A farm in Tennessee…

…with a friendly view into the regenerative future of agriculture.

Photo by Bill Spindle

My wife Michele and I recently found ourselves down on the farm of long-time friends Bill and Miriam Keener in southeastern Tennessee, outside Chattanooga.

Our visit to Sequatchie Cove farm was a chance to learn more about what’s known as “regenerative agriculture,” a movement I’d first heard in mountainous Darjeeling almost three years ago when The Energy Adventure(r) was traveling India by rail.

During several days-long visits to tea gardens — the quaint term locals use to describe their sprawling plantations — we learned back then how growers like Chiabari, Ambootia, Tea Promoters India, and Nuxalbari were adopting new organic and regenerative farming techniques in their fields.

Darjeeling’s estates stretch back more than 150 years. The terraced fields produce some of the finest, most expensive tea in the world. Implementing these new agricultural techniques wasn’t easy for communities steeped in time-worn practices and knowledge passed from generation to generation. But they now consider these new practices, which in many ways simply seek to imitate natural processes that governed the land before modern farming, an existential necessity. 

And so it is with the Keeners at Sequatchie Cove, where four generations of them live and work. In many ways, it starts with the cow pie.

“That’s what you really want it to look like,” Bill told me as we paused in one of his pastures to examine a pile of manure. 

He toed his boot right in, smearing it around to point out some things.

”You can see it’s not really hard. That would mean it’s not well-digested. It’s not really loose, either, which would mean too much protein. You want just this kind of balance.

“This right here, that’s what’s feeding the soil.”

And in the process capturing carbon, holding it below ground in nutrient rich soil that is also able to soak up and hold huge volumes of water during heavy rain. In other words, healthy soil is both absorbing the carbon dioxide that’s heating the planet and providing flood protection, all while producing the nourishment we need.

That sums up the essence of our climate challenge now. We have to move decisively to address the underlying problem — greenhouse gas emissions — while at the same time protect ourselves against the intensifying fallout from future warming we’ve waited too long to avoid altogether.  

Since the early 1960s, driven by the need to feed a human population that was crossing the 3 billion mark on its way to the current 8 billion people on the planet, agriculture has transmogrified into a gigantic global industry.

Photo by Bill Spindle

Industrial agriculture’s effort to defuse the “population bomb” has become a threat to the earth’s ecosystem, a threat even to itself. Disasters, intensifying due to climate change, caused almost $4 trillion of crop and livestock losses globally over the last three decades, the equivalent of 5% of average agricultural output, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

And in the end, as much as half the food produced is simply wasted. It spoils between field to table in developing countries that lack refrigerated supply chains or simply gets thrown out at the end point in developed countries. The organic matter winds up in landfills putting off gasses that warm the planet as it decomposes.

“The global food industry has created and perfected a system of production that is ultimately value destroying. Measures designed to increase yields and profits now threaten both,” argues a white paper by Pollination Group, an investment and advisory outfit focused on reforming food production. “The same system that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of food poverty and malnutrition now stands as a future barrier to its own continued success.”

Grazing and the desirable result. Photos by Bill Spindle

We’ve spent most of our time here at The Energy Adventure(r) focused on emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. But the reality is that even if all fossil fuel use ended right now, emissions from food production alone would preclude meeting the greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets set out in the 2015 Paris Accord. Cows burp up methane. Rice paddies across Asia emit methane, too, a gas 80 times more potent in causing warming than carbon dioxide for the first 20 years. Crop fields release carbon when they’re tilled, and energy used to make fertilizers and grow feed for animals that are then consumed is monumental. 

For even some giant players in the world of industrial agriculture, the solution increasingly begins on farms and ranches, with the adoption of a regenerative approach to agriculture. This involves a broader approach to growing crops and livestock within, rather than apart from or even pitted against, the broader health of the ecosystem that allows us to live and thrive. It means increasing the ecological diversity in and around farms and ranches. This transforms them from net greenhouse gas emitters into carbon sponges that also provide food.   

Photo by Bill Spindle.

For a deeper dive into the potential for regenerative agriculture, check out at multi-part documentary film by journalist Peter Byck (click here). It traces a remarkable project Byck devised and carried out, in part with funding from McDonalds, to try to prove out the value regenerative farming as a climate solution. It’s a terrific look at farmers and farming today, both at the cutting edge of regenerative trends but also through the window of the deeply conservative values the industry is steeped in.

Bill and Miriam Keener didn’t come from a long line of farmers. That made it easier to think about new approaches to the work more than two decades ago. Sequatchie Cove Farm began on land along the ?? river purchased by Mariam’s parents.

Bill studied at the University of the South nearby before heading to Yale Divinity School for a masters, and he’s been known to wax philosophical. He and Miriam have turned the farm into a low-key center of learning, hosting arts, literature talks, performances and lectures over the years.

Miriam and Bill in their kitchen. Photo by Michele Bambling.

But regenerative farming, as practiced here, is just a collection of practical techniques to try to re-instill nature, and natural processes, back into agriculture. 

Many of these, Bill points out on our early autumn morning walk, were developed by farmers in New Zealand as they figured out how to offload much more of the work, and cost, of farming onto nature, simply by working with it rather than against. 

That means moving their small herds of cow and sheep in a tight group through pastures fertilized solely by manure and cut by nothing other than the grazing ruminants themselves. Crop fields aren’t tilled — which releases most of the carbon otherwise locked underground — and pesticides are replaced by the birds, beneficial bugs and resilient crops that flourish in and above the enriched soil. 

The tight herd grazing is accompanied by frequent rotations of the herd to concentrate their manure, which is then broken down by insects and microbes and reabsorbed into the soil to nourish the grasses to grow again.

“Not only is carbon from the air being stored, but the soil is also like a huge sponge for water,” said Bill, marching through the pasture. Insects jumped, flew about, scrambling to get out of our way. “When you have zero organic matter, the rain hits it and just drains right through.”

Photo by Bill Spindle

Cows and cattle, which the Keeners sell for beef, are a particularly sensitive subject in agriculture. They consume vastly more food energy than would be needed if we simply consumed the plant nutrition directly, and their burbs are a substantial global source of methane. The big-time beef business, the domain of multinational corporate giants, is among the most highly industrialized parts of food production. The world would be better off if we consumed far less of it for a plant-based diets and meat substitutes. 

But beef is the oil of agriculture. It’s not going away anytime soon. It’s too woven into the lives and livelihoods of too many people, a defining part of our identities for now. As with oil, consumption should drop steadily over time, the faster the better but recognizing it won’t happen overnight. Meanwhile, we have to mitigate fallout from its continued use, from methane emissions to deforestation. 

Kelsey Keener, 36, was raised on the farm and now runs it. He’s embraced the regenerative ethos. When we were visiting Sequatchie Cove, Kelsey was in Northern California to learn more about regenerative chicken raising practices. You can read about it in his dispatch from the trip here.

He’s expanding Sequatchie’s egg business, with the farm’s 5,000 or so hens already laying some 3,600 eggs each day. They go out to retailers and restaurants as far away as Nashville. Kelsey, also known to wax philosophical, he does his bit on social media at Sequatchie Cove on Instagram and other platforms.

But he, too, is blunt about the challenge ahead with food:

"This factory-mindset, this industrialized factory-mindset, tries to cram nature into that model," he told the digital publication Food as a Verb in this interesting profile of the farm. "We’re sacrificing really our entire planet ... The true cost of this food is the toll on our environment and planet. The toll on these horrifying conditions that animals are raised in. The toll on humans."

His instragram dispatches (@sequatchiecovefarm) and the farm’s blog are great places to learn more.

Photo by Bill Spindle

 

It’s a fossil fuel world

Even at Climate Week, as it turned out.

Demonstrators take the stage, uninvited. Photo by Bill Spindle.

We come again to the question of fossil fuels and their role in the energy transition. They’re hard to get away from, since they’re mostly the problem. But oil and gas companies keep trying.

That’s for obvious reasons — as transparent and, frankly, delusional, as these may be. It’s hard to come up with a winning business strategy that ends in the elimination of your main product — although hardly unprecedented in the annals of business history. 

As long as the fossil fuel industry keeps trying to avoid this reality, others will feel compelled to underscore it.

For decades now, oil, gas and coal executives have been on a rocky public relations journey when it comes to climate change. 

From roughly the early 1960s until, well, not all that long ago, outright denial of climate change was the message. This was despite plenty of internal research at the oil majors, especially Exxon Mobil, that pointed to the burning of fossil fuels as the cause. Oil and gas companies have shifted to acknowledging climate change, but arguing little can really be done to reduce fossil fuel use for decades to come without denying the world — especially the developing world — the energy it needs. 

Most recently many have turned to arguing that the problem is not fossil fuels, per se, but the emissions that stem from burning them. While literally true, this is disingenuous. The entire world — including every country in the Organization of Oil Producing Countries (yes, OPEC) — willingly agreed at the most recent United Nations’ climate conference in Dubai that fossil fuels are the problem.

The stark conclusion there was that the world needs to transition “away” from them. Yes, there were stipulations and caveats. But the bottom line was clear: oil, gas and coal are the heart of the problem. They need to go.

Can’t happen overnight. Might even need to keep using a bit for some purposes forever. That’s what net zero means. But pretty much gone is where they need to be by 2050, which means we must start weaning ourselves off them now. 

Mike Bloomberg’s event was the biggest draw. Photo by Bill Spindle.

So I was somewhat — though not totally — surprised earlier this month when my experience at New York’s Climate Week involved so much about the staying power of fossil fuels. 

On the first day, I participated in a panel discussion at the New York Climate Exchange as part of a “Climate Taboo” series. Panelists were asked to debate, or at least speak to, the question: Should fossil fuel companies be paid to keep their products in the ground? The next day, I was sitting drowsily at an afternoon New York Times event when several dozen anti-fossil fuel protestors leapt up and took over the stage as a prominent oil executive — Vicki Hollub, chief executive of Occidental Petroleum — was entering for a so-called “fireside chat,” the sort of earnest dialogue Climate Week specializes in.

David Gelles, the New York Times columnist presiding over the conference, and the conversation, abruptly turned Hollub around and ushered her off the stage. Demonstrators unfurled banners and shouted slogans lambasting Hollub, the fossil fuel industry and the New York Times for inviting this conversation with an oil gas executive. 

The demonstrators were noisy and stubborn, refusing to leave until police arrived and arrested them. Hollub was defiant. She insisted, after the auditorium had been cleared of protestors, attendees and even credentialed media other than the Times, that the interview with Gelles go on as part of the conference’s online broadcast.

What most of Climate Week consists of….Photo by Bill Spindle

For protestors and Hollub the dust-up was hardly unique. The incident was another calculated move in a high-stakes wrestling match between the fossil fuel industry and its foes. 

Hollub’s disrupted appearance was the defining moment of this year’s Climate Week for me — the only time when the real urgency and difficulty of the challenge before us burst to the fore, despite countless other mentions of the “climate crisis.”

I thank both the protestors and Hollub for that — as well as the New York Times and Gelles for bringing them together within earshot of each other, albeit unintentionally.  

That’s because I think this this sort of confrontation is still necessary, even desirable. Both sides are underscoring real issues that must be wrangled with for the energy transition accelerate — as it must. 

Take the question the panel I moderated took up: Pay fossil fuel companies NOT to sell their products? 

Seems outrageous, the answer an obvious, no? Both Alice Evatt and Stephen Gardiner raised a raft of concerns about doing this — from the extortionist nature of paying to avoid harm, which can seem a lot like extortion, to the vast sums of money that would be needed to make a difference. 

My moment in the spotlight with Alice Evatt and Stephen Gardiner. Photo by Helene Hetrick of the New York Climate Exchange.

Yet just months ago I was in Southeast Asia reporting on a deal orchestrated, backed and funded by climate activists and philanthropists that would do precisely this. The agreement, one of several like it under consideration, aims to close a coal plant on the island of Luzon, Philippines more than a decade early by paying the owners the full value of their power contract.

As a practical matter, it’s difficult to see the coal plant being shut down early without such an arrangement — as desirable and as necessary as that would be, and as much as its owners should by all rights be stuck with a stranded asset they bet wrong upon. 

So to some extent, some owners and operators of fossil fuel plants will have to paid off. This is going to be part of the solution, the greater goal being fewer emissions and a faster transition to clean energy rather than solely to punish fossil fuel investors. 

In the case of the deal in the Philippines, the owner is at least assuring the plant will close early. They could simply sell the facility to another company that might run it on coal to the end of its useful life.

That brings us to Hollub and Oxy (as Occidental is widely known).  In the audience-less, online interview, Gelles pressed hard. Hollub is the vanishingly rare oil and gas chief executive who talks about climate with urgency and has devised a corporate plan that acknowledges a change in their business is needed. 

For Oxy under Hollub, that means capturing carbon, handling it, using it and storing it — the emerging industry of “carbon management.”

To be sure, a whole lot of carbon management will be needed in the coming decades, maybe more, while the world transitions “away” from fossil fuels, as was agreed by all in Dubai. Here’s the trouble with Hollub, though: she says she and Oxy don’t believe in moving away from fossil fuels. Most of the carbon the company captures right now goes right back into declining oil wells, helping to push out more oil and prolong their life, a process known as “enhanced” recovery.

Asked pointedly when she thinks the world will stop using them, she told Gelles, “when we’ve used the last drop of oil and gas.” 

Now, I’m convinced Hollub doesn’t actually believe this. 

Like all oil and gas industry executives today, she lived through the “peak oil” panic of the 1990s. Conventional wisdom all but concluded the world’s reserves were nearly tapped out, only to witness a gusher of newfound oil that wild-catter ingenuity collectively dubbed “fracking” brought forth over the ensuing three decades. 

As a practical matter, there’s really no end to the amount of oil and gas that can be found, only a price that would make it too expensive to extract. “The stone age didn’t end because the world ran out of stones,” a Saudi oil minister once famously quipped. 

Hollub is signaling to Oxy’s investors that the company intends to eek every penny of profit from its oil and gas business for as long as it can, even while it tries to build a carbon management business on top of this. 

She knows investors would bail fast and the company’s stock would crash if she said anything other than this. Selling oil, gas, and even coal, remains profitable.

Falling share prices have been the fate of European oil and gas companies whose leaders signaled anything less than a full-throated, never-ending strategy of extracting and selling oil and gas. 

Innovation event! Photos by Bill Spindle

Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and owner of about one-third of Occidental, regularly sings Hollub’s praises, once said, “She’s doing exactly what I would do if I were her.”

I have no idea what he was specifically referring to, and no way to find out. But I’d bet he’s referring exactly to Hollub’s two-faceted strategy of pursuing fossil fuel profits while opening the door on new businesses that depend, to one degree or another, on their eventually being phased out.

Even if Hollub and other fossil fuel executives understand fossil fuel demand is all but certain to peak and eventually begin falling, there’s plenty of reason a shrinking market could prove lucrative if the supply of oil, gas and coal consistently shrinks more slowly than demand — providing pricing leverage to those with supply.

Riding those resources down profitably will be hard for investor-controlled companies to pull off in competition with much larger national oil companies such as Saudi Aramco. It finances a kingdom of 40 million people and can’t easily wind itself up and disappear after paying out all its investors.  

Hollub’s strategy is to build out a carbon management business with the profits from oil and gas sales. It’s not unlike how major publishers, like the New York Times, have deployed profits from a lucrative but ultimately doomed print newspaper business to fund a transition to a fully digital product. 

Of course, the New York Times’ legacy print business wasn’t the main driver of the climate crisis. Oxy’s legacy oil and gas industry is precisely that, along with its fossil fuel brethren. 

And that, ultimately, is where the protests come in. The disruption they cause, by design, can be disquieting. I found it jarring to discover the true identity of one person who sat at my table during a lunch discussion about the challenges of the climate crisis and energy transition. 

He introduced himself to the group as a musician, simply there to learn more about the climate crisis and what could be done about it. An hour or so later there he was, thrusting his fist and shouting anti-fossil fuel slogans as part of the demonstration.

He clearly wasn’t there just to learn. Two can play the disingenuity game.

My point, though, is that it must be played, and the sooner the better to get on with the transition. 

Always time for a tech voyage at Climate Week, where one rarely gets outside event spaces. Photo by Bill Spindle.

Asian Retrospective

Its energy transition is complicated. Here’s all of it in one place.

Singapore’s ArtScience Museum. Photo by Bill Spindle

Those of you who have been Energy Adventuring from the beginning (more than three years and 65 posts ago!) know keeping up with my writing was easier in the early days. Back then, most all of what I penned was here at the Energy Adventure(r).

These days, I do more writing outside of the walls of Substack, mostly at Cipher News. I post here when I get a chance and when my focus falls more on climate change fallout than climate solutions. 

Here today, I want to pull all of my work from a long swing of reporting I did through Asia during the first half of the year. This reporting has been supported by the Alicia Patterson Foundation, as well as Cipher, just as my earlier reporting in India was backed by the Council on Foreign Relations.

The stories linked below aren’t in chronological order, and they include earlier posts you may have already read here at the Energy Adventure(r). I’ve arranged them thematically, with a few thoughts and insights from the reporting included. Click the linked words to read the stories, where they originally appeared. 

Finally, looking ahead: our next Energy Adventure will be later this year/early next, in South America! More on that later. 

Floating solar panels in Osaka, Japan. Photo by Bill Spindle.

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As many of you already know, Asia is a diverse, dynamic collection of countries, peoples and economies that span the spectrum — from hands down the most technologically advanced global manufacturing economies to traditional, village-based agriculture — often taking place within the same national borders.

When it comes to the energy transition, all regions matter, but none more than this one. The bulk of energy demand growth to 2050 and likely beyond will come from Asia’s younger, rapidly developing economies — especially two potential powerhouses, India and Indonesia. A huge share of the tools we’ll deploy worldwide in our pursuit of net zero will come from the mines, processing facilities and factories of the region, particularly its dominant economy, China, but also in Northeast Asia — Japan and South Korea — and across Southeast Asia. Australia is even in the mix.

These include electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines and nuclear power — both fission and fusion.

Asia includes some of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitting countries, but it also remains well behind the U.S. and Europe on a per capita basis in terms of both emissions and energy consumption.  At the same time, many countries and communities in Asia are especially vulnerable to fallout from climate change, which is already wreaking havoc regularly across the region. 

A farmer on Mindanao, the Philippines.

How the countries of Asia decarbonize their economies — while at the same time continuing to grow them quickly to achieve the development goals their people deserve and desire — is the central challenge of the global energy transition. 

And all this will play out across a profoundly geopolitically sensitive landscape, where national security concerns continually shape events, views and actions. Oh, and it’s all intimately and intrinsically linked to some of the most sweeping and rapid technological advances in human history, from clean tech to artificial intelligence.

It will matter to everyone on the planet how these countries manage the transformation taking place within their borders — just as they will play an essential global role in propelling the world toward its decarbonization goals. 

I spent a big chunk of time — almost a month — in Australia. The only country that’s also a continent is emerging, fitfully, as a renewable energy powerhouse. The first and last dispatches from the trip looked at this issue, from the most positive take — South Australia’s remarkable progress with wind and solar power — to some recent setbacks: Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest’s eyebrow-raising pullback from the euphoria around hydrogen as a sort of clean energy jack of all trades. 

A hydrogen pilot project in Adelaide, Australia. Photo by Bill Spindle.

The gauzy, solution-to-all-things view of hydrogen may be fading, or at least morphing, with its first major contact with reality. But visits to two leading solar power centers — one in Sydney and one in Singapore — made clear that photovoltaic power generation is not only the workhorse of the energy transition today but has a good bit more lifting it can likely do. 

What was obvious once there: Australia, like much of Asia, is acutely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, everything from the slowly dying great barrier reef, to sea level rise to the catastrophic “black summer” of forest fires the nation experienced in 2019-2020. This story from Kangaroo Island off South Australia, and this one from the eastern city of Gold Coast show how two immigrants to the country are helping find ways to adapt. 

Heiri, a forest ranger, and Joerg, an engineer and architect, know full well, though, that there are limits to our ability to adapt and adjust. In poorer parts of Asia, and there are many, adapting to climate change will be even tougher.

Manila, the Philippines. Photo by Bill Spindle.

In the Philippines, I looked at an innovative insurance product, ‘parametric insurance,’ that could be one tool for chronically and radically under-insured communities.  

As Asia struggles for a path that brings both much needed development (read: more energy) and decarbonization (read: fewer emissions), Singapore aims to punch above its weight. That’s both a function of necessity — the crowded city state can’t accomplish this trick on its own — and a reprise of a role it’s long played in the region. 

Coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels and a mainstay of the region’s large economies, is Asia’s bugaboo. It hasn’t even begun figuring out how to stop building new plants —  from India and China to Vietnam, much less bring on the steep decline the world needs to happen to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. 

There are ideas for addressing this challenge — which is what this story is about — but it’s going to be a long slog.  

Bangkok. Photo by Bill Spindle

Some truly innovative and bold thinking will be needed within the region to avoid the sort of easily foreseeable ecological/climate disaster that a wave of European/American long ago brought on to themselves and Asians alike. 

We’ve seen some of that — ambition and a willingness to try new approaches — whether from Elon Musk, a man famous for them, or from Neville Michael, who’s not famous at all but in his own way has made a difference.

Musk’s story you know — though this small chapter in Australia, about a big battery and a billionaire-to-billionaire challenge, you may not have heard.

Michael’s contribution makes clear you don’t have to be a billionaire. What their two tales mean I wrote about here.

Kangaroo Island, Australia.

Coal to Hydrogen by way of Renewables

My last stops Down Under: a coal port, a solar center and an electrolyzer plant

Coal being loaded onto a ship in Newcastle, Australia’s largest coal port. Photo by Bill Spindle.

Apologies for the recent quiet here at the Energy Adventure(r). I’ve been busy getting out stories from my Asian travels during the first half of the year through some other channels. These include my first story (and photos!) published via the Associated Press, which is partnering with Cipher on climate coverage. 

I’ll post here soon pulling together all the links to stories on other platforms with some thoughts about Asia’s central importance in the global energy transition. 

For now, we wrap up the adventure Down Under by focusing on what’s turned out to be a leitmotif: the advance of renewables, especially solar, in Australia, the potential for so much more, and what to do with so much cheap energy. 

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Martin Green oversees an impressive solar power research laboratory at the University of New South Wales in Sydney — one fitting of a guy present at the creation of the modern solar industry, who, indeed, helped create it. 

His story is oft-told, but worth repeating. Prof. Green began in solar as Ph.D student in Canada way back in the 1970s, when the main applications for solar power were in space. Research had begun on those in the 1950s in the now legendary Bell Labs, a subsidiary of American Telephone & Telegraph.

I met Green at his cavernous, sunlit lab at the center of the campus. It is filled with sensors, gauges, meters and other equipment, everything a man often called the Godfather of the modern solar panel could ever need. 

When outer space was the focus, efficiency became the only goal in making solar panels. Capturing as much of the power of sunlight as possible with each square inch of panel was all that mattered. This was NASA in its heyday — costs no impediment. 

“By 1983 we’d set a world record for efficiency,” Green told me.

Dr. Martin Green. Photo by Bill Spindle

One of Green’s research tasks, initially, was determining the outer limits of efficiency, theoretically. How much of the energy in sunlight could the standard solar panel made of silicon, still the main material the industry is built upon, convert into electricity?

Green and his fellow researchers worked out that the absolute maximum that could be obtained using panels made of silicon was around 29%, meaning the material had the theoretical capacity to convert almost one-third of the energy in the sunlight hitting them into usable electricity. Back then panels were pushing 20% efficiency.

Starting with the oil crises of the 1970s, solar started looking like a possible alternative to coal and oil, with their volatile price swings and unsavory international entanglements.

Green at the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics, the research institute he oversees at New South Wales University in Sydney.

But here on earth costs mattered. The cost of solar was high.

That sent renewables into hibernation for the next three decades. But a few researchers kept plugging away, none more so than Green. He returned to his native Australia and began overseeing a graduate research program that set new records for the efficiency of silicon panels for decades.

But making the panels themselves was still costly. No one had really focused on how to make them as inexpensively as possible — largely a manufacturing challenge.

In the late 1990s, some of Green’s exchange students from China returned home and took up this challenge. 

One of his early students, an ambitious Chinese researcher named Shi Zengrong, set up a company called Suntech Power. His timing dovetailed perfectly with a fevered rush by U.S. investors to get in on the China manufacturing miracle just after the turn of the millenium. Goldman Sachs was an early investor. Suntech became the biggest technology initial public offering on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 2005. Green helped ring the opening bell when the company’s shares began trading. 

Still, another decade elapsed before the next big chapter of the solar success story unfolded. Even as efficiencies inched higher and manufacturing costs ratcheted lower, demand for solar panels remained pretty muted. Then Germany began to see solar as a way to clean up its energy system, by substituting for coal, while also replacing its controversial fleet of nuclear reactors. 

The resulting explosion of demand was met by Chinese manufacturers, to the still-painful recollection of the then dominant panel-makers in Germany, the U.S. and Japan. As Chinese factories churned out more and more panels in each of their increasing number of factories, the cost per panel plummeted. Panel prices fell off a cliff.

An overview of the lab. Photo by Bill Spindle.

Fast forward to just before the covid pandemic and the triple-witching effect of efficiency gains, manufacturing improvements and economies of scale pushed panel prices well below 10% of what they were back in 2014.

Prices rose during the covid-induced global supply chain foul-ups and subsequent rise in international trade tensions. But today they’re again falling sharply as Chinese leaders, concerned about their flagging economy, have encouraged production far beyond China’s own, very considerable, demand for panels. They haven’t limited themselves to solar either. They supercharged production of wind turbines, nuclear and batteries, as well.

That’s left renewables poised to make their most important contribution yet to a global energy transition, one that desperately needs accelerating if we’re to even partly avoid the worst fallout from global warming. 

Why?

When I began writing the Energy Adventure(r) more than three years ago, the state of the world’s transition was trifurcated, so to speak.

Developed countries like the U.S. were using about the same amount of energy year after. Slowish economic growth was matched, or even overtaken, by gains in energy efficiency. Developing countries — first China, then India and Southeast Asian upstarts Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia — were seeing energy growth, and accompanying greenhouse gas emissions, gallop ahead along with economic growth. Undeveloped countries — mainly in Africa but also Asia and Latin America — hadn’t really even started consuming modern energy.

That’s all changed. Africa has emerged. India is booming. 

Those developments were expected. The surprise is in the developed world: Suddenly energy demand has kicked back into growth mode. And not just makeup growth mode, like we saw during the recovery from the global financial crisis in 2008 and after the lifting of Covid lockdowns in 2022 and 2023. 

There’s a new structural ratcheting up in demand, coming from two sources. 

The first is a surge in construction of computer data centers, many of them for tech companies racing to develop artificial intelligence offerings. Since developing these offerings — puzzling out the algorhythms and training them on vast stores of data — also voraciously consumes power, demand for energy is likely to keep growing even after the construction phase of AI mania subsides.

The second is a push toward electrifying much of what we do with fossil fuels today: transporting ourselves (with electric vehicles instead of petrol and diesel powered cars and trucks), heating our homes and offices (electric heat pumps instead of gas and oil furnaces), and producing industrial products (like steel). 

International Energy Agency, mid-year electricity demand report.

How will all this new global demand be met? 

In the longer term, possibilities abound — atomic fusion (which I wrote about for Cipher here), advanced nuclear , geothermal energy from the center of the earth, and others. Some of those may well take the baton some time after 2035.

Meanwhile, the task is more about how to get more out of the renewable technologies up and running today with potential not even close to fully tapped.

One answer seemed to be emerging in Australia. My reporting began in South Australia, the lead horse on a continent emerging as a renewable energy powerhouse. Three out of four homes in the state have solar panels on their roofs. Two thirds of the state’s electricity already comes from wind and solar power, and the government aiming to make that 100% within a mere three years from now.

You can read more about all this in this story I wrote for Cipher.  

On one of my last days in Australia I found myself in the town of Wollongong, in an industrial enclave along the country’s east coast. The Port Kembla steel mill, one of the country’s largest, operates here, as it has for nearly a century. Still pock-marking the beach are the huge concrete spikes, dubbed “Dragon teeth,” placed here during World War II to stop any attempted invasion by Axis powers. Nearby sits a shipping mine that’s been dragged out from the depths, where it once was placed to sabotage any lurking German submarines, and surrounded by picnic tables.

Dragon teeth and a WWII era subsea mine in the beach in Wollongong. Photos by Bill Spindle.

I had come not to see the steel plant, but instead a new factory set up to make what are known as electrolyzers. These devices deploy electricity to separate water into oxygen and hydrogen, the latter of which can be used to do everything from storing clean electricity to making clean steel. South Australia is one of dozens of renewable-rich regions hoping to cash in on these new ways of utilizing clean wind and solar power that routinely far exceeds the state’s electricity demand much of each day. 

The steel plant in Port Kembla. Photo by Bill Spindle.

To do that, the world will need many more electrolyzers. Hysata is one of the companies aiming to provide those.

I met Paul Barrett, the company’s chief executive, on the beach and he took me through the plant. The factory, gleaming new to the eye, rests on a steel frame that was constructed some 70 years ago, Barrett told me. 

Paul Barrett, CEO of Hysata, and me inside the company’s electrolyzer plant.

Barrett is a venture capital guy who teamed up with an academic researcher at Wollongong University, Gerry Sweigers, to launch Hysata. The company is attempting to commercialize a unique electrolyzer design that Sweigers, an electrochemist who has been researching electrolyzers for decades, came up with in his laboratory.

The company, whose investors include venture capital arms of British energy giant BP and the Korean steelmaker POSCO, is focused on supplying its electrolyzers to make hydrogen for heavy industry and transportation.

Barrett, a Brit, was bullish about the prospects for his adopted country.

“There’s a huge opportunity for Australia to become an electro-state. The last 50 years of energy and geopolitics have been dominated by petro-states in the Middle East, Russia and parts of America that had these fossil fuel resources,” he told me. “In the same way, there’s an opportunity for Australia to leverage its amazing coastline and deserts that have off-the-charts wind and solar resources.”

An electric bus in Sydney. Photo by Bill Spindle.

As cities grow and waters rise…

A Gold Coast institute looks for opportunity amid the challenges.

Joerg Baumeister lives in Gold Coast, a city where land and water intermingle by design and intervention. More canals and waterways here than Venice, residents of the Australian city like to point out. 

Joerg also founded a research institute devoted to exploring the frontiers of this deliberate intertwining of people, place and water — here along Australia’s east coast and beyond. 

All this puts Joerg, Gold Coast and the SeaCities Lab at Griffith University on the cutting edge of perhaps the most inexorable impact of climate change: sea level rise.

I stopped for several days to have a look at the institute’s work and meet Joerg and his partner, Daniela Ottmann, who does amazing sustainability work of her own as professor of architecture and design at nearby Bond University.

In this post I’m focusing on the looming disaster I’ve looked at before in India — here in the Sundarbans and here in Chennai. 

It’s hard to overstate: Humanity is on a collision course with the oceans. The water is rising towards us at the same time as we are moving towards it.

Some cities facing the challenge of sea level rise. Venice, Dubai, Amsterdam, Tokyo. All photos: Bill Spindle

Humanity is congregating ever more in cities, especially in the developing world, as young people stream out of rural communities into urban centers. Often these cities lie along coastlines.

Many are growing so fast that the fresh water being pulled from below ground for drinking combined with the weight of buildings being erected above ground are causing the cities themselves to sink.

Meanwhile, warming temperatures, especially in north and south poles, are melting ice that has accrued over tens of millions of years. The water from this melting drains into the sea, raising sea levels around the world.

This is not a theoretical or future threat. It’s happening, now.  

“At more than a dozen tide gauges spanning from Texas to North Carolina, sea levels are at least 6 inches higher than they were in 2010 — a change similar to what occurred over the previous five decades,” the Washington Post noted recently in an investigation of rising sea levels in the southern United States. 

Half the coastal cities in China are experiencing rising sea levels in relation to their shores. As many as 12 million Chinese will be living below sea level by the end of the century, Nature magazine reported. 

In India, Karnataka state hosts some of the many coastal communities threatened by higher sea levels. Various government studies have concluded that a third to almost half of the state’s coastline has seen significant erosion, according to Scroll. 

Joerg Baumeister. Photo by Bill Spindle.

How fast sea levels rise is a matter of frenetic study and lots of debate. What’s certain is this: It will accelerate as long as concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere continue to rise; Significantly more sea level rise is already baked in, unavoidable; However high the seas reach, they will not be easily reversed, at least not on anything less than a geologic time scale measured in epochs.

We’ll have to deal with higher seas.

The question is how?

The first knee-jerk urban response to this threat is good old fight or flight: build barriers to keep the water out — like New Orleans or New York City — or simply abandon vulnerable homes or communities and retreat to higher ground.

But some 3 billion people live less than five meters above sea level, a million in Australia alone, according to the World Bank. Neither fight or flight will be enough to head off  what may amount to a civilizational threat over time.

Joerg Baumeister, SeaCities Lab

That’s where Joerg and the SeaCities Lab come in.

“We have to ask ourselves, ‘What are the opportunities of sea level rise?”’ he told me as we walked across Griffith’s sunny and relaxed campus to the institute’s offices and engineering lab.

To the time-worn responses, Joerg and his team of researchers and graduate students emphasize two more strategies: “accommodation” — welcoming the water into urban areas in a controlled way — and “advance,” pushing the city and its infrastructure out into the water, either floating upon or submerged below the waves, and sometimes both. 

You can see an overview of the lab’s work, along with a video here.

Some cities already have the right idea. Singapore has built a large, floating stage for public performances. Venice in Italy and most of the Netherlands have long found ways to leverage waterways for tourism and commerce.

Other cities — such as Jakarta, one of the most immediately threatened megacities in the world — are still fixated on building barriers and moving populations, despite the efforts of some of Joerg’s former students to, as they say, turn the tide. 

Krishnaveny Rishehan, a Sri Lankan SeaCities Lab graduate student, working on mangrove restoration. Photo by Bill Spindle

During my visit, Joerg explained several projects he and his students are working on now. One is a large, floating fish pen that could provide aquaculture options for cities, part of the lab’s effort to add to productive agricultural space and address food scarcity. The structure, to be made of recylable plastic, adapts easily to both gradual sea level rise and the more intense storms that climate change is bringing. 

Bigger than a football field, the inexpensive, flexible frame would float on the surface of open water during calm weather. During a storm it would sink down under the water to better withstand the turbulence.

Floating fish pen model. Photo by Bill Spindle

Some of his students are studying ways to move greenhouses and renewable energy infrastructure offshore, as well. 

One student in the lab the day I was there is working with the nearby city of Brisbane to design floating beds of mangrove plants that can be used to restore wetland areas in the city. Others are working on ways to build artificial coral reefs, a response to the threat of reefs — including Australia’s Great Barrier Reef just north of Gold Coast — slowly dying off as water temperatures rise.

Still others are looking into the feasibility of large-scale, floating offshore ports that could be used by multiple countries in various regions.

Photo by Bill Spindle