Energy Q&A
Forty questions about how energy actually works, answered with sourced figures from The Complete Picture of Energy. Every number carries its unit, its year and its origin.
Fundamentals
- What is the difference between energy and power?Energy is a quantity; power is a rate. Energy is the total amount of work that can be done or heat that can be…
- What is exergy and why does energy quality matter?Exergy is the portion of a given quantity of energy that can actually do useful work. Energy has quality as we…
- What is LCOE and where does it mislead?LCOE, the levelized cost of electricity, divides a power plant's lifetime construction and operating costs by …
- What is EROI (energy return on investment)?EROI, energy return on investment, measures how many units of energy a resource delivers for every unit of ene…
Fossil Fuels
- Do fossil fuels really come from dinosaurs?No. Fossil fuels are genuinely fossils, but they are not the remains of Tyrannosaurus or Triceratops. They are…
- What is the difference between reserves, resources and the R/P ratio?These are three progressively narrower categories. The resource base is all the fuel estimated to exist underg…
- How does coal form and what are coal ranks?Coal is the compressed remains of Carboniferous swamp forests that grew about 300 million years ago, at a time…
- Does clean coal and CCS actually work?Carbon capture and storage works technically but fails economically. Projects such as Boundary Dam in Canada a…
- Why is Asia still building coal plants while the West retires them?Asia keeps building coal because coal is still the fast lane to a middle-class economy, supplying the cheap, r…
- What are fracking and the shale revolution?Hydraulic fracturing pumps a fluid that is roughly 99.5% water and sand, with a small dose of chemical additiv…
- Why is Singapore a refining hub with no oil of its own?Singapore produces no oil, yet it ranks among the world's top three oil trading and refining centres alongside…
- How does LNG shipping actually work?LNG travels as a liquid. Natural gas is chilled to minus 162°C, which shrinks it to 1/600th of its gaseous vol…
- How serious is the methane leakage problem?Serious enough to cancel out the entire climate advantage of gas over coal. Methane warms the atmosphere about…
- Is natural gas really a bridge fuel?It depends on two variables: the leak rate and the destination. Burning gas emits roughly 50% less CO₂ than co…
Nuclear
- How is nuclear waste actually dealt with?In three steps. Spent fuel sits in a water-filled cooling pool for five to ten years, then moves into dry cask…
- Why is nuclear power so expensive?Nuclear power is expensive to build, not to run. Almost the entire cost is front-loaded: a decade of construct…
- What are small modular reactors (SMRs)?A small modular reactor (SMR) is a reactor of less than 300 MW output whose main components are built in a cen…
- What actually went wrong at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima?Each failed in a different way. Three Mile Island (1979) was a failure of the human-machine interface: after a…
- Will Singapore build a nuclear power plant?Singapore has made no final decision to deploy nuclear power, but since 2025 it has shifted from continued obs…
Solar and Wind
- Why did solar become the cheapest electricity in history?Because solar PV is a technology, not a fuel. Technologies follow Swanson's Law: every doubling of cumulative …
- What is the duck curve and why does more solar make the grid harder to run?The duck curve is the daily shape of grid net load — total demand minus solar output. Abundant midday solar pr…
- Does solar power really use up huge amounts of land?No. Supplying all of America's electricity from utility-scale solar would take roughly 22,000 square miles — a…
- Singapore is sunny — so why is its solar share so low?Because Singapore has only 730 km² of land, and rooftops are effectively its entire 'land'. Solar capacity rea…
- Why does doubling wind speed give eight times the power?Because the power available in wind is proportional to the cube of wind speed: double the speed and power does…
- Why is offshore wind so expensive?Because the cost is not in the turbine but in getting it into the sea: foundations, subsea cables and installa…
- What is a grid-forming inverter and why does the grid need inertia?A grid-forming (GFM) inverter establishes and holds the grid's own voltage and frequency, using a virtual sync…
Hydro, Ocean and Biomass
- What is pumped hydro and why is it still the world's biggest battery?Pumped-storage hydropower (PSH) uses electricity to pump water from a lower to an upper reservoir, then releas…
- What are the four types of hydropower plant?Hydropower comes in four forms: reservoir plants, where a dam impounds a river and the storage allows peaking …
- What did the Three Gorges Dam really cost?The real cost of the Three Gorges Dam was the forced relocation of roughly 1.4 million residents from ancestra…
- What is OTEC (ocean thermal energy conversion)?Ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) drives a heat cycle on the temperature difference between tropical surf…
- Is biomass power actually carbon neutral?Not straightforwardly. Burning a tree releases exactly as much CO₂ as it absorbed while growing, but that equa…
- How does waste-to-energy incineration work?A modern waste-to-energy (WTE) plant is built around a moving grate incinerator: refuse advances along the gra…
Grids and Project Development
- Why do renewable projects wait years for grid connection?Because interconnection is a real physical and administrative queue: until the studies for the projects ahead …
- What is curtailment and why is clean power thrown away?Curtailment is when wind turbines and solar farms that are already physically connected, with the resource ava…
- Why must the grid balance supply and demand every second?Because electricity cannot be stored in bulk the way oil can — it must be produced and consumed in the same mi…
- How do large-scale blackouts actually happen?Large blackouts are almost never caused by a single failure; they are cascading failures. One local fault push…
Storage and Hydrogen
- What are the main types of energy storage and how long does each last?Storage technologies sort into three duration tiers: seconds to minutes (flywheels and supercapacitors), hours…
- LFP vs NMC batteries — how do you choose?Choose LFP for grid storage and NMC where weight matters, such as long-range electric vehicles. NMC has the hi…
- What do the hydrogen colours (green, blue, grey) actually mean?Hydrogen's colours describe the carbon intensity of how it was made, not the gas itself. Grey hydrogen comes f…
- Where does hydrogen make sense, and where is it a waste?Hydrogen belongs where electricity cannot go. The Energy Transitions Commission's Hydrogen Ladder sorts uses i…