‘It’s Energy sir, But Not As We Know It.”

And it’s really upsetting some folks

I spend quite a bit of time each month looking for stories for the Fully Charged Show ‘Almost Breaking News’ episodes.

It can be fascinating and depressing, I will come across the most ignorant and ill informed opinion pieces by hate filled British journalists, and then incredibly optimistic reports from around the world of new technologies, energy storage systems, transport ideas that are full of hope and innovation.

I recently met a delightful engineer from India. We were talking about the uptake of electric mopeds and scooters in his home country. The latest estimate from Bloomberg is that there are now over 280 million electric scooters and mopeds in regular use in Asian countries.

The small battery swap stations on street corners have proliferated, it’s become common practice to stop at such a station, slip out the battery from under the seat, pop it in the charger and take out a freshly charged one. This is happening literally millions of times a day, it’s become normal.

A scooter battery swap station in Taiwan

The other thing that’s become normal is these 280 million people no longer burn toxic liquid fuel. This has resulted in the first drop in global oil demand that isn’t connected to a war, an economic crisis or a pandemic.

It’s entirely down to people not buying the stuff any more.

I also met folks from a start up called OX Delivers who have built lightweight electric trucks that are being used in Rwanda, charged off solar, no need to import toxic diesel and of course much, much cheaper to run. Doers a story like this make it into Britain’s foriegn owned and increasingly reactionary traditional media? No, of course not

I also met folks from Space Solar who have already proven that solar panels in high orbit can transmit power back to earth 24/7. It’s always sunny up there. Although this UK based start up are yet to actually send anything into space, the technology has recently been proven to work. In February of this year the first power from solar collectors was successfully beamed back to earth.

The wireless power transfer was achieved by the Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment (MAPLE), an array of flexible and lightweight microwave power transmitters, which is one of the three instruments carried by the Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1) launched last year.

Now, I am not claiming this slightly crazy experiment is guaranteed to work, but if you were to cast your mind back to 2010 when multiple pundits, know alls and super confident shouty men all claimed that electric cars were a short term fad and the future was hydrogen, then it’s maybe worth keeping an open mind.

Micro start ups and crazy concepts, many many little steps. This stuff is happening all around the world.

Another interesting example is Base Power in Texas. Regular readers may know I have batteries in my house, but they are, without question, expensive things to buy and install.

Base power is going around installing impressively big batteries at people’s houses for the cost of installation, about $2000.

They then run the system remotely, charging the battery when electricity is cheap, and using that power when electricity is expensive. However, it also means that when there’s a power outage in Texas, which is apparently quite common, the house will have power for a couple of days.

As most American homes are the highest consumers of electrcity on the planet, that’s pretty impressive.

And as we have all been told countless thousands of times by the fossil fuel industry, their paid lobbyists, we cannot operate on 100% renewables. It’s impossible they tell us. End of discussion.

Well here is a short list of countries who now produce more than 99.7% of their electricity using geothermal, hydro, solar, or wind power. This isn’t one special sunny day, or a windy week, this is 365 days a year.

Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As I said, it’s a short list and I know some fossil shill will be upset by this and try and point out that these are very specific countries with unique geography etc etc and while that is of course true, it does not mean every nation on earth can’t do the same.

The more I understand about the challenge to stop burning stuff, the more enormous the task appears.

But alternatives are appearing every day and there are multiple tiny examples of hope around the world, some of which I’ve listed here.

I still believe there could be a version of the future that is better than today.

Yes, the manipulative fossil extractors are spending billions spreading their lies, but against all the odds every electric car, van, bus, truck taking to our roads reduces demand for their product.

Even with one million EVs on the roads of the UK, we still have around 31 million combustion cars and a few million diesel busses, trucks and vans burning their way through gigatons of toxic liquid fuel.

It’s going to take years before there is a really serious drop in sales around the world But I worry about the response from the biggest global industry we have created.

They have known this is a problem since the 1960’s and there is now so much evidence that the scum, sorry, highly paid people at the top of these companies don’t care about anything except profits.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts 2027 as peak demand year and a slow decline in demand around the world after that.

Just to put all this in context, today, and every day for the next 3 years, we will consume between 102 and 110 million barrels of oil a day, a little over half of that being burned in ground transport.

And just to put 102 million barrels a day, that’s 16 billion litres of oil a day. That makes me dizzy, but it also galvanises me to continue to find stories, signs, distant hopes, speculative technology or crazy experiments that might turn out to be good, anything that give us hope that we can slow down our addiction to burning oil.