Essay · Energy
After Scarcity, Before Abundance
The awkward middle decade of the energy transition, and who pays for it.
Most energy narratives skip the middle. There is a dirty present and a clean future, and the story is about how fast we travel between them. But the interesting — and dangerous — part is the overlap, the decade or two in which the old system must keep running reliably while the new one is built on top of it.
In that overlap, two systems are paid for at once. The retiring system still needs maintenance, staff, and fuel; the arriving system needs capital long before it earns. Someone carries that double cost, and how it is distributed decides whether the transition is politically survivable.
This essay looks at three places the overlap cost tends to land — on ratepayers, on taxpayers, or on the balance sheets of incumbent operators — and argues that pretending it can land nowhere is how transitions stall. The technical path to a clean grid is increasingly clear. The financial choreography of the middle decade is not, and it is where most of the real risk now sits.
The firms and governments that handle the transition well will be the ones that name the overlap cost honestly and plan its distribution in advance, rather than discovering it as a series of bill shocks and political crises. Abundance is a reasonable destination. It is not a plan for the journey.