micro-dose of anarchy [week 1]
The one where a maple syrup superpower gets into a situationship, renewables are both winners and losers, and UK finally decides home is where the heat is.
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.
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.
🏡 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
Christopher Johnson 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.
