what's 'good' energy policy?
seven tests every serious energy system should survive
Welcome to the anarchists who have joined since we launched our manifest (and delivered a micro-does of anarchy). (And thank you for the external validation.) Join them by subscribing here:
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:
Social: Make life easier, not test resilience.
Technology: Fetishise function over novelty.
Security: Reduce leverage over society.
Economic: Make it easy to follow the money (it stays close)
Environmental: Reduce harm over time
Temporal: Must be buildable (shocking we need to say this)
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.
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.)
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.