Both New York Democrats and Republicans are embracing an all-of-the-above Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) energy strategy that includes a role for wind and solar because it provides a “diversity of generation sources”. I believe that wind is useless and solar should only be used on-site to reduce a structure’s energy use, so I have wanted to respond to this for a while. However, providing an easily understood comprehensive explanation why dependency on wind and solar is flawed has given me pause. Richard Lyon has written up exactly what I needed and this article describes his series of posts describing the core arguments of his forthcoming book The Energy Trap: Why the Renewable Energy Transition Can’t Work — And What Can.
I am convinced that implementation of the Climate Act net-zero mandates will do more harm than good if the future electric system relies only on wind, solar, and energy storage because of reliability and affordability risks. The opinions expressed in this article do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other organization I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.
Overview
The Climate Act established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction in GHG emissions and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050. The Climate Action Council (CAC) was responsible for preparing the 2022 Scoping Plan that outlined how to “achieve the State’s bold clean energy and climate agenda.” In 2025, the State Energy Planning Board approved the 2025 Energy Plan that “provides broad program and policy development direction to guide energy-related decision making “. The documents did not provide a complete, transparent accounting of the total costs to achieve the Climate Act mandates or a feasibility analysis that demonstrated that the proposed dependency on renewable energy would provide safe and adequate electricity.
Wind and solar are intermittent, diffuse, and correlated. I believe that those physical realities preclude their use as the backbone of New York’s electric system. Explaining why those characteristics and others make a renewable energy transition impossible is a challenge, however. Richard Lyon has provided the necessary documentation by describing his forthcoming book at The State of Britain Substack.
He is a former senior oil and gas operations manager with 35 years of international experience, and academic qualifications in electrical engineering and power systems, petroleum engineering, and energy economics.
His series of posts: “walks through the core arguments of my book The Energy Trap: Why the Renewable Energy Transition Can’t Work — And What Can. Each post is self-contained, but they build on one another”. He suggests starting at the top and once you’ve read them all, use this page is your reference. In this article I quote each post with some comments.
Renewables Cannot Work – Physics
Every electrical engineer has told me straight up that renewables won’t work because “physics” In Chapter 1 — The Physics of Energy Lyons provides an analogy that explains why they all say that:
There is far more heat energy in a swimming pool than in a pan of boiling water. You can boil an egg in the pan. You cannot boil an egg in the pool. And if you doubled the size of the pool, you’d double the energy available — and still have a cold, raw egg.
This is not a riddle. It is the single most important concept in the energy debate, and almost nobody making energy policy understands it.
The difference is not quantity but quality: the gradient between hot and cold that makes work possible. This chapter introduces the three physical measures — energy gradient, energy density, and areal power density — that determine whether an energy source can sustain industrial civilisation. Every successful transition in history moved up on all three. The proposal to replace gas and nuclear with wind and solar reverses the direction.
When I said that renewables won’t work because they are diffuse, energy density is an example of that problem. Lyons goes on to explain two other physical constraints: gradient or the difference in energy availability and power density or the amount of energy that can be extracted from a given area. The weather related impacts that wind and solar are intermittent and correlated compound these issues.
Renewables Cannot Work – Chemistry
I always want to ask people who want to ban fossil fuels if they want to ban the use of fossil fuels for energy generation and as feedstock to society In Chapter 2 — The Industrial Metabolism Lyons shows why we are not ready to go completely off fossil fuels.
Steel, cement, ammonia, and plastics: four materials that hold up virtually everything. Each requires hydrocarbons not merely as a fuel but as a chemical feedstock — the carbon and hydrogen atoms become part of the product itself. Electricity is an energy carrier, not a fuel, and each conversion from one to the other loses energy. “Electrify everything” is a slogan that ignores the chemistry. The industrial core of civilisation will continue to require hydrocarbons for the foreseeable future.
Renewables Life Cycle
New York’s Climate Act accounting mandates the life cycle of fossil-fired infrastructure be considered but ignores the life cycle of renewables. In Chapter 4 — The renewables paradox Lyons eviscerates that approach:
The number that matters is not how much energy a turbine produces, but how much is left over after the system has fed itself. Add storage, grid infrastructure, and fossil-fueled backup to the headline figures and the system Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI} drops into the danger zone of the energy cliff — where small errors in the ratio can be civilisation-ending. The IEA calculates that onshore wind requires nine times more critical minerals than a gas plant, offshore wind thirteen times more. Every link in the supply chain is a hydrocarbon operation. And because wind and solar wear out in 20–30 years while a nuclear plant runs for 60–80, the entire system must be rebuilt two or three times within the life of the conventional plant it replaces.
Magical Solutions
Looking back at the Climate Act Council deliberations during the development of the Scoping Plan there was great faith in the ideas that energy efficiency would provide significant benefits, that hydrogen could replace fossil fuels for hard to electrify applications among other things, and that reducing energy use would not affect the economy Lyons addresses these ideas in Chapter 5 — The escape hatches.
Three reasons for believing the transition can still work — efficiency, hydrogen, and decoupling — and why none of them survive the evidence. Efficiency triggers the Jevons Paradox: cheaper energy use produces more use, not less, and economy-wide rebound effects typically exceed 50%. Hydrogen is an energy carrier with a round-trip efficiency of 30–40%, requiring infrastructure that would need to be largely rebuilt from materials resistant to hydrogen embrittlement. And decoupling — the claim that GDP can grow while energy use shrinks — has never been achieved by any country except through recession or near-stagnation. The escape hatches are closed.
Economics
Richard Ellenbogen constantly points out to me that renewable energy proponents do not understand the economics of infrastructure development. In Chapter 6 — Energy and your money Lyons points out that there is a more fundamental economic problem.
Money is a claim on future energy conversion. When the money supply grows while the energy supply contracts, each unit of money claims less — and what follows is not a policy choice but an arithmetic certainty. McKinsey estimates the transition at $275 trillion, or 7.5% of global GDP, likely an underestimate. No government can raise that from taxation, so the unspoken plan is to print it. But you cannot print energy. Since 2008 the global economy has added roughly $200 trillion in debt against a contracting energy supply. Every pension, every bond, every mortgage is a promise that the energy to honour it will be there. The physics says it will not.
Oil Depletion
I am not as pessimistic about oil depletion as Lyons. In Chapter 3 — The depleting oil inheritance he argues:
Not all oil is equal. A barrel of Saudi crude costs $10 to extract and returns over 30:1 on energy invested. The Canadian oil sands yield bitumen so heavy it must be mined or melted with steam. Conventional crude peaked around 2006; the shale boom that appeared to disprove peak oil was financed by $28 trillion in central-bank balance-sheet expansion and was cash-flow negative for over a decade. Discovery peaked in the 1960s at roughly 50 billion barrels a year; in 2024 the world discovered under 2 billion while consuming 30 billion. Oil is the bridge fuel that builds the new energy system while keeping us alive: we can’t squander a single barrel on replacements that can’t work. It’s running out.
I am optimistic because when there were similar historical constraints solutions were found and I expect that to continue. For example, if we simply exploit resources we know exist, like New York’s shale gas, that are off limits now for irrational reasons, then there will be additional resources. Despite my optimism the fact is that transforming to a new energy system is an enormous challenge that will take decades. I agree that we should not be squandering oil.
The Solution
Energy system realists have argued for a long time that society needs a rational discussion of the future energy system and that always includes a nuclear power component. Lyons addresses this in Chapter 7 — Forging a new realism.
The energy trap: the renewable transition is consuming the very hydrocarbon surplus needed to build whatever comes next. The only proven way up the quality ladder is nuclear — two million times the energy density of coal, power density matching gas, sixty to eighty years of operation from a one-time construction investment. Even so, a gap of decades is unavoidable while the new system is built. A seven-point blueprint — start with the physics, protect the inheritance, fast-track nuclear, eliminate demand, redirect subsidies, anchor money to energy, trust the public with the truth — offers a framework for navigating a managed descent rather than an unmanaged collapse.
Discussion
Taken together, Lyons’ work makes it clear that an “all of the above” energy policy is not prudent policy but a way to avoid addressing hard physical and economic limits. His articles show that modern society depends on high‑quality, high‑density energy sources that deliver large surplus energy after the system feeds itself. He shows that utility‑scale wind and solar move us away from that path and toward the energy cliff once storage, backup, and grid costs are honestly counted. At the same time, fossil fuels remain indispensable chemical feedstocks for steel, cement, ammonia, plastics, and broader societal needs. They cannot simply be swapped out by electricity or slogans like “electrify everything.” In that light, “all of the above” becomes a dangerously vague invitation to waste our finite fossil fuels on low‑return projects, under build nuclear, and pretend that efficiency, hydrogen, and using less energy while still growing the GDP will magically close the gap. New York must commit to physically credible options with nuclear at the center and stop making believe that wind and solar should be included.
Conclusion
As an outsider with no concerns about appeasing the special interests foisting wind and solar energy upon New York, I can stop pretending that an “all of the above” energy policy is appropriate. In the series of posts that Richard Lyon uses to describe his forthcoming book The Energy Trap: Why the Renewable Energy Transition Can’t Work — And What Can he clearly explains why utility-scale and wind and solar are a distraction for a rational energy policy. Besides the intractable problems described here, there are enormous costs and scandalous environmental impacts related to wind and solar energy resource development. It is time to just say no.
Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York 