15 Years of Progress?

A long, slow battle for the future.

I’m not going to lie, battling the endless supply of negative attitudes to the energy and transport transition is a bit exhausting. Through the work I have done on The Fully Charged Show, I will have been at it for 15 years this coming June.

In that time, counter to many people’s weirdly distorted world view, we have seen truly remarkable developments. I just want to go over some of them, partly to show that things have changed, and partly to reassure myself that all that effort hasn’t been totally in vain.

Back in 2010 when I released the first episode of the Fully Charged Show on YouTube, renewables accounted for around 10% of global electricity generation. Not 10% of global energy consumption, energy consumption was then and still is mainly supplied by burning fossil fuel.

But electricity is obviously very tied to electric vehicles, so cleaning up our generating capacity is critical. In 2023, the most recent year where reliable figures are available, renewables accounted for over 30% of all the electricity consumed on earth. The majority of that production replaced coal burning, specifically in China.

The fact that 30% of global generation does not need to burn fuel has had a truly impressive impact, so now when people say (and believe me they still do) ‘your electric car is powered by burning coal’ it’s just a boring and dated comment. Electricity has got much cleaner in the past 15 years, simple fact.

And while on the subject of electric cars, back in 2010, there were approximately 17,000 electric cars on the roads worldwide.

By any measure, that is a very, very low number when put alongside the 1.45 billion cars globally, and anyone sensible back in 2010 would have thought to themselves, ‘this is never going to catch on, no one is ever going to drive an electric car.’

In 2023, the most recent year where reliable figures are available, there are now 40 million electric cars on the road, and nearly 400 million electric mopeds, scooters and rickshaws in China, India, and southeast Asia.

There are also over 700,000 electric busses in regular use around the world.

What this has meant is that for the first time since oil blasted out of the Spindletop oil well in Beaumont Texas in 1901, the amount of fossil fuel sold has dropped by a very modest 1%. More on this in a moment.

There is, however, an important aspect to this growing fleet of battery electric vehicles. Eventually we will use these batteries on wheels to their full potential, but just suppose that today we had developed a fully functioning vehicle to home and grid system that could link all those electric cars to a smart grid.

Technology that can charge and also take power from the battery according to demand, the total energy storage we would have on tap is currently around 2,400 gigawatt hours. And that’s just from 40 million vehicles.

If we are stupid enough to replace all the fossil burning machines we use today and simply replace them with battery electric versions, we would have a global energy store in excess of 1,475,000 gigawatt hours.

To put that figure into some sort of context, that’s enough electricity to run the entire UK, in the dark, with no wind, for just over 5 months. Now obviously that’s stupid and no one is going to use the power like that, but we are talking substantial amounts of storage lying around doing nothing. But not for long.

Projects to make full use of electric vehicle batteries are already in use and being rapidly developed. Check out electric school busses in the USA for a simple example.

So those are all positives, and showing that there is hope for existence beyond fossil fuels. Not today, not by 2030, but in the next 30 to 40 years,w e are going to see these big oil companies shrink and start to lose their incredible political and economic power.

But.

We’ve also seen an entirely predictable backlash with huge support from very loud voices who drown out much of the positive news. People puce with fury about a wretched wind turbine or a solitary solar panel. People who have managed to twist together their resentment about the way their country is being governed with an entirely apolitical technology.

This is the hardest thing to counter.

Burning coal isn’t right wing, installing a wind turbine isn’t left wing.

Drilling for oil isn’t right wing, installing a solar farm isn’t left wing.

Driving a diesel car isn’t right wing, driving an electric car isn’t left wing.

Building a nuclear power station isn’t right wing, building a hydro electric plant isn’t left wing.

It’s just technology.

However, one pressure group, backed by a very wealthy industry run by very well educated and intelligent people know that technology isn’t political, but they are very happy to generously fund one side of global political opinion, and thereby skew the whole debate.

A glance at the large oil and gas multi nationals who fund directly or indirectly through third parties the following political organisations gives a clue to their approach.

The Conservative and Reform party in the UK, the AFD in Germany, the Front National in France, Party for Freedom in Netherlands, The Brothers of Italy, the Republican party in the USA, the People's Party of Canada, Liberal Party in Australia and the New Zealand National Party.

In some countries, notably Canada, these donations are very modest, whereas in others we are talking millions, if not billions of dollars in support. But that’s just the money, of course the money buys political influence, and this can be seen across the political spectrum.

The recently elected Labour party in the UK have been hopelessly ill equipped to resist the siren call of the massive, unelected and hyper powerful fossil lobby. The tragic absurdity of ‘carbon capture and storage’ and ‘the hydrogen economy’ are 100% inventions of the fossil fuel industry. They know neither of these technologies have a hope in hell of working, but they will delay the transition away from us all burning their product.

They will keep coming up with other lies, con jobs and half baked notions of how we ‘reduce our individual carbon footprint,’ which they have manipulated with stunning dexterity.

You see, it’s our fault, not theirs, that we are trapped in a fossil fuel economy. We are made to feel guilty for having no choice but to rely on their products. It’s genius.

And as mentioned previously, for the first time since they were formed, the big oil companies are seeing a minuscule drop in demand for their product. Not because of war, economic instability or pandemic, but because millions of people are using a technology that doesn’t need to burn fuel.

This, dear readers, is a genuine existential threat to the richest and most powerful industry in human history, and these chaps are not going to wander off into the economic and political wilderness to finally expire.

They are going to fight, they will be relentless and they have the funding to keep the lies, fiddles, misinformation and obfuscation machines running 24/7.

Sadly, they are winning at the moment. Despite the unstoppable rise in the use of renewables, storage and electric vehicles around the world, the oil and gas monolith will fight to hold back development both legally and utterly dishonestly, just like the current CCS and hydrogen swindle.

I know I, and the amazing team behind the Fully Charged Show and the Everything Electric Show will carry on illuminating the growing superiority of technologies that don’t require us to burn a finite product.

We will struggle to remain politically neutral just like the technology, but on that score, we are fighting a losing battle. The powerful combatant we are facing has no such qualms and will fund the maddest, most hate filled weirdos we’ve seen in a couple of generations