Australia swallows renewables, passionately

However a "passion for renewables" seems to encourage sloppy energy accounting. Australia uses a faulty measure of progress, "percent renewables", which gives exaggerated impressions of progress. These kinds of lapses are inexcusable from those responsible for securing the future of energy, so vital to global prosperity. We need more objective measures of progress. Time-to-target is suggested here.

The transition faces other serious issues. While electricity is a fine choice as the main medium for delivering and using clean energy, the transition will rely on development of many new methods for "electrifying everything". This is an enormous technological challenge, too often trivialised by common misunderstandings of success rates in turning novel laboratory ideas into full scale commercial industrial processes.

Also the transition is not just about energy. It's about the end of fossil fuels. Some 7% of fossil fuel consumption is for "non-combustion" applications like plastics, petrochemicals, fertilisers and the like. Their carbon content may not immediately appear as CO₂ in the atmosphere, which might allow some delay in developing alternative clean processes based on electricity. But when the time comes those developments will be exceptionally difficult.

Finally here are a couple of hints for those responsible for delivering a real energy transition. Keep your passions in check. Deploy instead the famous "irrational passion for dispassionate rationality". And never promise more than you can deliver.