owners turn on the growth spigot. Forget Porsches and hair transplants: this is the industry’s mid-life crisis remedy.

💔 losers

The Planet
We’re rapidly going backwards on net-zero targets.

Clean Energy Investors & Projects
Policy and capital that could go to wind, solar, storage and grid modernisation are being crowded out or delayed due to the political and financial weight behind gas.

Electricity Consumers
In some regions, gas proliferation is already tying electricity prices to a volatile commodity market. Double bad if you were promised clean, cheap power.

💥 anarchy opportunists

Never let a crisis go to waste.

1. Distributed Clean Power with On-Site Storage
AI data centres aren’t the biggest distributed-energy opportunity overall, but they may be the clearest commercial test case for firm, modular clean power at scale.

2. Grid Flexibility & Demand Management Startups
If data centres actually pay for grid flexibility (they like uptime), firms that manage load shifting, dynamic pricing and demand response could sell a cleaner alternative to “build another gas plant”.

3. Hydrogen & Low-Carbon Dispatchable Technologies
If developers are serious about reliability and climate, there’s a niche for real alternatives to gas peaker plants to get funded on the back of gas anxiety.

4. Public Transparency & Accountability Coalitions
The slow backlash against opaque data centre build-outs, rising bills and local environmental impacts is real. Grassroots organising and regulatory pressure could flip project economics quickly.

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Europe Orders Hamburg(er); Discovers Kitchen is Backed Up Until 2032

Category is: renewable energy policy.

€95bn pledged by 10 European countries to turbo-charge North Sea wind and “lock in energy security” in an agreement they’re calling the Hamburg Declaration.

Impressive number. Lovely nouns. Scores, please.

💚 social: make life easier, not test resilience

Score: 4 / 10

In theory, more cheap wind should mean lower bills and fewer price shocks. Unfortunately, this does very little for households this decade.

No immediate bill relief. No simplification of energy systems that people interact with. No reduction in the cognitive load of “navigating the transition”.

This still asks citizens to be patient, flexible, and resilient while infrastructure catches up. Patience is a virtue, but bills are piling up.

🕹️ technology: fetishise function over novelty

Score: 8 / 10

Offshore wind is a boring, proven technology. That’s good. No hydrogen cosplay, no moonshot nonsense, no “AI-enabled decentralised energy marketplace” waffle.

Points deducted because we’re still treating integration (grids, storage, dispatch) as secondary to headline generation. Function includes the whole system, not just turbines.

However, points added for doubling down on a technology that Trump thinks is ‘stupid.’ Excellent trolling.

🛡️ security: reduce leverage over society

Score: 7 / 10

This meaningfully reduces gas leverage, which is one of the most corrosive forms of political and economic pressure Europe faces.

However, it replaces fuel leverage with capital, supply chain, and financing leverage. Better, but not zero.

Still a net security gain.

💶 economic: make it easy to follow the money (it stays close)

Score: 3 / 10

€95bn is waved around, but who pays, who profits, who carries risk, and where returns land remains opaque. Utilities, pension funds, manufacturers, foreign suppliers, public guarantees; all blurred together.

If you can’t trace where value accumulates, you can’t govern it. Until we get more detail, this fails the ‘follow the money’ test.

🌲 environmental: reduce harm over time

Score: 8 / 10

Clear win. Offshore wind displaces fossil fuel generation, cuts emissions, and reduces long-term environmental damage relative to the status quo.

Not perfect, but materially better over time without asking for mass behavioural change.

🏗️ temporal: must be buildable

Score: 4 / 10

Technically buildable. Institutionally sluggish.

Europe keeps announcing capacity faster than it can consent it. Permitting, ports, vessels, grid connections, legal challenges, and workforce constraints remain unresolved at the pace required.

Buildable in theory. Fragile in execution.

🇪🇺 political: Make politics boring again

Score: 5 / 10

Half credit. On one hand, this is infrastructure policy, not culture war theatre. Good.

On the other, it is still drenched in summit optics, declarations, and applause lines about leadership and ambition.

Remember our rule: if a policy needs applause, it usually isn’t ready. This one still enjoys the clapping.

🧮 anarchist score: 6 / 10

By our standards, the Hamburg Declaration is well-intentioned but incomplete.

It scores strongly on technology realism, environmental impact, and strategic direction, but fails on what actually matters to people: near-term social benefit, financial transparency, delivery speed, and boring competence.

This is not bad policy. It is unfinished.

Europe keeps announcing the destination while quietly hoping someone else figures out how to pour the concrete, carry the risk, and stop the lights flickering in the meantime.

Promising. Still not enough.

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📚 anarchist read of the week

🇨🇦 One for the Canadian energy nerds. I started reading the when they published their historical primer on Venezuela. I was delighted, then slightly horrified when published a follow-up dispatch on the Canadian energy industry.

Collapse Intelligence Agency

The Geological, Engineering, and Financial System Dynamics of the Canadian Oil Industry

This is a comprehensive expansion dispatch for…

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3 months ago · 15 likes · 9 comments · John Doe

A word of caution: this is not a light read. It’s kind of like watching a new, updated edition of Energy and Civilization be published chapter-by-chapter in real-time.

They promise “the most unbiased and technically comprehensive understanding of how the initial domino of Venezuela will affect the geopolitical and macroeconomic balance of North America and possibly the World” if you commit to reading the dispatches in a particular order.

It’s a commitment but they got a nod from (yes, that one). If it’s good enough for that maniac, it’s good enough for me.

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I spent the inaugural post bitching about bad energy policy. It’s only fair to define what good looks like.

A good energy system is not defined by ideology, ownership model, technology stack, or (trigger warning) financial returns.

If we take our manifesto as true - energy is the master variable and operating system of civilisation - then energy policy isn’t about control, virtue or ambition. It’s about removing points of failure until society can get on with its life.

I’ve built this scorecard of sorts around key outcomes:

1. Social: Make life easier, not test resilience.

2. Technology: Fetishise function over novelty.

3. Security: Reduce leverage over society.

4. Economic: Make it easy to follow the money (it stays close)

5. Environmental: Reduce harm over time

6. Temporal: Must be buildable (shocking we need to say this)

7. Political: Make politics boring again (if it needs applause, it will fail)

social premise: make life easier, not test resilience.

A legitimate energy system expands what people are able to do.

It provides reliable, affordable energy for healthcare, housing, food systems, education, mobility, and communication. It reduces the time and mental load spent managing scarcity, freeing attention for productive, social, and creative life.

Energy poverty is not an individual failure. It is a system failure.

Any system that withholds basic energy services through price volatility, unreliability, or deliberate constraint undermines social progress regardless of intent.

Killer question: will this make daily life better for most people?

If a policy pushes system risk onto households, relies on scarcity, or moralises restraint, it is probably weak.

Heating is the clearest tell. As a transplant to the UK, one of the strangest national fixations is treating heating like a personal vice rather than a necessity. Thermostats become a battleground: comfort versus fear of bills.

Over 40% of households spend more than 10% of income on energy. Nearly 5 million spend over 20%. That is not “transition pain”. That is system failure.

Contrast Denmark, where heating is treated as infrastructure. District heating is delivered street by street, not household by household. It isn’t perfect, but fuel poverty rates remain among the lowest in Europe.

Comfort is not indulgence. It is the baseline.

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technology premise: fetishise function, not novelty.

A legitimate energy system works as a system, not a sequence of upgrades.

Energy transitions fail not because societies cling to old technologies, but because they replace components faster than they repair the system that connects them.

Politicians and technologists consistently fetishise the new over the functional.

Good energy policy makes the existing system work better before asking it to work differently. It prioritises sequencing and operations over replacement theatre.

What determines system success is not whether generation is cutting-edge, but whether generation, transmission, storage, and demand are integrated into a whole that can be run, repaired, and scaled with available skills and materials.

This is boring. There are fewer announcements and fewer photo ops. That is the point.

Killer question: what has to go right for this to work?

If it requires perfect conditions, flawless execution, or permanent emergency intervention, your policy is, as they say in my culture, “all hat and no cattle.” 🤠

California is the cautionary tale. Solar generation expanded rapidly without equivalent investment in transmission, storage, and system coordination. The result is deep duck curves, rising curtailment, and blackouts during real heatwaves.

These failures happened on the worst days, not in models. They show that building clean generation faster than grids and operations produces fragility, not resilience.

A system that only works once everything is replaced is not a transition plan. It’s an abdication of responsibility for the system that exists.

economic premise: make it easy to follow the money.

(hint: it should stay close)

A legitimate energy system strengthens the economy it depends on.

It doesn’t just move money around. It anchors value creation, supports productive industry, and reduces volatility that scares off long-lived investment.

Energy is not just a cost input. It is an enabling condition. Cheap, predictable energy compounds growth. Volatile, politicised energy pushes capital toward rent-seeking or out the door.

Killer question: where does the money go when this system works, and who pays when it doesn’t?

If money leaves, risk stays, and subsidies never end, the system is eating the economy it relies on.

Look at the UK as an example. Ambitions include attracting hyperscale AI data centres and anchoring high-value, energy-intensive compute domestically, while running one of the most volatile, expensive industrial electricity systems in the OECD.

These are fundamentally incompatible.

In contrast, Canada’s energy system largely strengthens the economic base it depends on, not because it is perfect, but because it is designed around abundance, optionality, and productivity.

Energy-intensive activity is normalised, not penance (we’re already apologising for so many other things). Canada can have credible conversations about energy-intensive compute. The result is boring but powerful: long-lived capital should feel safe showing up.

security premise: reduce leverage over society.

Energy security is not about independence, morality, or the “right” fuels. It is about who can hurt you, how fast, and how often.

Security means absorbing shocks without panic, fiscal crises, or emergency governance. Dependence is not a moral failure. It is a design choice.

Killer question: what can hurt this system, and how quickly do we feel it?

Renewables and electrification can improve security, but only if electricity itself is affordable, firm, and buffered. Without market reform and physical buffers, electrification simply relocates vulnerability.

The clearest indicator of an insecure energy system is not import dependence. It is how often governments intervene.

Price caps.

Subsidies.

Bailouts.

Emergency legislation.

These are not signs of compassion; they are signals of architectural failure.

The UK is often described as energy-secure because it has diverse gas import routes, a liberalised market, and significant renewable generation.

In practice, it has no meaningful strategic gas reserve, electricity prices set by marginal gas, and households and industry exposed to global price swings

The UK’s “security” lives in the Treasury, not the system. That is financialised exposure, not resilience.

(Editor’s note: the jury is still out as to whether having your leader snatched in a midnight raid or being threatened with 100% tariffs is the sign of security or insecurity. More to come.)

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environmental premise: reduce harm over time.

A legitimate energy system lowers cumulative environmental damage relative to what it replaces. We need to look at environmental performance as comparative, not absolute.

If harm is exported, deferred, or masked by accounting, the system has not improved. It has only rebranded its damage.

There are two killer questions:

“Does this reduce total harm over time, or just move it out of sight?”

“Will this transition trigger a collapse in another part of the system?”

Performative green policy is worse than honest incrementalism. A slingshot effect occurs when systems go “fully clean” on paper without accounting for integration, durability, or displacement. When the system inevitably strains or fails, society snaps back to emergency measures that are more damaging than what was displaced.

Germany removed large amounts of firm, low-carbon nuclear capacity before equivalent replacements existed. Between 2011 and 2022, it deliberately shut down most of its nuclear fleet as part of the Energiewende, framing the move as an environmental and safety win.

Renewables expanded, but not fast enough, and without sufficient grid reinforcement, storage, or firm low-carbon backup. To maintain system stability, Germany filled the gap with gas, much of it imported from Russia, increasing geopolitical and price exposure. When that system was stressed in 2022 by the Ukraine war:

• Coal plants were reopened or extended under emergency powers

• Lignite generation increased

• Nuclear closures were briefly delayed, then resumed

• Emissions stopped falling and, in some periods, rose

The lesson is not “don’t decarbonise.” The lesson is don’t remove firm capacity before its replacement can carry the load.

Environmental progress is not about purity. It is about replacement, endurance, and accumulation.

temporal premise: must be buildable.

Wild that we have to say this. But if the long game is the shortcut (thanks, Richie Norton), no where is that more true than energy.

A legitimate energy system can be built, operated, and evolved within the constraints of physical reality.

This premise is not about politics or public opinion. It is about time as a material constraint: construction timelines, workforce capacity, supply chains, permitting drag, capital turnover, and asset lifetimes.

Energy systems move at engineering speed, not announcement speed.

Killer question: What becomes permanent if this takes longer than planned?

If the answer is:

• fossil infrastructure

• emergency measures

• sunk capital in the wrong places

• political reversal

then the system is not temporally coherent. It is betting against time.

Grid connection queues are the clearest contemporary example of temporal incoherence. These are stretching out to 10 years in many countries, with projects stalled not by capital or ambition, but by:

• planning consent timelines

• shortages of skilled engineers

• transformer and cable supply constraints

• sequencing failures between generation and networks

Most transitions aren’t failing because of a lack of generation. They’re failing because networks move at civil-engineering speed, not policy speed.

political premise: make politics boring again.

Finally: if your energy policy needs sustained political enthusiasm, it will not survive democracy.

Energy systems in democracies do not fail because voters are irrational. They fail because political attention is scarce, fragile, and cyclical. Elections happen. Governments change. Priorities shift. Patience runs out.

Killer question: can this survive beyond a single political cycle?

China can run energy policy on multi-decade horizons with central coordination and limited public veto points. Democracies cannot. They do not get unlimited time, unity, or compliance. They get scrutiny.

A legitimate energy system does not require constant political attention to keep functioning. The name of the game becomes endurance.

Systems fail politically when operational problems leak into household bills, fiscal crises, headlines, and emergency powers.

If prices require explanation every winter, if supply needs constant reassurance, if there is a perpetual system of subsidies and caps, if failure must be narrated rather than fixed, the system is not politically coherent.

That is not governance. That is life support. At that point, energy stops being infrastructure and becomes a permanent political liability.

The paradox is simple: the freer the politics, the more boring the energy system must be.

Good energy policy shrinks the political surface area of energy over time.
Bad energy policy expands it until everything becomes political all at once.

Energy does not need to inspire. It needs to endure.

And in democracies, endurance looks a lot like boredom.

Embarrassingly, I missed my own deadline to post my first micro-dose on Friday. A combination of unexpected personal things cropping up, along with the lack of restraint. Any news can be energy news, so it took force to remove myself from the Davos doom spiral.

Here are a few energy bits that caught my eye this week.

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full anarchy blind of the week

SPOTTED: A usually well-behaved middle power quietly entering a very interesting situationship after being publicly dumped by an ex with a loud platform.

After a certain former central banker–turned–PM gave a devastatingly calm speech at Davos about diversification, resilience, and not organising your entire economy around one volatile partner, a certain orange ex reportedly did not take it well. Sources say the reaction involved dramatic disinvitations, tariff threats, and a group chat meltdown about “loyalty.”

Meanwhile, across the Pacific, a new “friend” has been sliding in with actions, not tweets.

👀 Recent sightings include:

• That friend quietly becoming the largest buyer of oil flowing through a very expensive west-coast pipeline.

• Whispered conversations about whether they might invest in making sure even more of that oil reaches tidewater.

• The dumped ex suddenly remembering they care deeply about who Canada hangs out with.

Official line is “this is just trade.”
Unofficial vibe is “I’m seeing other people and you can’t stop me.”

No labels yet. No announcements. Just vibes, barrels, and one very bruised ego watching from the sidelines.

Status: It’s complicated.
Energy policy: Never just energy.

good news + bad news: Europe’s power vs Britain’s mood

Good news: Wind and solar have overtaken fossil fuels in Europe’s electricity mix. For the first time, clean power is winning on actual generation, not just targets or press releases. This is a long-anticipated tipping point in the clean power transition and real progress; the physics showed up and did the work.

Bad news: In the UK, newspaper editorials calling for a rollback of climate action now outnumber those supporting it, for the first time on record, according to Carbon Brief. As bills, delays, and delivery failures pile up, decarbonisation is being reframed not as infrastructure, but as an optional hardship Britain can’t afford.

Anarchist take: Winning the supply-side transition while losing public consent is not success; it’s how you turn an engineering achievement into a political liability.

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🏡 the UK Government (finally) released the Warm Homes Plan

After nearly five years of delays, consultations, and subsidy side-quests, the UK has finally published the Warm Homes Plan. It commits £15bn to upgrading up to five million homes, prioritising fuel-poor households with fully funded retrofits and offering a broader pathway via grants, cheap finance, and coordinated local delivery.

The real shift is philosophical: cold homes are treated as a systems failure, not exclusively a consumer choice problem. More to come on this, but I ran it through the first pass of an “anarchist scorecard.”

💚 Social Outcomes: 🟢 Strong Potential

The Plan explicitly targets fuel poverty and affordability. It should make life better for people through lower bills, less damp/mould, and better health.

🕹️ Technology Outcome: 🟡 Good, but with high delivery risk

The Plan backs whole-home upgrades, eases planning for heat pumps, supports heat networks, and quietly admits EPCs are broken. The biggest red flags are around delivery; the UK hasn’t covered itself in glory when it comes to retrofit.

💷 Economic Outcome: 🟡 Good

Clear jobs and investment story, with the explicit intent to unlock private finance. Slight risk this becomes another subsidy-and-finance machine.

🛡️ Security Outcome: 🔴 Weak, focused only demand-side

The Plan weakens the UK’s exposure to gas markets but leaves households structurally exposed to electricity prices that were never designed for mass electrified heat. You cannot electrify your way to energy security while leaving electricity itself insecure.

🌲 Environment Outcome: 🟢 Strong

Electrified heat + efficiency measures lower emissions relative to gas boilers (and we seem to have finally killed the household hydrogen delusion).

🏃🏼‍♀️ Temporal Outcome: 🟠 Neutral

The Plan targets very large deployment (”upgrades to 5 million homes” and 450k heat pumps/year by 2030). To achieve this, delivery must be ruthless. I love the idea, in theory, of pushing delivery onto experts within local authorities but there is wild inconsistency in capability and resources.

There is a lot of faith put into A New Agency, but I fear ambition is front-loaded, feasibility is back-loaded.

🇬🇧 Political Outcome: 🟠 Neutral

It feels like a Plan that’s worked very hard to be well-meaning and non-offensive, but I wish they had taken bigger swings: it tinkers around the edges to optimise things that largely already exist.

Anarchist verdict: The intent is decent, the physics are plausible, and the delivery risk is enormous. It has a whiff of the great British tradition of “announce targets, outsource delivery, hope.”

📚 anarchist read of the week

did a brilliant deep dive into Moxion Power, a California-based battery storage start-up.

They raised $110M from Amazon and Microsoft, landed a 600-unit order from Sunbelt Rentals, and hired 400 employees. It then suddenly collapsed, filing for bankruptcy within 22 months.

A gripping cautionary tale of the devastating consequences when product-market fit isn’t quite right. Read it at .

Energy Industry Insights from Avanza Energy

From $1.5 Billion Valuation to $201,980: When Investor Validation Isn't Market Validation

In August 2024, Moxion Power filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in Delaware with $201,980 remaining in its checking account.¹ Twenty-two months earlier, the Richmond, California-based battery storage startup had closed a $100 million Series B led by Tamarack Global, with Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, and equipment rental giant Sunbelt Rentals joining as strategic investors.² The company had delivered 400+ mobile battery units to customers, secured a multiyear partnership with the largest equipment rental company in North America, and positioned itself to displace diesel generators across construction, events, and film production.³…

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3 months ago · 1 like · Christopher Johnson

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“New York set bold climate targets, but ignored the economic and technical realities required to achieve them.”

This depressing statement came from Neel Brown, Managing Director of PPI and co-author of a recent report called “New York’s Climate Crossroads: Assuring Affordable Energy.”

[Props to Energy Bad Boys for their coverage, which caught my attention.]

This perfectly encapsulates the point of my last post: treating energy as a moral or political badge locks societies into bad policy. (From PPI’s report: “New York’s current energy strategy is driving up costs for families, constraining reliable supply, and jeopardizing the political viability of the state’s climate agenda.” Awkward.)

Whilst energy itself is not moral, energy policy has a moral obligation to protect ordinary people from avoidable system failure. Bad policies impose avoidable harm by pretending physical, economic, or temporal constraints do not exist.

To score policy, we need first principles.

Not targets. Not slogans. A manifesto (drawing inspiration from the original anarchist tradition, particularly Anselme Bellegarrigue).

We are not anti-state, anti-market, or anti-technology. We are anti-delusion.

the energy anarchist manifesto (v1.0)

This is v1.0 because changing your mind in response to evidence is not weakness; it is the minimum requirement for competence. Consistency is great for McDonald’s franchises; it’s anathema to critical thought.

Also, because this should be a group exercise. Share your thoughts, critiques, edits, and omissions in the comments and you might see them pop up in future versions.

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1. No Authority Above Physics

Traditional anarchists argued that no ruler holds legitimate authority over the individual. In energy, the equivalent truth is more brutal: no institution holds authority over physical reality.

Governments may set targets. Markets may set prices. Politicians may shout slogans. None of these can override thermodynamics, energy density, material limits, or time.

2. Energy Systems Are Inherited, Not Chosen

Anarchism rejects the fiction of consent under coercive systems. We reject the fiction of free choice under inherited infrastructure.

Societies do not select energy systems; they inherit them. Grids, pipelines, power stations, skills, and supply chains are the product of decades of accumulated decisions and sunk capital.

No society has ever voted its way out of an energy system overnight.

Every transition has been slow, additive, and shaped by materials, labour, and time. (See: Energiewende)

Policy that ignores this inheritance is not visionary; it is unserious.

3. Judge Energy by Function, Not Virtue

No energy source is morally pure.

Fossil fuels, renewables, nuclear, storage, and demand reduction all impose costs and create dependencies. They must be judged by what they deliver, what they displace, and what they lock in.

4. No Gods, No Masters, No Dogma

Anarchism is often interpreted as a demand for decentralisation. In energy anarchism, we reject architectural dogma.

Centralised systems offer scale, coordination, and reliability. Decentralised systems offer resilience, flexibility, and local optimisation. Both fail when treated as ideologies rather than tools.

Debate each approach on what it will deliver, and deploy each where it reduces risk and improves system performance. Centralisation and decentralisation are engineering choices, not theology.

5. Targets Are Theatre, Not Strategy

Classical anarchism rejects rule by decree. Energy anarchism rejects policy by proclamation.

Targets without credible pathways are not plans. They are assertions of authority over systems that do not recognise it. (cough*New York*cough)

Energy infrastructure does not adhere to the “shoot for the moon; even if you miss, you land upon the stars” bullshit. When ambition outruns infrastructure, the result is not progress: price shocks, rising costs, emergency interventions, and political backlash.

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[Sidebar: Kerry Clapp published a data-driven critique of the shifting climate targets. The comment section is wild, with great examples of dogmatic hand-waving alongside some very thoughtful commentary.]

A Pragmatic Approach To Energy

Settled Science? Or Shifting Goalposts in the Climate Debate?

Substack is overflowing with climate firestorms—catastrophists predicting imminent apocalypse on one side, skeptics waving it all away on the other. This essay isn’t here to join either tribe. I’m not trying to relitigate whether the mainstream climate narrative is broadly right or wrong (though, for the record, I have serious doubts about much of it…

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4 months ago · 93 likes · 142 comments · Kerry Clapp

6. Demand Is Not a Moral Failure

Modern societies consume large amounts of energy because they are complex, interconnected, and technologically intensive. Healthcare, food systems, transport, communications, and industry are energy-intensive by our own design.

Treating demand as a moral failing confuses consequence with cause.

Reducing demand may be necessary. Pretending it is painless or universally available is dishonest. Designing systems that fail people and then blaming them for consumption is worse.

This logic does not stop at national borders. Billions of people still live in energy poverty. Denying developing countries access to abundant, reliable energy in the name of virtue is not climate leadership; it is imposed stagnation.

Energy poverty is not a behavioural problem. It is a system failure.

7. Trade-offs Are the Work

Every energy decision involves trade-offs between cost, reliability, emissions, speed, land, materials, and risk.

Refusing to name these trade-offs pushes them onto the most vulnerable or into the future, and ultimately undermines public trust and confidence.

Ideological systems collapse trade-offs into betrayals. Energy anarchism treats trade-offs as the substance of policy, not an embarrassment to be hidden.

8. Resilience Is the Highest Form of Freedom

For Bellegarrigue, freedom meant autonomy from brittle authority. In energy systems, freedom means resilience.

A system that fails under stress is not liberating, no matter how virtuous its intent. A resilient system preserves agency, safety, security, and social stability.

If you want something to keep you up at night, read the UK’s National Preparedness Commission report. They’ve concluded that the UK is running a civilisation-scale energy system that cannot withstand disruption. The energy and industrial foundations lack redundancy, depth, and shock tolerance, leaving modern life fully exposed to cascading failure.

This is not a resilient system. It is a system that assumes nothing goes wrong.

9. Reject Purity Tests

Anarchism rejects absolute doctrines. Energy anarchism rejects purity tests.

Progress comes from optimisation across imperfect options, not from waiting for perfect solutions.

Hybrid systems, transitional technologies, and compromises are not signs of failure; they are how complex systems actually evolve.

10. Energy Is the Operating System of Civilisation

Energy is not a sector, a culture war, or a branding exercise.

It is the operating system on which healthcare, food, transport, industry, communication, and social order depend.

Breaking it for ideological satisfaction is reckless.

The goal is not to defend fossil fuels or sabotage decarbonisation. It is to stop pretending that energy is a moral costume drama instead of critical infrastructure.

In his pre-COP30 memo, Bill Gates argued that the climate community is too focused on near-term emissions goals, which is diverting resources from the most effective things we should be be doing to improve life:

“…we should measure success by our impact on human welfare more than our impact on the global temperature, and that our success relies on putting energy, health, and agriculture at the center of our strategies.”

On this, we agree. If energy policy continues to be treated as an extension of political identity, it will continue to fail at the one thing it exists to do: keep societies functioning while reducing harm.

I’m having an existential energy identity crisis, and I’m making it everyone’s problem.

same, sign me up

I’ve worked on the full energy stack. I’ve shilled for Canada’s oil sands (tar sands if you’re nasty), carbon capture, and shale gas drilling. I’ve agonised over market access, built out oil-by-rail, and looked at some truly delusional projects to get oil to a coast, any coast.

But I got tired. Attacked by many for oil loyalty; exhausted by peers pretending that climate change wasn’t real.

Eventually I found the debate exhausting enough that I withdrew from energy (and Canada).

I landed in the UK amidst an energy boom of sorts, where deregulation meant that essentially anyone could start an energy retail business. It was fucking madness.

Gas prices rose, which exposed the “fragility” (stupidity) of the system. As a newcomer and now-closeted energy nerd, I spent hours trying to understand what happened and being bewildered by the UK’s energy decisions.

I joined Octopus Energy post-energy crisis, which thrust me into the heart of the net zero movement. Renewables were championed and I was reminded of my genuine belief in the energy transition. I embraced the intricacies of the grid, the promises of flexibility, and the true potential of electrification.

Yet, I was unsettled. At their best, the net zero side were optimistic and inspirational. At their worst, they are wilfully and dangerously ignorant about how the “other side” of the system worked.

The same suspicion and hostility that exhausted me about my fossil fuel brethren existed in the electrification folk. Oh, molecules are molecules, electrons are electrons, and never the twain shall meet.

Energy policy is often performative. The ‘right’ performs loyalty to fossil fuels, the illusion of sovereignty, and “drill baby drill.” The ‘left’ performs loyalty to net zero targets, transitions, and moral urgency.

Both sides treat energy as a signal of virtue rather than what it actually is: a master variable of civilisation.

Energy lives upstream of politics, governed by physics, geography, infrastructure, capital, and time. Throughout history, our civilisations have not been constrained not by ideas or politics, but by how much energy we can capture, convert, and use.

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Treating energy as a political or moral badge creates three recurring failures:

• Encourages magical thinking. Fossil fuels are framed as enablers of growth without consequence; renewables are framed as easy replacements. Both ignore real constraints, which can delay real solutions and evoke public backlash.

• Rewards loyalty over competence. Energy systems always involve trade-offs, but political framing turns these trade-offs into moral binaries. Policy becomes an exercise in maintaining narrative discipline rather than solving problems.

• Locks policy into performative targets instead of functional outcomes. Offshoring emissions to hit net zero targets, shouted political slogans, and press releases with empty promises become substitutes for system performance.

Let’s face it: most political systems are currently oscillating between dangerously toxic and tragically ineffective. When systems wobble or break, decisions are rarely made from first principles. As Milton Friedman bluntly put it, “the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”

so, what’s the plan?

Energy policy is in a period of repeated crisis, and most of the ideas “lying around” are almost entirely tribal, performative, or fantastical.

Making sure common-sense energy policy is legible, written down, and emotionally survivable for normal people is strategically necessary.

We’re going to debate, analyse, and dissect policy using first principles, delivering insights and options that are endorsable.

We use real words (acronyms can kindly fuck off) so that the average person can understand what we’re talking about and why it matters to them.

We need to give the people something to pick up.

It’s weird that this is now anarchist behaviour, but you know what they say: anarchy is order.