- Details
- Written by: John C Burke
- Category: Alternative
- Hits: 7
The Efficiency Alternative:
Why Decentralized Energy Systems Beat the Renewable Subsidy Race
A Pre-Summit Analysis for the FT Energy Transition Summit 2025 - 29th and 30th October 2025
By Sun Earth Energy Ltd
As the Financial Times Energy Transition Summit convenes this coming week, CEOs, policymakers, and—critically—US investors will gather to discuss the "path to net zero." They'll hear familiar themes: massive renewable deployment, gigawatt-scale solar farms, offshore wind expansion, and the billions in subsidies needed to make it all "competitive."
But what if that entire framework is thermodynamically backwards?
The Uncomfortable Truth About Current Policy
At this year's FT Hydrogen Summit, a senior DESNZ official made a remarkable admission: the UK government's strategy involves deliberately making natural gas expensive to make alternatives like hydrogen appear "competitive."
This isn't market economics. This is industrial policy disguised as environmental necessity.
The same mechanism drives renewable energy policy:
- Add £65/MWh carbon pricing to gas generation
- Apply windfall taxes to North Sea production
- Provide 25% capital grants for solar/wind
- Guarantee prices through Contracts for Difference
- Socialize grid connection and balancing costs
Then declare renewables "cheaper than fossil fuels."
The Thermodynamic Case No One Makes
- Details
- Written by: John C Burke
- Category: Alternative
- Hits: 14
Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller have just had a huge, paradigm shifting paper published by peer reviewed journal MDPI Geomatics. This was an invited paper, so Ned and Karl didn’t have to pay fees for it to be open access. You can freely download and share it, (local copy here). The peer review process took 45 days, with only minor revisions to the manuscript required. MDPI operate an open review process and you can see the questions asked by the reviewers and clarifications provided by the authors at the relevant links on their site.
In many regards, this paper represents the culmination and summation of the scientific work Ned and Karl have been publishing over the last 15 years. Here at the talkshop, we’ve been following and discussing the development of their empirical and theoretical work. We picked up on their first publicly available work, an extended poster on their Unified Theory of Climate written following a conference presentation in 2011. In May 2022 we published their paper analysing the CERES data and deriving climate sensitivities to various forcings for open peer review. The present paper draws it all together and fills the gap left by the IPCC in their AR6 climate report by their misrepresentation of and failure to discuss the decrease in reflected solar radiation and its effect on increases in Earth’s surface temperature. As Ned and Karl’s new paper shows, it’s the primary cause of the observed warming in Earth’s surface temperature.
The new paper also discusses how the IPCC’s central concept of ‘heat trapping’ by ‘greenhouse gases’ arises from a misconception of the reason the outgoing energy flux attenuates with altitude. This reduction of energy with height is actually largely due to quasi-adiabatic processes which reduce the per-unit-volume energy of rising air parcels as they expand into the lower pressure regime aloft.
Ned’s announcement of the new paper on X has caused a stir. Since 5pm BST yesterday, it’s been liked 4.3k times and reposted 2.4k times, with over 180 follow up comments.
See article here [Click Here] Access Research PDF HERE