The Scandal at The Heart of The Energy Transition | Ep275: Jan Rosenow

Michael Liebreich
I find it scandalous that you actually look at the economy, that serious politicians, that energy ministers will look at the economy and don't know what powers it. Measuring the energy use of our economy in primary energy units is like measuring nutrition by how many acres are used in agriculture. And yet that's what we're doing, don't you find it just astonishing?

Jan Rosenow
It is. And when I posted the Sankey diagram from Lawrence Livermore Lab at some point, someone in the European Commission, very senior, that person asked their staff, why has no one told me about this? That person wasn't aware that we have these huge losses, this huge amount of rejected energy. And that's someone who is running an organisation that is in charge of regulating the energy system, which to me just says we haven't had enough conversation about this very topic.

ML
Hello, I'm Michael Liebreich and this is Cleaning Up. Energy discussions can seem to be dominated by engineers presenting technical solutions, politicians talking in generalisations, lawyers and consultants having a field day, regulators left doing their best to keep the lights on, and investors refusing to put money to work unless they receive guaranteed returns. Regular listeners will have heard me talking about the importance of systems thinking to break this logjam. Before we build any complex machine, we need to know what it is we actually want it to do. How do we want to run it? And how is it meant to fit together? But what does good energy systems thinking look like? How do you learn it, how do you teach it, how do you communicate it? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I do know a good energy systems thinker when I meet one, and my guest today is one of the best. He is professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford, where he leads the Energy Program at the Environmental Change Institute. He also serves as a Jackson Senior Research Fellow at Oriel College in Oxford. Please welcome Jan Rosenow to Cleaning Up. Jan, thank you so much for joining us here today.

JR
It is an absolute pleasure, Michael.

ML
So it feels like this is long overdue, I can't believe that I've managed to get to 250 or whatever it is episodes and not had you on the show.

JR
Well, you promised me I would be at some point and here we are.

ML
Indeed, I always live up to my promises, almost always. And the reason I'm so excited is that our paths have just crossed repeatedly and there's this kind of small group of people who are energy systems thinkers, really good people, and very rarely wrong. And so there's, I don't want to call it a brotherhood, because there are also women in that group, but it's a very tight knit circle of, I don't know, how many is it in your mind? 10, 20? Not that many. And you're definitely one of them for me.

JR
It's certainly not hundreds I think, of people who I feel that I have a sort of similar intellectual agenda when it comes to energy and where we think similarly about the problems. People very often operate in silos, I find. And I think what maybe sets us apart from quite a lot of people in energy is that we try to connect the dots of the transition in ways that perhaps many won't want to do.

ML
Yeah and there's a sense in this little group, there's a sense that “I'm going to agree with you, probably, if I really did the work, I would agree. Therefore, I don't need to do the work because I can just agree.” That's a lot of trust that I put in you and a small number of people. But let's start where we start, tell us who you are and what you do and what made you so smart.

JR
So, I'm Jan Rosenow, I've been working in energy for 22 years now. I'm a professor in energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford, but I'm a very unusual academic I'd say, because I've worked 10 years in consultancy, advising industry, government, and another 10 years I was running a think tank in Brussels on energy, the Regulatory Assistance Project. And most academics in a position like myself would have been in academia all their career, so I'm a bit of an oddball when it comes to academia. And I still very much work on energy systems thinking, the transition, electrification, but very much from an applied perspective rather than just producing research for research sake. I'm really interested in working with industry, with government, in making a difference to the energy system.

ML
Okay. Now, you've called yourself an oddball and this is my segue into asking, how did you end up at Oxford? Because that is a German accent.

JR
It is still there right, even after 20 years in the UK. But Oxford is where I did my doctorate, and I did my doctorate on energy efficiency back in 2009 to 2012 with Nick Eyre, who was an Emeritus professor there and a nuclear physicist and an expert in thermodynamics. And that's where a lot of, I think, what I've sort of learned and still talk about today comes from is actually that doctorate back then with Professor Nick Eyre.

ML
But your undergraduate was in Germany?

JR
Undergraduate was in geosciences in Germany at the University of Münster and then London School of Economics for my master's. I was intending to stay for 10 months, go back, work in Germany, and I'm still here.

ML
Professor Nick Eyre, he wrote a seminal piece on what we would now call the primary energy fallacy. So, was that an important piece for you? Is that why you did your PhD there or did that postdate it? Put that in context.

JR
I mean, this is the paper, I think, from 2021 that you refer to where he's looking at what it would do to final energy use if we electrified to the maximum potential. And that paper was published in an okay journal, but it was rejected by many of the top journals, as he tells me, which I think is a real shame. But that was a seminal piece after my doctorate in 2021. It was published, my doctorate was about a decade earlier. And his workI think has been very important when it comes to understanding the primary energy fallacy.

ML
Yes. And I've got to be completely honest, I'm very aware of his piece, and I read it at the time, I must say, I thought he'd also done other work that was on that topic, and we're going to get onto what is the primary energy fallacy, but I thought he had done some of that earlier, which is why I thought it might have been influential in your PhD but you say it postdated it by quite a bit.

JR
I think where Nick was coming from was always to think about efficiency, not in isolation, but think of it as a resource for the energy system. And think about the integration with renewables, with a grid, with storage, rather than just thinking about efficiency as this is energy conservation, full stop.

ML
Okay now let's actually go down that, there's a number of rabbit holes that we're already stumbling over and I think we need to go there, because the primary energy fallacy has now become kind of famous. And if I could characterise it, it is this idea that energy drives the economy. That's not a fallacy, that's true. But what drives the economy is the energy we use. It's actually the motive power that hits the road through the wheel of the car, which is useful energy. It is not primary energy, which is what we dig out of the ground, the oil that we extract, the coal that we extract, the gas that we extract.

And there is a world of difference between the two, because of course most of the primary energy in the world actually goes to what some people call waste, and what other people call rejected energy. But it's not what is needed to power the world's economy. So all of these people saying that we to replace primary energy, the climate problem is that we need to replace primary energy with some form of clean energy, they are wrong and that's the primary energy fallacy. So that's my summary. Is that a good expression of it in your view?

JR
I think it is. And this all started with a guy called Paul Martin, who you know very well. A Canadian expert on industrial electrification, industrial efficiency and decarbonisation, I think he coined this phrase for the first time. You've been using it, I've been using it, and some people attribute it to you or to me. But Paul Martin, I think, was the first person who has coined this term, and I think your description is very accurate. Where I think it really matters is when, and I'm sure you've seen this on social media, when you post anything about renewables, you usually have someone who just posts this graphic from Our World In Data where you see energy consumption going up globally. We're just layering lots of fossil fuels on top of biomass and then some renewables maybe on top. And that's kind of an argument to say the transition isn't real, cannot happen, it's too difficult.

And I think the primary energy fallacy really takes that argument and I think destroys it largely because it actually makes the point that most of the inputs are wasted, it's just waste heat. About two thirds of all the energy inputs on the left hand side of the Sankey diagram end up as waste heat on the right hand side.

ML
Okay now, Sankey diagram is not an acronym, you know, the acronym rule that we apply, but the Sankey diagram is the diagram that goes from sources of energy all the way through to uses of energy. It kind of looks like, I think it was invented for Napoleon's army marched into Moscow and came back with a fraction of the number of soldiers and mapping where they all ended up was the first Sankey diagram. And people do this now for energy, it's become quite famous.

JR
I didn't know that. I thought Captain Sankey did the first Sankey diagram, but perhaps he was inspired by sort of a completely different sector and then applied it to energy. And that's why we call it Sankey diagram.

ML
I think that's right. Because then it became famous for when we used steam engines.

JR
Exactly.

ML
You've got all the energy in the coal and how much of it ends up actually pumping water out of the mines, which is what the coal engines were first used for. An interesting fact, the first coal engines, the Newcomen engine was half a percent efficient. And Watt, the famous Watt improved engine was I think something like 3% efficient. And interestingly enough, he sold those engines, he didn't sell the engine, he actually did it as steam as a service. So he actually financed the engines and took part of the efficiency savings. So I don't know if you came across that in your PhD.

JR
I have not. That's a beautiful extension of the story of the Sankey diagram.

ML
It's an extraordinary story. The fact that even energy as a service is not actually a new thing, it's something that James Watt invented in the, I guess, in the 18th century, extraordinary. But now, we're going to probably confuse a lot of people because we're going to be attacking all sorts of things, primary energy the fallacy, but also the word waste. But I want to come back to that in a while. So Paul Martin certainly came up with the primary energy fallacy phraseology, but not the thing, the actual problem. And I'm going to confess that when I started New Energy Finance, which was 2004, I had absolutely no idea. I just thought primary energy, that's what you measure and if it grows, it means that an economy is probably growing and we need to feed the machine and so on. I didn't really think about it. And to be fair, at the time, wind and solar were less than 1% of electricity. I think that hydro, which of course also produces only electricity and so it doesn't suffer from the primary energy fallacy, was probably only 10% or 15% of electricity around the world.

So it was a relatively unimportant problem. But of course, as those things grow, it becomes vitally important to get this stuff right. But I probably didn't become aware of, in a sense, the vast accountancy problem, which is the primary energy fallacy, until around I would say 2007, 2008, when I started to talk publicly more about transition, about where the energy system was going, and I was trying to locate what was clearly transformation in electricity versus transformation of energy. And that's when you really butt up against the energy fallacy. So my question, when did you first become aware of the primary energy fallacy, which now rules your life?

JR
It's probably not that long ago, actually. I believe maybe three or four years, not longer than that. And that was in the context of looking at the efficiency differences between combustion technologies such as gas spoilers, which of course are very popular in many European countries, including the UK, and heat pumps, where you have these vast differences in efficiency, a factor of three, maybe even four, five or six. And that really caught my eye, because when you think about the energy system, not from the inputs into it, but from what we use it for, and you sort of work backwards and think, what is the most efficient way of providing this energy service? And then you work backwards, and then you find actually we only need a system that is significantly smaller to do the same thing without any change in behavior or conservation or building insulation that could come on top if you wanted to. But I think that was the first time when that really opened my eyes to see these big differences in efficiency, especially for buildings with heat pumps, but also for transport with electric vehicles. You find very similar savings, and that filters through when you model this at a global level.

ML
So your gateway drug was heat pumps and heating, was space heating. Let's try and give an example, but let's use electric vehicles where you ended up first, because with heating, just the calculations become more complicated, because nobody really knows where the heat comes from, it's not even on the Sankey diagram. So let's start with vehicles. So primary energy is how much oil we get out of the ground. How much of that ends up driving a car forwards?

JR
I mean, it depends on the engine, whether it's a diesel car or petrol car. But roughly speaking, about 20% give or take, of all the energy that's contained in the oil is actually then driving the car forward. The other 80% is lost as waste heat.

ML
Okay. Now, that starts upstream with the energy that goes into actually extracting the oil, and then doing things like pumping. Oil comes out with produced water, so you then have to pump that water underground, or you have to treat it, there's energy required in that. And then that gets moved around. The crude oil goes to a refinery, the refinery has an energy demand, and that lot upstream is what, about 15% or something of all of the energy that came out of the hole in the ground, about 15% is lost just doing that. And then eventually, what's refined gets to the forecourt and from the forecourt, from when it's actually put into the car, what percentage is lost actually in the car?

JR
Yeah, that is the 80% that I was referring to. If you layer on top all the losses that occur further upstream, the losses will be even bigger.

ML
Right, and that's where I was going, because for me, 80% loss is too low. It's actually more like 85% or 87%, it's absolutely enormous. And all of that energy goes off, and it becomes heat and it's not useful energy. So primary energy is the oil that comes out of the ground, what is secondary energy, Professor?

JR
Well, secondary energy would be the next stage after you've converted primary energy to something else. And that could be electricity, that will be the example that most people will be well aware of. So you might have a coal-fired power station, you convert coal to electricity and that is some secondary energy that you use for all the appliances that we have. So you have the same applies in other parts of the energy sector. So it's usually a conversion stage before that.

ML
So in the case of oil, the secondary energy is what leaves the refinery, I'm guessing.

JR
Yeah, the petrol that will then be put into your car.

ML
Well, hang on because once it's put into your car, it's final energy, right? Because final energy, that's another fallacy by the way for those listening, I've also started banging on about the final energy fallacy. Because most people think that final energy is the energy that we use. But of course, it's not, that's useful energy, the motive power of the car, which is hugely different from the amount of petrol or diesel that we put into the car. That's the final energy.

JR
Yeah, massively different. And again, when you look at the Sankey diagram, often what they depict is you see the energy flow from left to right, and on the right you just have the end use sector. So it might have a box saying residential buildings or industry or transport. But what it does, it doesn't show you how much of that energy is actually useful energy and how much of that is wasted. The only global diagram that does that, that I'm aware of is from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. They produce these flow charts for pretty much every country around the world and globally where you can see where the waste is coming from, how much of it is useful, how much isn't. But most Sankey diagrams don't do that. They don't tell you that even at final energy use stage, you're still throwing away a vast chunk of the energy inputs.

ML
Now, you call it throwing away and I've already flagged that there's this word waste and then other people call it rejected heat. And you're right, the Lawrence Livermore Sankey diagrams, by the way, they go all the way back to the 1970s, you can see some that are written by hand, the first ones, but they're almost unchanged. And about two thirds of the primary energy, it becomes secondary, then it becomes final, then it goes to useful. But two thirds of it is rejected and they call it rejected. Why do they say rejected rather than waste?

JR
Well, I think that's a debate we have. Rejected is a term that people really understand. But I think rejected as in an engine just can't make any better use of it, it doesn't have the ability to convert it to the energy service that you want. And that is not because the engineers have been lazy or the technology is poor. It's just there are certain physical limits of what you can do with combustion technology and that leads to this vast amount of rejected energy, which I think we call waste heat in sort of more colloquial terms, because that's essentially what it is. It's heat that is leaving the engine and going back into the atmosphere or leaving the power station through the cooling towers, going back into the atmosphere.

ML
Right, I had this discussion with Jonathan Maxwell on a recent episode. And the terminology question about what is waste and I think I made a mistake on that episode and called it lost, but it's rejected. And it really comes down to the thermodynamics, which Nick I hope enlightened you about as you said you were a geophysicist. And that is, if what we need is work, if I want to ride up and down on an elevator or drive a car for whatever reason, good or bad, what I need is work. And work is different than heat, even though it's measured in the same units. So this is very complex for non-engineers, non-physicists, non-chemists, that what you're doing with some of that primary energy that goes through the system is you're upgrading it into, you're using some of it to upgrade the rest of it to work.

And when you do that, inevitably there is rejected heat, trying to be very specific with my use of terms. I would call it losses or rejected heat at a low temperature, which could be used, but generally isn't used. And that's why we call it waste. But there is this cascade, which I find it's very hard to explain to non-engineers that you start with a fuel, which has got the ability to do work, but only if you throw a bunch of it away. And that's really what we're grappling with. That's what drives this conundrum, this primary energy fallacy.

JR
And of course, we pay for all of the energy input. I think that's often forgotten, we pay for all of it. We're not just paying for the 20% that we put into the car, that drives the car, we pay for 100% of the fuel. And therefore, I think there is an economic opportunity if you can find a way of providing the same service with vastly improved efficiency, even if your fuel costs are higher, you can compete. And that's what we're starting to see with electric vehicles and heat pumps, where per unit of energy, per kilowatt hour of input, electricity is more expensive in most places around the world, not everywhere, but in most places. But because of the efficiency, it's still cheaper to provide the same energy service.

ML
This is why I love the conversations with you and others of this little band of initiates or whatever you want to call us, because I could take issue with so many details of what you've said. So for instance, we pay for all the energy, we don't. We pay for the fuel. And if what we want is if we want work and we've bought a fuel, of course you have to pay for all the fuel. But you do that knowing you're going to have to discard or reject some of it in order to get work, because otherwise you can't ride up and down on your elevator. And so even the concept of efficiency, the narrow description, the narrow definition I like, which is at the demand side, supposing I'm making a ton of steel and I use a certain amount of heat to do that and a certain amount of feedstock, if I can next year make more steel, then I am more efficient. But if I'm converting some of my input, let's say I'm making ceramics, and I'm trying to think of a good example, if I'm using work to do something, drilling or milling, then I have to reject some of the heat from the fuel, what does efficiency mean?

Because really what it means is perhaps cascading the uses of that energy through lower and lower temperature from the fuel to maybe a flame temperature, and then down through different use cases until it becomes valueless, 20 degrees heat or even lower, where you can't do anything with it. And so efficiency is really about system design. It's not just about making a ton of steel a little bit better, or drilling a little bit more with the same amount of electricity. It's really going to be saying, what could we do in the system design that uses this resource better?

JR
That's exactly where when you asked me, when did you first come across this? It was in the context of energy efficiency policy, which is often designed in incremental improvements to existing technologies. And then you have programs, grant programs that maybe reward kilowatt hour savings or how many tons of carbon have you saved, but it's agnostic to how you do that. And of course, that often led to replacing maybe an old gas boiler in a factory with a slightly more efficient one, and you have some incremental savings. But when you think about the potential system savings, they could be much larger. What if you had installed a heat pump and wasted from a nearby facility? You could have maybe had a factor of five or even ten times more savings. But because of the way policy is often designed, it's quite narrow and it doesn't focus on systems change, but incremental change. And that's when I first really thought about how can we rethink how we approach efficiency from a much more systematic perspective.

ML
And I can give an example of that, that there are ports where we're bringing in LNG, liquefied natural gas, -152°C I believe it is. And we need to regasify that, which means we have to inject heat. So what do we do, we use seawater. So you use the heat from seawater to regasify liquefied natural gas. Just down the road, there might be a chilled warehouse where they actually want to have very cold, not -153°C but maybe -18°C or so degrees for a freezer facility, or 5°C for a chilled facility, and what they do is they use electricity to run a fridge or a freezer. And it doesn't matter how efficient your fridge or freezer are, the big win would be to use the cold or the coolness of the LNG and somehow reroute it and use it. Systems thinking you could make a monstrous improvement, whereas the energy efficiency narrowly defined, you really can't. And that thinking is simply not there in the generality of commentators on energy. They're just not thinking in systems, they're siloed.

JR
100%. And I've just written something on my substack about data centres and district heating, and I was interested in finding out how many projects are there where we use the waste heat from data centres for district heating. There's been some projects in Stockholm for a while, but how many of them exist in the US where we've seen the most build out? Almost none. There's a sort of university national lab projects, but almost none. But there's a huge opportunity I think to use that waste heat for district heating rather than just throwing it away back into the atmosphere. If you have buildings nearby that can use that heat, if you build a data centre in the middle of a desert, then it's going to be quite difficult.

ML
Well, so I would, on that one, I'm going to come in there because that is, that's come up a number of times on different shows. And it's regarded as a truism that we should use the heat from data centres to do district heating. The problem is we only need district heating a third of the year. So two thirds of the problem remains entirely unsolved. You add enormous complexity to your data centre build. You would have to wait, presumably, or somehow reject the heat some other way until you're ready with your district heating system. And then you've solved, you've used, cascaded which I like, but you've only done it with one third of the heat. And so then you get people say, oh, well, the other two thirds of the time, you could power cooling, you could do district cooling. It's like, oh, well, there's another system you have to build, another set of complexity.

And so using the heat from data centres, the number one thing that it should be doing is driving the chillers of the data centres. So it's being rejected currently, reasonably, in many cases, at a high temperature. And then we're running cooling, which was energy intensive cooling using a different system. So first, the data centre should become more efficient, but then it strikes me we should be using that heat for probably industrial processes. It's probably for food processing or somewhere where we need, where we can upgrade that waste heat and use it in an industrial process somewhere between, let's call it 40°C and 200°C , but all year round.

JR
Maybe two points on that. I agree with the industrial, and district heating is not just for buildings, it could also be for industrial facilities. And often they might use district heat, especially for that process heat. But I think the other opportunity is thermal storage, which is still in its infancy but there's now a very large facility being built, I think the world's biggest with 90 gigawatt hours in Finland, to store heat in the summer and use excess heat or excess renewables or whatever you want to call it, and store it for the winter. Then extract it with heat pumps and put it back into the district heating system. So I think that remains to be seen how cost competitive that is, how quickly that can be scaled. But I think all of this deserves to be part of the discussion of conversation and needs to be tested and shouldn't be ignored.

ML
So I agree entirely with your conclusion that this is what the debate needs to be around. It's systematic changes, rather than these kind of siloed, small interventions. And by the way, there are interventions that are pushed very heavily by those people in the silo, you know, it becomes a very sort of tribal business. 90 gigawatt hours of seasonal storage, just think of this though, we did an episode on a data center that's being built in Sines in Portugal, we went down and talked to Rob Dunn who's building it, a great episode. But it's going to be 1.2 gigawatts. So 90 gigawatts of seasonal storage is about 75 hours. In other words, 3 days of the heat from Sines would be captured by that system and 362 days of it would not.

And that's another, I don't know if I would call it a fallacy, but it's another complication. Why do people find it so hard to do this systems thinking is because the scale of what we're talking about is gargantuan, and utterly beyond most people's understanding. Most people think, oh, well we'll put solar on the roof, and I'll have a battery and then I can just be off grid. And even at the level of a house, that ain't going to work for most, most people.

JR
And it's so context specific where solutions make sense, where they don't make sense, where they're economic. Even if they might not be economic, they might still make sense. Because take the city of Oxford where I live, it's very difficult to transform heating for all these old colleges that have heritage buildings, where you're going to put air source heat pumps, it's very difficult. So district heating, even if it might be more expensive, I don't know it remains to be seen, makes sense in such a setting where you struggle to find any alternative, anything viable. But I think all these options need to be tested, discussed, and shouldn't be off the table and should be connected, rather than dismissed.

And I agree with you very much that this idea that there's a sort of silver bullet solution, this is going to solve all of our problems, it's very tempting. And every time I've written something about here's one solution, someone else is saying, well, you should have really written about this thing, which is my preferred solution. And I keep telling them, well, just write your own article then if you want to, because I write about all sorts of things as you do. And I don't think there shouldn't be a hierarchy, necessarily, that could all play a role in different settings. Although there are some solutions, I'm sure we're going to come on to that, that we both would agree should not be considered because they're simply uneconomic and do not make sense.

ML
That's right. And we will talk about hydrogen, which is where you're headed with that but I want to finish off a few things, because the other reasons for complexity in this systems thinking challenge is there may be just geographical reasons, Singapore just doesn't have the same options as Australia, as I found on my recent trip. But also you have questions of resilience, which is also incredibly important. So a solution that works 99% of the time, but leaves a country completely without energy 1% of the time, that's three days with lights out, unacceptable. And of course, you also have safety issues. A solution like ammonia for shipping sounds marvellous when you're giving a presentation PowerPoint in some boardroom, would you go into the engine room of a ship powered by ammonia? And perhaps a ship that's maintained who knows where by who knows who and so on, so there's a lot of factors here.

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That chart that you mentioned from Our World In Data, which by the way, is only using standard data, could be from any of the big data agencies, could be IEA, International Energy Agency, EIA, the Energy Information Administration, it could be the BP World Review of Energy, which is now Energy Institute. It's all the same outcome, it's all produced the same chart and Our World In Data can only use data that's available to it. So it's used quite frequently to undermine the value and the importance of the shift to renewables in electricity. But most recently, it was really surfaced by Dan Yergin, by Chris Wright the Secretary of Energy in the US, and others. And in fact, every argument that says the transition is probably not going to happen or is slow, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, who's written this book called More and More and More, that energy is always additive. It's always founded on this idea that the data is always the primary energy and then renewables are only this little tiny bit. If you flip it, they always say that primary energy is 80% or 85% fossil, if you look at useful energy, what powers our economy, what really powers our economy, it's not 15% or 20% clean. What is the number?

JR
Well, I think there's a real gap. There's no proper data series at global level or country level that translates all of this into a useful energy metric. I've looked for it and the first thing I find is your piece, where you say it's about 30% I think is the number that you use, which was quoted in the Financial Times, and Ember have done some work on this as well. But nothing from the IEA or IRENA or whoever could produce such a figure, so there's a real gap, I think, in getting a proper answer to that question.

ML
So you're very measured. I think it's a scandal, not a gap, but a scandal that we don't actually have, none of the big agencies that are funded by taxpayers, they're multilaterals or national agencies, none of them produce useful energy figures that are reliable. So there is, now I'm going to fall foul of the acronym rule, IIASA, the International Association of something-something Systems Analysts.

JR
Advanced Studies?

JR
In Austria, we have to look that up.

ML
We'll put it in the show notes. Who is IIASA, what does I-I-A-S-A stand for? But they did produce some, but it's not up to date. They stopped doing it in, I think 2015 or something. Presumably, there was no appetite for it, no funding. I find it scandalous that you actually look at the economy, that serious politicians, that energy ministers will look at the economy and don't know what powers it. They know what you shovel in at one end, I've said that measuring the energy use of our economy in primary energy units is like measuring nutrition by how many acres are used in agriculture. Can you imagine if a medical system, medical nutrition was measured in acres? And yet, that's what we're doing, don't you find it just astonishing?

JR
And it is. And when I posted the Sankey diagram from Lawrence Livermore Lab at some point, someone in the European Commission, very senior, that person asked their staff, why has no one told me about this? That person wasn't aware that we have these huge losses, this huge amount of rejected energy. And that's someone who is running an organisation that is in charge of regulating the energy system, which to me just says we haven't had enough conversation about this very topic. And it's so important that we have metrics where we can track this much more properly, because it's so confusing for people to understand that primary energy is really not a good metric for looking at how things are progressing.

ML
What question can you answer with primary energy?

JR
Well, you can answer how many resources we use. That's what it does show, how many barrels of oil or tons of coal go into the economy. But it doesn't really tell you all that much of how it's being used and what is it used for.

ML
But it adds together fuel plus heat plus work. So let me give you an example, a country's primary energy has gone up by 3%, is that good or bad?

JR
Depends what the primary energy is, right? If you're interested in decarbonisation, you may not want fossil fuels to go up. If you're interested in economic growth and it goes up because of that, you might be satisfied.

ML
So your economy has grown by 4% and primary energy went up by 3%. Is that good or bad?

JR
I mean, it's just not a very good metric, right?

ML
You just can't say, you can't say. In that example, you have two countries, they both grew 3% and one primary energy went up 2% and one it went down. You cannot say which country is doing better. It doesn't tell you the emissions, it doesn't tell you the real efficiency, it doesn't tell you whether people are living better. It doesn't tell you whether you've become more resilient, it just doesn't say anything. I've challenged people to complete the sentence, “country A's primary energy grew and this is good because” or whatever. To me, there is not a single question that primary energy actually answers other than, look at this - coal, oil, gas, nuclear are much bigger, much bigger than renewables. So it serves a very good purpose to make that point, but in a completely misleading way.

JR
And also, maybe a final point on this diagram from Our World In Data, which is so frequently used. It also obscures what actually happens in specific sectors, in specific places, because it's sort of used, “Look, there's no transition, look at the global data”, and it's like, well, you're sort of mixing up a whole bunch of things. There's economic growth, there are emerging economies, there's maybe industrial stagnation in Europe. It's all bundled and mixed up together and what you don't see is where things are actually moving, where things are changing. And it's not particularly helpful at all, I think, as a metric to understand, is there a transition happening or not? Yes I mean, you have to give it to those who use that number. It is true that we're still using more fossil fuels, I think that's the only point I would say was useful for. It's an indication of we haven't quite managed to do enough on the demand side and with renewables to replace fossil fuels at speed.

ML
Well, let me tell you, as somebody who's given, I'm going to guess, 1,000 presentations in the last 25 years on this stuff, if I wanted to show that fossil fuel use increased, I wouldn't use that chart. And the reason is that what it obscures, as you say, you've got years in which China's coal use surged and then you've got the OECD coal use collapsing. And then you've got the arrival of renewables in electricity. Then you've got two wars, which has driven up the cost of gas and therefore there's a switch from gas to coal, which was before that was coal to gas. If you don't understand that, you know, just balancing a ruler across the top and saying nothing's changing, it just seems so intellectually weak. Which is a good segue into hydrogen.

So you and I first met because we were both banging on I think about hydrogen and heating. And you did what has become, I think, a very well-cited study or series of studies because you update them, on the likelihood of hydrogen or the use of hydrogen for space heating. So what did you find?

JR
So what I found is that the discussion around hydrogen for heating was extremely polarised. It isn't anymore, but I'll come to that maybe in a minute. But it was extremely polarised between two camps, the electrification camp, that heat pumps are going to solve all the problems. And then you had the hydrogen camp, let's just repurpose the gas grid and use gas boilers and make them hydrogen ready. And my sense has always been that based on just the underlying physics, the engineering, the economics, the hydrogen camp had the weaker position intellectually. But there was no way of solving the argument because both sides produce study after study.

So what I said, look I'm going to do a meta study here, exclude all the industry-funded studies. That includes the heat pump industry funding a study that says heat pumps are much better than hydrogen or the gas companies funding a study saying hydrogen boilers are the way forward. And I found around 60 plus studies now, I actually stopped counting that because it's going to get a little bit tedious, but about 60 plus studies independently funded, not by industry, that all come broadly speaking to the same conclusion, which is hydrogen is a lot less efficient. We knew that already before, but there's lots of studies agreeing on that, modeling it in different ways. It's less economic to use hydrogen for heating because of these inefficiencies. And finally, in all of the models that sort of map what is the most cost-effective pathway and mix, hydrogen shows up roughly around maybe 1% was I think the median of all the studies with one or two outliers where it was slightly higher. But really overall, the conclusion was very robust.

And I think that study was taken up in lots of the discussions in Europe, in the UK, also outside of Europe, in the US, in Canada, in discussions about the future of the gas grid and the future of heating, because it was the first attempt to do a meta review of the evidence and I had a very clear conclusion. So lots of people challenged me afterwards and said, oh Jan, but you have forgotten this study. And I said, I'm going to look at it and looked at it and look at the acknowledgements, and they have thanked this industry for its support of this project. And it's like, well, this is an industry-funded study, I can't include it. And so far, nobody has been able to produce a single independent study that challenged that meta review.

ML
And can I ask, did you look at safety as part of that? Because I'm a safety hawk, partly because of my time on the board of Transport for London and my understanding as a result of that of some institutional problems with managing safety. You know, when you have something dangerous, the best way to get rid of it, to make it safe, is to engineer it out entirely. What you don't have can't explode. And when you start to look at safety for particularly hydrogen in homes, what you have to do to make it safe is entirely improbable, like knocking holes in walls and having sensors and multiple valves, new valves, replacing lots of the pipework, all sorts of things like that. Did you find that properly represented or did you do a deep dive ever into safety?

JR
I did not in that study, but I'm well aware of the safety discussion. And people like Tom Baxter I think have spent quite a bit of time trying to understand the review that was done of hydrogen safety in the UK by the relevant authority and what would be required. I think Arup was tasked partly by supporting that as consultants in the context I think of the pilot schemes up in Whitby and Redcar which never happened, partly as a result because I think residents were concerned about some of the safety aspects. But no, I did not review that as part of the meta review. That was very much looking at the technical economics, the efficiency and the cost of hydrogen versus heat pumps.

ML
Yes, so there was indeed, so Arup is one of the Leadership Circle of this show. Long before then, they did the engineering work, very good engineering work, modelling the safety of homes, and then the health and safety executive actually said what needed to happen to make these trials safe. I was very involved because I wanted to make sure that the locals, the people in whose houses this would be done, understood the implications. And buried deep in that was the fact that in every room with a hydrogen appliance or significant pipe work or a meter, you would have to have a 10 centimetre by 10 centimetre unclosable vent to the outside within 50 centimetres of the ceiling. And of course, when you tell people, oh hydrogen, it sounds so whizzy and futuristic and fantastic and somebody's going to give it to you free, you say yes. But when you know that you're going to have to knock a hole in every wall to the outside, then you of course just say no.

So this is what was going on on that front and I don't think it's been resolved. I think even now there are about 40 potentially, I can't confirm, but I think there's 40 homes somewhere in Europe that apparently allegedly are using hydrogen, but we're not sure whether those trials have finished and they've been quietly shelved. They may well have been. There's one in Holland and I think one in Germany.

JR
Bavaria, yeah. And yeah, there's still one in Holland.

ML
There are lots of people who still think, I don't care what these two clowns say, hydrogen is the answer not just for heating, but also for transport. Where again, there's a similar process of hydrogen that has completely failed in cars and is then being proposed for buses, it's completely failing in buses. Now it's being proposed, still being proposed for heavy goods vehicles, it's going to completely fail there as well. So why is it that people cling to this energy systems, I mean, it's not even a fallacy, it's just an absurdity, to be honest.

JR
So I'm actually writing a book right now, which I didn't mention earlier, which will come out in 2028. But this book is going to look at partly electrification, what we talked about, the primary energy fallacy, but also incumbency and resistance against change and against electrification in particular. And I haven't written the chapter yet fully, but it's very much looking at this from the question of why is there so much resistance? And I think at the heart of it is a process which you find not just in energy, but in any sector. There's an entire book written about it called Innovation and Its Enemies, which is a great book by a Harvard professor. It's a trade book, so it's quite accessible. And he's looking at past transitions in other sectors, or new technologies arriving and incumbency, so vested interest groups, incumbents who want to keep using their assets, resisting change.

And I think that's what we find very much, but I think that's clearly one of the key drivers of this focus on hydrogen in pretty much all of the sectors of the economy, because it allows you to just keep doing what you've been doing for a very long time. I think that is sitting at the heart of it. You know, that's why the gas networks like the idea, that's why the boiler manufacturers like the idea, and those who make internal combustion engines are quite fond of it too.

ML
Do you think that that is a sufficient explanation? Because there is, of course, the Hydrogen Council, and there's Hydrogen UK, Hydrogen Europe, they're all industry funded. They're all from the incumbents, whether they're gas companies, boiler companies, gas network companies. But is that a sufficient explanation? Because Jules Verne was not an incumbent, and he was the one who first postulated hydrogen. And it seems to have a mythic power that goes beyond lobbying.

JR
I would agree with that. And I think it's, you know, there's different waves and cycles, hype cycles of hydrogen, this isn't the first one. We had at least, I think, two preceding, probably four preceding the current hype cycle that I think we're now at the end of. So, there's definitely something there. I mean, was it Jeremy Rifkin, The Hydrogen Economy, that was about I think 2000, maybe 2002.

ML
2003. In fact, the funny thing is, his book came out, it had already become clear to the energy sector that this was a big fat nothing burger. But actually, his book was fascinating because what he called it was The Energy Web, his subtitle was The Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power. I mean, it was because the internet came along, and there was the World Wide Web. And then he was saying that hydrogen would enable the World Wide Web of Energy, we'll all be making hydrogen in our homes. And so, it was sort of a version of Small Is Beautiful, the Schumacher book. So, it was a social book, not really an engineering book at all.

JR
There was actually even a politician I think, on German television in a talk show sort of saying, we should all have solar panels, make our own hydrogen with an aluminium electrolyser. Then we compress that hydrogen, store it, and then use it to heat our home in a boiler. And you sort of think about all the different steps involved in doing that, the safety implications, the complexity, but doing that, nobody called him out. And you think, this is nonsense.

ML
I got into trouble about, and it wasn't that long ago, it was about a year and a half ago, I discovered that there is a Swedish kindergarten, I kid you not, a kindergarten, where there is a project to make hydrogen on the roof of a kindergarten, and solar, exactly the system you described, hydrogen, compress it, and store it on the grounds of the kindergarten. And I'm like, look, I tweeted or put out on social media, I said, that is one kindergarten my kid is not going to go to, for sure, that's it, done. And I got all sorts of, it must be safe, and it will be regulated. We have no idea. You could get a leak, it can go into the sewage pipes, it can go underground, it can go into a flare, there's all sorts. And that's right, I calculated the explosive power of the hydrogen they were going to store on this kindergarten. And it was of the order of magnitude of tons of TNT, tons of TNT in a kindergarten.

JR
Sounds like a great idea.

ML
But apparently for some people, that's perfectly normal and sensible.

JR
Yeah, luckily I think, intellectually, the argument has been won. And I think the market has also decided very clearly. I mean, just looking at, and you've posted these figures, I think a while back, when you look at global sales of EVs or trucks and hydrogen vehicles or boilers with hydrogen and heat pumps, you can't even see the hydrogen technology because it's so small, the numbers are so small on the chart. And I think the market is increasingly deciding in that direction. I'm not seeing any sort of revival, there's still attempts being made, there's still the rhetoric, but I don't think there's any traction.

ML
The market I think gets it now, investors largely get it. But what worries me is, look at the EU's networks package, 1.2 trillion euros on electricity, of which 720 billion that they want to spend between now and 2040 on electrification, which is what we should be talking about instead of hydrogen. But that's good, I don't know if it's the right amount, but that's the right direction, lots of work on electrification. Your book, I suspect, will be big on electrification. But there's still 240 billion of hydrogen pipelines that are in the EU's grids package, which means that in every country, there is a department working on hydrogen pipelines. There are civil servants, there are regulations, there are people designing financial metrics, there are people giving grants. The inertia in this still worries me, even though to me, it is game over. We use hydrogen for fertilisers and for petrochemicals and probably almost nothing else, maybe some niche uses here and there and so on. But it won't die, I don't think it'll die.

JR
I mean, the targets that the European Union adopted for green hydrogen, I think are worth reiterating here. And I'm sure you discussed them before on the show, but you had 10 million tons of domestic production of green hydrogen by 2030 and 10 million tons of import. And the total amount at the time I looked it up of green hydrogen being produced globally at the time when the targets were adopted, it wasn't even anywhere near one million tons of green hydrogen, it was much less than that. And those targets, I think it was someone from Agora and a key vendor, I think he traced back where these targets came from and found that these were industry numbers. These were numbers postulated by, it may even have been hydrogen Europe saying this is what we think the target should be and the commission just used it in their communication.

ML
So we had a chap on this show who's an old friend of yours, I understand, Jorgo Chatzimarkakis. And on this show, he boasted about where those numbers came from and that they had been from Hydrogen Europe. And of course, they traced their way through, I think there's Diederik Samson, who was working with Frans Timmermans. Frans Timmermans, of course, famously said hydrogen rocks. He was all in maybe because of incumbency, paying money for lobbying, maybe just because he was one of those romantics who held a candle for hydrogen, very unwise thing to do of course. And then there was Professor van Wijk, who used to run a consultancy, ran that into the ground, then became a professor and came up with it. But it worked its way through hydrogen Europe via a chap called Jorgo Chatzimarkakis on show. And if you don't mind, I'd love to finish by asking you, how did your paths cross?

JR
Well, this actually surprised me. The first time I came across Jorgo in Brussels, and I said before I was running a think tank in Brussels for quite a long time. And this is a few years back now of course, I immediately thought, I know this guy, and I remembered straight away where from. So there's actually the reason why he ended up as the chief lobbyist for Hydrogen Europe is that his political career in Germany was over after a scandal when he lost his doctorate degree in his title. And this is all public knowledge, he was found to have plagiarised large parts of his theses, and then he lost his credibility as a politician and took on the job in Brussels. But the first time I came across him was when he stated that he learned how to cite the literature or not, as he did in his doctoral thesis at Oxford, where he spent some time as a visiting doctoral student. And I was outraged because I was doing my doctorate at the time and I think I may have said something on social media and Der Spiegel wrote a whole full page article about Jan Rosenow, the doctoral student at Oxford who was outraged about this. So that's where I first came across him because of this plagiarism discussion and him losing his doctoral title.

ML
At least according to Der Spiegel, you're somewhat underplaying your involvement, because there were two of you. Was the other chap also German, also studying at Oxford, and the two of you were outraged that Jorgo Chatzimarkakis’ excuse that he was giving for having incorrectly or failing to attribute chunks of his doctoral thesis, his excuse was, I've been to Oxford and this is how they do it in Oxford. But what you and the other chap, Markus Gerstel, the two of you actually caused some trouble, didn't you? You didn't just do some posts on social media.

JR
No, we did cause some trouble.

ML
You wrote to the University of Bonn, which had awarded his doctorate. How did that play out?

JR
I think we wrote to the political party as well that Jorgo was a member of.

ML
The FDP.

JR
Yeah, I believe we did. And we were very factual in just saying, look in the regulations, of course they're very detailed, the regulations of how you cite the literature, how you get examined at Oxford. It's very thorough, it's hundreds or even thousands of pages and you can look it up and it's very clear and very clearly does say the opposite of what Jorgo was making it out to be.

ML
Okay, so now you are one of the leading voices for the electrification of heat, and he is one of the leading voices for hydrogen. And he came on the show and he said, oh you know, it may not be for heat and we don't really promote that. But you go to Hydrogen Europe's website and so on and it's all about, because of course, heat means that you retain the gas network. If you don't do heat with hydrogen, you don't need the gas network and then you can dismantle it and you don't do lots, there's no distributed uses of hydrogen if you don't do heat. So it's core to what they're trying to do, core to what Jorgo Chatzimarkakis is promoting. So you have become, I'm going to say it, Mr. Electrification in Europe and he's Mr. Hydrogen. But your crossing swords with him over his plagiarised thesis was before, you were doing energy efficiency, but he was doing digitisation and IT and something completely different, correct?

JR
There was no thematic overlap at all. He's never been someone who'd said anything about energy as far as I was aware, this is the first time I came across him.

ML
Isn't that an extraordinary coincidence? Or is there something Wagnerian going on where you and he are in this kind of intellectual death struggle from when you were a student and he was a politician all the way through your energy years?

JR
Yeah, I mean, it is quite curious isn't it, that that would sort of play out the way it has played out and I find it rather amusing, I must say.

ML
Now, I should say, just to round out that story, that I was very grateful, very impressed and very grateful that Jorgo came on this show knowing that I was another strong voice against the use of hydrogen in heating and many other things. And so I respect him for coming on the show and he also has a standing invitation to come back on the show at any time. So if he wants to dispute your version of events, Jorgo if you're listening, do get in contact because we will have a good conversation. And like last time, it would be entirely respectful and we would share whatever issues that you want to discuss. But Jan, I want to thank you for coming on the show, I think we've covered a lot of ground. You do have a book, which you say will be out in 2028. And I can say right now, we'll have you back on the show when you've got your book and we'll talk at length about the themes, which I hope will build on some of the things that we've talked about today.

JR
They will indeed. Thanks, Michael for having me, looking forward to coming back on.

ML
So that was Jan Rosenow, Professor of Energy and Climate Policy at the University of Oxford, where he leads the Energy Programme at the Environmental Change Institute. As always, we'll put links in the show notes to resources that we discussed during the episode, as well as some tidbits like a link to my five superheroes of the transition, where I describe in my words as best as I can, the primary energy fallacy. And with that, I'd like to thank our producer, Oscar Boyd, video editor, Jamie Oliver, head of operations, Kendall Smith, the team behind Cleaning Up, and of course, our Leadership Circle, without whom none of this would be possible. Thank you too in the audience for spending some time here with us today, and please join us this time next week for another episode of Cleaning Up.

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