Why the renewable energy transition can’t work — and what can
The renewable energy transition cannot work. Not because of politics. Not because of cost. Because of physics.
Paperback original · £10.99 · also from Swift Press
‘The energy system that feeds, heats and transports eight billion people is being dismantled — with confidence, with public money, and with almost no scrutiny — before anything remotely adequate exists to replace it.’From The Energy Trap
Energy policy is being written by people with no training in physics or power systems, no experience of producing energy, and no grasp of the economics of finite resource extraction. The result is the most consequential gamble in industrial history — and almost nobody checking the arithmetic.
In this short, sharp book, Richard Lyon — electrical engineer, petroleum engineer and energy economist — strips the debate back to the physics. What he finds is alarming: the fossil fuels that built the modern world are running down, the proposed replacements can’t do the job, and the people in charge don’t understand the science well enough to realise.
But this is not a counsel of despair. There is a way through — if we stop wasting what remains on systems that can’t work, and start building the one that can.
Energy gradient, energy density, and areal power density: the rules no subsidy or press release can repeal. You’ll never read an energy headline the same way again.
Hydrocarbons aren’t just fuel — they’re the feedstock for the fertiliser, steel, cement and plastics that keep eight billion people alive. Why ‘electrify everything’ can’t replace the menu.
What reserve figures actually measure (accounting, not geology), and how to read what really remains.
Does a renewables-powered system return more energy than it consumes? Nobody has measured it. You’ll understand the energy cliff — and how little margin for error there is.
The three most popular reasons for believing none of this matters — the efficiency illusion, the hydrogen mirage, and the decoupling delusion — tested one by one against the physics.
Money is a claim on future energy — why printing more can’t fix less, and what that means for your pension, prices, and everything you own.
A practical programme for the managed descent: where the remaining inheritance should go, and how an informed public forces better choices than the ones being made in its name.
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