Environment Seminar Series: Repowering the Global Economy with Kirsty Gogan

About the Seminar

The Energy Security Imperative: Repowering the Global Economy

Every major oil shock has defined the energy system that followed it. France reached 75% nuclear electricity within a decade of the 1973 embargo; Japan cut the oil intensity of its GDP by 30% after 1979; Europe cut Russian gas imports by 80% in the three years after 2022. The 2026 shock — the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the destruction of two-thirds of Ukraine’s generating capacity — is of the same rank, and it arrives as demand for reliable, clean power is climbing steeply.

This talk examines what energy system the present shock should build. It makes three arguments. First, energy security and decarbonisation have converged into a single delivery problem, whose binding constraints are speed, cost, land, and regulatory throughput. Second, energy density governs the land constraint: replacing the UK’s current oil consumption with hydrogen would require roughly 136,000 km² of offshore wind or 26,000 km² of solar photovoltaics, against about 55 km² of advanced nuclear heat sources. Third, nuclear energy can be delivered at the required scale only by moving from site-specific megaprojects to factory-manufactured, product-licensed systems — the transition aviation made — supported by AI-assisted siting and licensing tools that compress regulatory schedules by more than 90%. The talk draws on Terra Praxis’s REPOWER programme for repowering the world’s ~2,000 GW coal fleet, refinery-scale hydrogen and synthetic-fuel production, and deployment tools validated under crisis conditions in Ukraine.

About the Speaker