17 hours Ago By Michael Barnard
It’s the time of year when people publish retrospectives on the year and start thinking about the year ahead. As so much of my work ends up in CleanTechnica , I thought it would be useful to provide my retrospective here. On a purely personal note, I’ve been told over and over again this year by people I’ve had conversations with how much more optimistic about addressing climate change they are after talking with me.
They hear the broad suite of solutions we have, and they hear the progress we are making and it’s refreshing to them after the more typical doom scrolling that’s so endemic to people toiling in niches of the decarbonization space. That extended to the perhaps dozen people I mentored this year. I get asked regularly by people of multiple ages and backgrounds how they can pivot into a career which makes a positive climate difference.
I’ve been blessed by having excellent mentors over the years and giving back with what advice I can provide is something I consider a duty and a privilege. I published on that not long ago after yet another mentoring discussion, this one with a sciences graduate from Cambridge. While the mentoring and many things I do are pro bono, my professional life has been good this year as well.
Leveraging both my global technology career and my climate focus, I’m one of the founders and principals of Trace Intercept , a firm which leverages the latest in 3D capture, rendering and artificial intelligence technologies to assist infrastructure laden companies deal with maintaining the built environment in western countries, starting with water and roads in the UK. Digital twins are often built without clear business cases and using technologies which have in many cases diverged from one another — lidar and machine learning image recognition for example —, and with a new toolkit, much more rapid, much less expensive and much more focused digital twins can deliver clear business value quickly. Two repeat clients, a North American renewables developer and a European green infrastructure fund, engaged me to assist them as they considered pumped hydro investments.
I have a good set of contacts in the space due to my focus on grid storage globally, and a strong perspective on where energy is going. In one case, I assisted to get energy projections through 2060 for the British Isles aligned to a more reasonable scenario to help with business casing for investment. A well funded private individual engaged me to destruction test his idea of using the USA’s west coast hydroelectric dams as passive storage linked with HVDC instead as baseload.
The problem isn’t technological or economic, as that’s been being explored and acted upon in northern Europe for over a decade. In the USA it’s the water treaties, the complex stakeholder sets and lack of market mechanisms. As I always like to remind people, Nicholson’s Chinatown was about water rights for Los Angeles.
Sadly for the individual, I didn’t shoot holes in the idea which had been obsessing for months, but instead left him with a different set of work to do to try to realize it. A European compressed gas storage startup engaged me to destruction test the technology that they’d been working on for a couple of years. They and their team had spent years in offshore oil and gas in the North Sea providing deeply technical products, and thought they had an insight about how to leverage carbon dioxide and underground storage.
Sadly, in that case, I had to do a quick thermodynamics work up using the appropriate simplified ideal gas law equation and let them know that they were looking at a maximum of 13% round trip efficiency. They had another solution in the hopper that they’d been working on in parallel, and were able to devote their time to something that would be more productive. In March a roughly year long process came to fruition for me.
In 2023, a European contact had asked me to assist them to set up an EU-funded dialogue between EU and Canadian governmental, academic and oil and gas industry stakeholders. I reached out to contacts at major consultancies to bid on the effort, and Dunsky Energy + Climate Advisors won the initiative. I helped them with the preparation collateral and facilitated one of the sessions, a key in-person day in Calgary.
My efforts to bring Canada closer to Europe were rewarding professionally, intellectually and personally, and my knowledge of methane’s role in global warming and what we can do about it deepened substantially. I have ongoing engagements as an advisor as well. Flimax, the UK-based electric aviation startup, continues to chug along, surviving the couple of years post-SPAC cleantech debacle and origami evtol distraction, and continuing to refine the engineering.
A British Isles family fund focused on impact investing engaged me to provide ongoing insights to assist them to sharpen their targeted investments for the best outcomes, and I’m in the midst of working through strategy sessions with the team that they’ve assembled around one of those levers of change now. I learn a lot engaging over an extended period of time, as I did with Agora Energy Technologies around their carbon dioxide based redox flow battery. Then there were the dozen or so short, sharp expert consultation engagements.
I get asked to help major consultancies and venture capitalists to assess very specific topics in decarbonization fairly regularly. A major international venture capital firm engaged me to talk about US rail electrification. Bent Flyvbjerg’s — author of How Big Things Get Done — firm Oxford Global Projects engaged me to help them understand aspects of cement decarbonization.
A major consultancy needed some expert input on battery technologies. Last, and far from least, I’m now an expert witness in lawsuits being brought in California against Toyota on behalf of all of the purchasers of Toyota Mirais who sincerely thought they were buying reliable cars that were just like gas cars, and instead found that they couldn’t use them because they couldn’t get hydrogen in any remotely reliable way. One conversation I had this year was with a woman who had believed California and Toyota’s assertions about hydrogen cars and bought a Mirai to try to do the right thing.
She was at risk of losing her job because she needed to be able to drive between four locations every week and couldn’t. Writing a 27 page affidavit that included my findings on California’s deeply unreliable hydrogen refueling stations, how Toyota had no chance of not knowing that they were unreliable, as — among other things — it was paying for their maintenance, and yet was constantly making false advertising claims was a fun exploration. I’ll be testifying in the new year, hopefully getting some economic justice for the Californians who have been suffering.
I suspect it might not be the last expert witness engagement I get around hydrogen. On the publication front, the most common adjective I hear is prolific, and I hear it a lot. I write like Usain Bolt runs, which helps a lot, but it’s part of my process of understanding.
If I can’t express something in reasonably clear English, I don’t understand it myself and won’t remember it very well either. And, of course, I live by post-publication humiliation when I get things wrong, as I do occasionally. Certainly there are people who remain convinced I’m wrong about hydrogen for transportation, but that’s not because they find errors in my work, it’s because they refuse to accept economic and technical reality.
This year saw me engaged in three book projects. Joe Romm, giant in US clean energy, Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in the U.S.
Department of Energy during the Clinton administration and currently working with Michael Mann at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, asked me to do a technical review of the 20th anniversary update of his book The Hype About Hydrogen . That will be coming out in April of this year, so watch for it. In 2023, Bill Nagy asked me to contribute to a book on climate solutions.
The book, Proven Climate Solutions: Leading Voices on How To Accelerate Change , came out in June of this year and included contributions by a stellar list of authors including Dr. Audrey Lee, Mark Z. Jacobson, Dr.
Nancy Ryan, Dr. Robert Howarth. I was privileged and humbled to be among such luminaries.
Lesley O’Connor, global renewables executive through Mainstream Renewables and now a Director of the firm, asked me to assist her and a small team with the second edition of Super Grid Super Solution: A Handbook for Energy Independence and a Europe Free from Fossil Fuels . The team included Kevin O’Sullivan, editor and now environment editor of the Irish Times, Christian Kjaer, chair of currENT Europe, a trade association devoted to grid innovation, and Val Cummins, Chief Impact Officer and Portfolio Director of Emerald and Western Star Joint Ventures with EDF at Simply Blue Group. I learned a lot from this talented and passionate group, and once again was privileged and humbled to help bring the late Eddie O’Connor’s book with O’Sullivan up to date and back into the forefront of Europe’s transmission strategy discussions.
This year I added another major industry to my scenarios of decarbonization through 2100, cement . I wrote something like 44,000 words across over a dozen lengthy articles exploring every facet of the gray glue that binds the modern world together. Triggered by a couple of startups in the space, concrete day turned into concrete week, then month and then almost two months.
As I noted at the time, my dinner party conversation was especially scintillating during that period. (Obligatory Poe’s Law warning.) That effort led to a US engineering professor to reach out to ask for my collaboration in a peer-reviewed policy guidance paper for cement decarbonization.
I reviewed the final draft just before Christmas and it will be submitted to the journal in January for publication later next year. Reading the final draft made me remember how broad a net I’d cast in looking at how we were going to address the climate problem that is cement, from software tools to geopolymers to cross-laminated timber to the end of China’s infrastructure boom. Ocean geoengineering finally resurfaced for me.
I’d looked at it in the late 2010’s, but my chemistry and biology basics were too weak to get through it. I’ve upgraded those STEM skills, dusting off my year of pure science and math from before I pivoted to something that would put food on the table, and could do the subject justice. And this year was a target rich environment for assessments, with half a dozen startups being touted as magic bullets, featuring approaches as diverse as magnesium dioxide, green sand beaches and electrochemical carbon dioxide removal from and addition to seawater.
That led to me assisting a BC-based environmental lawyer with her presentation to Canada’s Senate hearings on the subject, and possibly a Senate presentation of my own in the new year. One of my assessments that received a great deal of attention this year was my portfolio review of the Bill Gates’ founded Breakthrough Energy Ventures. My findings were that a full 38% of companies by both count and value were dead ends, not passing technical due diligence or even close.
A full 10% more were just off base for a venture capital fund. Firms which picked alternative rocks to make cement from but didn’t acknowledge that 90% solid waste silicates made it nonviable, firms which proposed to put wind turbine wings on a loop of clotheslines repeating a couple of failures in the past when it was tried, firms which were all about hydrogen for energy, firms focused on nuclear fusion and more, the fund was littered with wasted investments that wouldn’t and couldn’t lead to climate solutions. The fund was founded by billionaires who didn’t accept that renewables were the breakthrough, that batteries were the breakthrough, that electric vehicles were the breakthrough and arrogantly instilled their biases into the investment theses of the fund.
The fund is staffed by frequently brilliant, deeply educated people who have a very cushy job confirming the biases of the billionaires, so don’t rock the boat and keep contrarian views — like mine — away from their boss’ eyes. I can’t tell you the number of people who have let me know that they’ve tried to get my material in front of Gates and the fund and bounced off the bubble. I had a lot of excellent conversations with investors as a result of that assessment, including a fun episode of Redefining Energy, the leading energy transition podcast hosted by Gerard Reid and Laurent Segalen.
That episode was the most downloaded of the year for them, providing quite a few of the 500,000 downloads they saw this year. Peer-review seems to be becoming a part of my life, although I’m not trying to have that happen. The editor in chief of the Journal of Sustainable Marketing reached out to request a piece on electrifying supply chains for competitive advantage .
That worked its way through the process and was published mid-year. Hydrogen of course reared its invisible, expensive and unreliable head. The biggest effort I put in was a series around hydrogen transportation failures, triggered by Canada’s municipal transit agencies actually selecting hydrogen buses to be part of their blended fleets.
A lot of that was related to a report jointly authored by Canadian transit ‘think’ tank CUTRIC and Deloitte for the city of Brampton. That report claimed that a blended fleet of 700 battery electric and 400 hydrogen buses was cheapest, but it was possibly the worst report of the type I’ve seen. On a $9 billion cost work up, the claim was that the blended fleet was $10 million — an immaterial 0.
1% — cheaper than the battery electric only fleet. Michael Raynor, formerly a managing director of sustainability and thought leadership for Deloitte and author of four books on innovation and strategy, and I identified $1.5 billion in errors in the report that allowed that false conclusion to be reached.
The smallest error I identified was $10 million by itself, which is why the 0.1% difference shouldn’t have been considered remotely relevant on a scenario assessment stretching through 2040. How could they get it so scandalously wrong? All fingers point to CUTRIC, which is riddled with conflicts of interest and incompetent to do reports like this.
Three Board members are from firms which get potentially hundreds of millions more if hydrogen buses are chosen, and two get nothing if only battery electric buses are chosen. Enbridge, Ballard Power and New Flyer have seats on the Board, pay the biggest membership fees and undoubtedly open their pocketbooks as needed for initiatives that favor them. Raynor and I have already met with councillors and the city manager of one of Canada’s major cities to try to help them find a way out of this mess.
Attendees at Canada’s annual transit conference tell me it was the talk of the day, and that many members of CUTRIC were going to yank their funding. Expect this house of cards to continue to crumble through 2024. As part of that series, I extended a list of hydrogen bus trials that Professor David Cebon, founder of the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight at Cambridge and co-founder of the Hydrogen Science Coalition, had put together to get a complete global list.
There are more abandoned trials than bus fleets with operating hydrogen buses. Then I did the same for hydrogen rail trials , where failure and abandonment abounds as well. And then I did the same for maritime hydrogen trials , which found yet more sinking of expensive dreams.
The most egregious greenwashing on open water was Norled’s sole operating hydrogen ferry, which has double the greenhouse gas emissions of the diesel ferry it replaced, 40 times the emissions of the battery electric ferry that operates on the same triangular route and ten times the fuel expense as the electric ferry. That led to a piece I hope will have a serious impact in 2025, a survey of much stiffened environmental truth in advertising laws around the world. My work up of hydrogen bus and ferry emissions based on peer-reviewed hydrogen global warming potential and leakage rates make it clear that it’s against the law in most countries to call hydrogen vehicles zero emissions or even low emissions.
Thankfully, I’ve also spent a considerable amount of time on real transportation solutions. My series with Rish Ghatikar, distinguished US energy leader, formerly Deputy Leader for Grid Integration Research at Berkeley Lab, Chief Research Officer at Shell Recharge Solutions and most recently Energy Fellow at General Motors, is a strategic assessment and action plan for US charging microgrids with solar and buffering batteries that will be increased incrementally in size over time as electric freight truck penetration grows. It combines a future proof strategy with enabling charging to start soon, and is targeted at logistics giants like Amazon, Proviso and Walmart, major truck stop chains like Loves and Pilot, and major engineering, procurement and construction firms focused on those customers like TLM.
The series is being published in bi-weekly increments through early January, and then will be assembled into a report under the CleanTechnica banner early in the new year. The latest article, on the use of intelligent incrementalism to overcome key hurdles identified in earlier articles, just dropped. It’s been a good year for impactful presentations as well.
Most recently, I was in Brussels at the book launch for Supergrid Super Solutions , speaking alongside an EU energy minister, a member of European Parliament and other luminaries on the subject of the absolute necessity for Europe to build a mesh direct current supergrid rapidly to remain competitive. My prepared remarks were on how China was absolutely dominating this space globally, how rapidly it was moving and how Europe was being left behind. During the discussion, a key topic was how Europe was going to pay for the transmission it needed, and my contribution was the modest proposal that they stop wasting absurd amounts of money on hydrogen for energy and carbon capture and storage.
This year also saw an extended seminar series with Indian electrical utility professionals through the auspices of the India Smart Grid Forum. They engaged me to deliver a plenary session at the annual India Smart Utility Week conference of my short list of climate actions that will work , and then follow up with a seminar on each of the actions. It was excellent to spend a lot more time understanding the major economy of India and its challenges and opportunities in decarbonization.
It’s assisted me to now include comparisons of trajectories of Europe, the United States, China and India in multiple assessments, bringing much greater clarity to the transition. The Green Builder Sustainability Symposium hosted me as well at their annual conference. Their model is a small number of high impact virtual presentations over two half days, something that emerged in the long-running series during COVID and is staying.
I spoke between Jon Creyts, the CEO filling Amory Lovin’s big boots at RMI, and Jeremy Rifkin, author of the deeply unfortunate The Hydrogen Economy and guide to politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. Regular readers might remember that I provided a 14,000 word assessment of RMI’s hydrogen efforts and some strong strategic guidance on how they could get on the right path in that domain again in January of 2024. Amusingly, Creyts’ staff asked the conference organizers if I was going to lay into RMI again in my presentation, but my prepared remarks were on Our Low Carbon Future , a vision of what the clean, electrically powered world of tomorrow will look like.
It’s worth noting the reach I’ve achieved this year. On LinkedIn , my posts have been read 2.7 million times by 560,000 professionals.
Also on LinkedIn, over 27,000 professionals now follow me, with the top categories being founders, chief executive officers and managing directors. My podcast, Redefining Energy – Tech saw 50,000 downloads this year. There’s no easy way to say how many times my articles on CleanTechnica have been read, but I wrote about 200 of them and each is read by thousands of people, sometimes tens of thousands, so having reached a million reads through this channel is in the right ballpark.
Then there are the multiple conversations I had over the year with investors who told me I’d saved them from being in bad investments just through my publications. I’m now a key step in due diligence for many firms it seems, in that if they are considering a startup or technology, they see if I published on it. One investor stepped away from a Board position in a firm because he realized the firm was going to end up in the SEC’s crosshairs after following up on some of the things I’d pointed out.
Another was in the middle of due diligence on a firm for the greenlight committee in part because I hadn’t published my opinion of it, which I shared with them to their dismay. My goal is to have the trillions that we need to spend to get to our low carbon future spent more wisely and quickly, so I don’t mind — much — that big investment funds are getting pro bono guidance. 2024 was the year when I finally embraced the title climate futurist.
People have been referring to me that way for a few years, and I always resisted it, feeling it was pretentious. But given that I keep doing decades-long scenarios of major climate change problem areas and levers, I am regularly consulted on what the future is bringing and my predictions track record is surprisingly good, I finally had to get over my innate Canadianness and put it on my virtual business cards and presentations. For those who read this far, my dance card for 2025 isn’t full.
The amazing breadth of things I was able to do this year were because people reached out and asked me to collaborate with them. If you are working on something impactful, reach out. Perhaps I can help.
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