Once in a while a great presentation of key arguments for the renewable energy transition comes along. This is one of them and well worth reading. It isn’t that these arguments haven’t been put forward: Dave Roberts’ Volts podcast is one terrific and comprehensive source on the subject of the renewable energy transition, and—not surprising, given the title—so is Chris Nedler’s The Energy Transition.
But recently, the Substack The Electrotech Revolution published an excellent apology for the energy transition, titled “Rewiring the energy debate: The electrotech perspective,” authored by Daan Walter, Sam Butler-Sloss, and Kingsmill Bond, published on May 28, 2025. This is well worth the read, with the authors reframing the renewable energy transition independent of climate change. The authors certainly don’t reject the seriousness of climate change—and hence the need to drastically reduce GHG emissions—but argue that the economic arguments behind the transition to renewable energy are themselves so strong that there’s little need to confuse the issue with climate change.
Yeah, I know that this sounds a bit blasphemous, but they aren’t wrong. Climate change continues to be an area in dispute, although not because there’s any significant doubt about the science of it, but rather from the pushback of legacy energy producers—the very same “villains” of climate action denial and delay. Fossil fuel companies are now in the reactionary position of trying to save their businesses, which is the finding, extracting, refining, transporting, and selling of fossil fuels toward various and important ends, including electricity generation, transportation, industrial processes, and building heating/cooling, to name the biggest categories of human energy use that also happens to be the biggest contributing applications of combustion contributing to global warming.
But tying the renewable energy transition exclusively to climate change may be the weaker connection. As the authors of the Substack referenced above say, “[t]he debate on the future of energy is a mess”:
Ask a dozen pundits about the energy transition and you’ll hear a familiar chorus of gloom: electric vehicles stall, net-zero targets unravel, emissions climb, and the fossil fuel industry is emboldened. The world, we’re told, is failing to decarbonize. Energy transition? What transition? With Trump back in the White House and geopolitics pushing climate change further down the agenda, surely the whole project is doomed.
The point of the authors’ argument is that fossil fuel has become less attractive for energy production relative to renewables, and especially from the economic perspective. They throw in the bonus point that those “clean” energy projects such as carbon capture and sequestration, and biofuel, and hydrogen are ineffective, expensive, and largely a mechanism to keep fossil fuel in the game, so lumping everything under “clean” energy works to undermine the real economic success stories of renewables, i.e., solar, wind, and batteries.
Renewable energy versus “clean” come down to whether net-zero emissions is the particular goal of the energy transition or the happy by-product. The authors see the current energy debate a fight between “fossil gradualists” and “net-zero puritans.” The fossil gradualists insist that legacy fossil fuel energy remains essential, and that any moving away from fossil fuels will be a painful and slow process, at best. Carbon emission reduction—eradication, even—is the net-zero puritans’ zealous aim, and the energy transition is about addressing pollution. Neither of these positions are wrong, except at the extremes. We—even China with its massive additions of renewable energy supplies—are hardly in the position today to ignore the long-established fossil fuel energy that has built our current world, and there’s certainly likely pain in any shifting away, although in a just world that pain should belong to the corporate ownership class that’s benefitted so long from their oily hegemony and their decades-long efforts to deny and delay climate change actions. The need to rapidly and radically reduce greenhouse gases is spot-on, but too often there’s insistence of governmental policies that compel, desiring “action not so much out of opportunity, but out of necessity.” Both extremes fall into a trap, the authors argue:
While these camps may appear diametrically opposed, their world views are more aligned than either may like to admit. Both assume that today’s energy transition is driven mainly by climate concerns and policy. Both seem to implicitly assume that fossil fuels are part of the ‘natural’ state of the economy—something only painstaking intervention can steer us away from. And both tend to treat the economic growth, energy security, and industrial opportunity emerging from the transition as side effects, rather than as central forces of change.
When I read the phrase “Both seem to implicitly assume that fossil fuels are part of the ‘natural’ state of the economy,” I realized the important truth in it. Many in the renewable energy world see their struggle as one between the old order and the new, but the fact is the best perspective is that of superior economic opportunity, not ideological allegiances.
Don’t get me wrong. Moving toward net-zero—a journey we’re likely to also be on for many years, step-by step by step right down to that last half-step fractioned by some continuing usefulness of oil—is the right direction, but emphasizing climate benefits may inadvertently serve to keep fossil fuels as an active player in the game (and, obviously, with Trump’s orientation, a still quite powerful player), even while it is the economic benefits of renewables that actually trumps (sorry) the hand dealt.
The authors of this Substack spend a lot of words and charts making the argument that renewable energy is a market disruptor, with “electrotech” adoption (the authors’ preferred term rather than “clean” or “renewable” tech, just to drive home their point), being where the motivating drive comes from “forces far deeper than climate action.”
Both extremes, caught up in direct conflict of government policy to move us away from fossil fuels to reduce carbon emissions versus fossil fuels’ current central role in our economy, fail to understand what’s actually going on, the authors argue, as follows:
As a result, neither view has much explanatory power for what’s happening in energy right now. Neither has the logic to make sense of the scale or speed of the current shift—especially in places they never expected to lead. They didn’t anticipate China’s rise as a clean energy powerhouse, nor did they foresee how fast technologies like batteries, solar, and EVs would become cheap and competitive.
To make sense of what’s happening in energy today, we need a new lens. We propose a third way: the electrotech revolution. This sees the transition not as swapping dirty fuels for cleaner ones, but as building a fundamentally better and more efficient energy system organized around electricity. This is being realized through the deployment of electrotech—a new wave of electricity-based technologies including solar, wind, batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps, smart grids, and digital controls. On the supply side, solar and wind are replacing fossil generation. On the demand side, transport, buildings, and industry are electrifying. And in between, batteries and digital systems tie it all together, enabling real-time coordination, flexibility, and control.
This change is unfolding in a cascade of classic technology disruptions, of the kind we’ve seen play out many times before. Like past shifts in computing, telecoms, and transport, change is being driven not by top-down mandates or incumbents, but by bottom-up innovation, market momentum, and prescient governments investing in the next generation of technologies. This view foresees rapid, disruptive change ahead as electrotech adoption is driven by forces far deeper than just climate action.
Like every other manifesto, the details and subtleties and challenges can be understated, and this manifesto comes across a bit pollyannish, despite the force of argument and plethora of charts. Of course, the particular Substack post is just that, a post, and not a comprehensive manual, but the basic thesis, which is that framing the energy transition as an electrotech one apart from a cleantech one, highlights the entrenched fossil fuel corporations’ active bullshit arguments of biomass, hydrogen, and CCS schemes and properly separates such greenwashing tricks from the sort of renewable energy actions we are already able to take today.
This Substack’s headings outline, along with the chart titles within the headings, a compelling tale in their own right:
The problem with today’s energy debate
Chart: “The electrotech revolution”
Electrotech, not cleantech
Electrotech predates climate action
Chart: “We’ve been electrifying for over a century”
Chart: “Electrotech is closely linked to digital tech”
The drivers of electrotech run deep
The physics of change
Chart: “Electrotech is 3x more efficient than incumbent fossil tech”
The economics of change
Chart: “Electrotech beats fossil fuels on cost”
The geopolitics of change
Chart: Renewables are available to all”
These are drivers of electrotech, not cleantech”
The implications will go further and come faster
Chart: Incumbents have underestimated the speed of change”
Chart: S-curve-as-usual, not business-as-usual”
The new electro world order
Chart: “Electrotech is big enough to disrupt the whole energy system”
Sure, maybe I should have simply re-posted this Substack, or even more simply, just the link. But if you’ve made it this far down my post, you’re interested in the argument.
Go read the original “manifesto.”