A Holiday-Escape from the Echo Chamber
The holidays are coming, and with them a great chance to escape a bit from our echo chambers. Given the accelerating pace of technology, this escape becomes ever more important - it’s more important to be right than to be consistent, particularly in business. It is all but impossible to find “un-biased” information, thus the key becomes quality and transparency of the analysis to effectively challenge ourselves. Here some suggestions for generally high quality information sources for broad perspectives.
Podcasts
Epic. An MIT computer science professor running a podcast focused on understanding different aspects of life driven by pure curiosity. Guests range from black hole & astrobiology researchers to Jeff Bezos & Elon Musk to politicians on the opposite end of the political spectrum. This podcast gets as close as is probably possible to being unbiased whilst providing very thought-provoking perspectives. Cannot recommend it highly enough.
Before moving to “energy-only” focused sources, a recommendation for what in my very subjective view is the greatest business podcast of all - (ultra)long-format, often split into multiple 2-4 hour episodes on a single topic, covering the history and business models of iconic companies spanning all industries. Personal favorites - Standard Oil, SpaceX, and LVMH. The interview with Charlie Munger a few weeks before his passing is also very worth listening to. The podcast is available via the above weblinks and other providers like Spotify, Apple, Google, etc.
Peter Tertzakian and Jackie Forrest, both Managing Directors at Arc Financial, host this Canada-centric energy podcast with wide-ranging perspectives from guests in industry, First Nations, and politics. Pretty much a must for anyone interested in the Canadian energy landscape. Note - the Arc Energy Research Institute also publishes the weekly “ARC Charts”, summarizing key statistics in a very concise manner.
Hosted by Venture Capitalist Shayle Kann of Energy Impact Partners, this podcast series explores economics and business models of a wide range of energy technologies. He gets into the numbers, avoids fluff and provides constructive challenges around assumptions.
David Roberts, the host of the Volts podcast, has a journalism background and he approaches energy topics mainly from an environmentalist perspective, thus expect some political activism in this direction. Many of his podcasts go into technical details, and the quality of discussions is very high.
Reports
All Energy scenarios and forecasts have their shortcomings, but the IEA is doing a superb job at documenting its assumptions. The (very detailed) reports provide great insights into the drivers of supply and demand in various energy commodities. Expect reality to be too complex to be fully captured by the scenarios (see also Predictions are Hard, Particularly about the Future), but that doesn’t render them any less useful for understanding system dynamics.
Investment firm Lazard’s regularly updated Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) analysis provides a great overview of cost trends across the industry. It is at times criticized for underestimating total costs, e.g. by excluding electricity transmission costs. But the analysis is very consistent across different forms of energy, and more transparent than most other reports. Thus it’s a great tool for comparing macro cost-trends and relative cost competitiveness developments.
For anyone coming from a hydrocarbon industry background, the Tesla Masterplan 3 provides a true “outside the echo chamber” perspective. Unsurprisingly it doesn’t see much future for hydrocarbons (it’s also called “The Plan to Eliminate Fossil Fuels”), but the way Tesla approaches the challenges around mining, waste heat, production scaling etc. is quite unique, and worth a read.
Websites & Blogs
Short daily reads on energy topics from oil well productivity to LNG exports to solar PV costs.
McKinsey Insights
McKinsey’s insight articles both for electric power and natural gas and for oil and gas provide very condensed information on key topics - worth the (free) subscription.
RBN Energy’s Daily Energy Blog
High quality analysis with even higher information density mainly about North American hydrocarbon markets, but also including some articles on offshore wind, CCUS, etc. And written in a quite entertaining style.
Paul Martin, a Canadian chemical process development expert, publishes blogs and articles on a variety of energy topics, focused on hydrogen. These usually express strong opinions, but most are very transparent and underpin their central thesis with detailed “first principles” based calculations. Disagreeing with an assumption? Simply replace it with your own and see where the outcome gets you.