What mattered this week

Remember the war that was meant to send oil to $200?
Well, America HAD to give in, renewables WON and China is a BIG SWINGER now

Who actually won though? Depends who you ask. Three things the headline skipped:

1. America RAN OUT of fuel: Timetable was forced as the US’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve was kaput 🫙. Shortages were due in weeks. Kemp - SPR depletion set the deadline 

2. Lots of oil for Christmas - but renewables are forever 😊. The 60 governments that spent the crisis scrambling to electrify aren't un-scrambling. The fear outlasts the price and there’s no going back. FT: "Oil glut next year" (£); Market Watch - Energy Markets will never be the same

3. China didn’t blink. Beijing cut oil imports by A THIRD 😱 - and it didn’t show. Unthinkable a few weeks ago. Saudi might be the swing exporter - China is now the swing importer. Blas: China's new oil-price weapon (Bloomberg, £)

Wind (cheap, quick) just overtook nuclear (expensive, slow) just as Shell sold its turbines (greedy, greedy)

Wind bigger than nukes? Yup - added 870 GW in a decade to nuclear's 40. Dorfman has a new paper as to why: New nukes take too long, and cost too much. (I love nukes. So cool. But he’s right. Old tech that we don’t need any more).

And Shell’s still bailing? Shell wants fat oil cash today, not steady utility-style trickles over decades. Not a verdict on wind. It's a verdict on Shell.

Read more: Meder - wind ≈ nuclear, growing far faster · Shell's $1bn windfarm sale

One thing to worry about

Surprise (not): The UN's mid-year climate talks in Bonn - the warm-up for the next COP - ended in gridlock (Climate Home).

• Developing countries want cash from rich countries, who don’t want to cough up

• Fossil exporters want nothing to change (‘science under attack’)

• Big countries make big promises… that are the same as their existing promises

Same old.

Treaties won’t change things.

Tech will.

One thing to be optimistic about

China's electric high-speed rail network just passed 50,000 km - longer than the rest of the world's combined. (Razzouk).

In 17 years. In constrast, Europe has 8,500km.

Purely electrons, no diesel.

Displaces around 1.5 million barrels of oil a day.

While everyone watched the Strait of Hormuz, China was laying wires that make it irrelevant.

If you’ve got more time…

Ukraine is Russia-proofing its power grid with renewables.

Big thermal plants (eg gas) mean a small number of juicy targets - one missile can knock out the power for a region. Russia has spent three winters going at them.

So Ukraine is building thousands of solar-and-battery nodes: distributed generation you can't knock out easily (Barron's).

It's the same lesson Hormuz just taught the oil market, only in uniform: concentrated energy is a vulnerability, distributed energy is a defence.