David Mitchell

Rewiring the energy debate The electrotech perspective

Time to rethink the energy debate.

It is time to rethink the debate on the future of energy. This is a technology revolution driven by physics, economics and geopolitics, and galvanised by China.

electrotechrevolution.substack.com/p/rewiring-t...

So is “solar capture rate” another metric that’s been invented specifically to make solar look bad (like EROEI), but in reality is never looked at by solar project developers?

It’s bad 😥

I would assume you can get a transfer at night (I use Traveloka to book). Less traffic then than if you leave Sanur in the morning. (At a guess).

EVs Take 97.4% Share In Norway — Tesla Model Y Best Seller - CleanTechnica The April auto market saw plugin EVs take 97.4% share in Norway, up from 91.0% year on year. BEVs alone accounted for 97.0%

New EV registrations in Norway hit a staggering 97%.

cleantechnica.com/2025/05/09/e...

That’s a really good question. I suspect it doesn’t because driving more miles because it’s cheaper doesn’t really give you any benefit. You just spend more time in traffic.

They are certainly planning that. But it doesn’t mean it will happen. Kodak was planning to keep selling film. Also didn’t happen.

Switching oil demand to electric depresses the price of oil. That makes exploration/new development more financially risky. And so it goes.

Yes please.

Then you’d need another decade to get them to 10,000 kWh/pp/pa.

By 2050 there will be no child living in energy poverty (apologies to Bob Hawk).

Ends.

Global PV manufacturing capacity is roughly 1.1 TW. That’s 1.8 billion x 600W panels.

There are about 2 billion people living below 1000 kWh/pp/pa.

So at current manufacturing rates, that’s 13 months of production to lift everyone out of energy poverty. 3/n

The real question is, how much PV do we need and how long would it take to lift up all those low energy (and hence, low income) countries using PV. 2/n

Jesse Peltan on X has been showing this graph for a while. He says a 600W PV panel will provide 1000 kWh/year. This gets you to top of the low energy countries. I ran the numbers and this is right. 1/n

Thread: Each week I run a simulation of Australia’s main electricity grid using rescaled generation data to show that it can get very close to 100% renewable electricity with 24GW/120GWh of storage (5 hrs at av demand)
Results:
Last week: 100% RE
Last 168 weeks: 98.5% RE (1/n)