The Problem with Academic Articles on Commercial Energy
Last week a Michigan academic team published an article approximately titled “BEVs 4x as efficient with renewables as Hydrogen cars.” Unfortunately for them, this has no basis in reality. Unfortunately for all of us, scientists as peer-reviewers are not qualified to review anything commercial, yet somehow they keep doing so. I have an engineering PhD from Harvard, so I have direct experience on how these sausages are made.
Note that for the “BEV charging 4x as efficient” article: The largest BEV charging station in the world is powered by natural gas. The commercial reality is that grids can’t support large-scale battery charging of high-utilization vehicles, they can’t support large-scale charging of every low-utilization vehicle, and this will be the case for the foreseeable future. Hydrogen is being built out now and much lower cost ($28B for grid upgrades in IIJA vs $8B for commercial H2 projects). So these authors pretty much started with a completely unrealistic commercial scenario for batteries, then sprinted with it, right off a cliff.
Here is a direct example for their analysis of aircraft:
They are missing a few key points. First, batteries are too heavy for aircraft to fly. Second, planes are high-utilization assets – they don’t sit around long enough to charge. Third, a cross-country plane in the US uses about 360MWh of energy – charging this in the one hour it is boarding is not feasible with any current electronics and a single plane would require 1/3 of a full-scale power plant to charge. Reality did not come into play in this article, yet this is common in academic writings on commercial projects.
For all battery examples in this article they disregard the fact that renewable power needs to be used at the time of production or stored. Their assumption that there is no storage in between or that there is no backup natural gas plant is ridiculous. For fuel cells, they use outdated tech and designs that would never make it past Final Investment Decision on a project. The rest of the article is filled with similar issues. Academics opining on commercially unrealistic designs is a major unresolved issue.
Listening to these splashy articles that stray from basic science would be like the CEO of an energy company listening to a newly minted graduate that wanted to explain basic supply and demand while ignoring commercial reality. We don’t do that, so don’t pay heed to any of these academic articles in H2.
I want to make clear that most basic science publications are great. It’s when they stray into commercial implications that they almost certainly should be ignored.
Article flow:
The push to publish – whether or not it’s good
The Replication Crisis - why science is broken
The major problems with academics writing about industry
They have no industry experience
They have no commercial experience
They have no finance experience
They have no product experience
Their advisors are equally clueless
What this means for H2
Who you can trust – sort of
Caveat: This article became way too long, and I have skimmed over some important topics. There are many amazing researchers who do great work. I have rarely seen those ones participate in commercial discussions and comparisons.
The Push to Publish – whether or not it’s good science
There is one currency in academics – publications. There is a perverse incentive to publish as much as possible, regardless of quality. This is supposed to be kept in check by peer review- other academics reading and rejecting papers – but it’s hard to count on peer review when the reviewers also have no experience in the field that others are writing about -- specifically anything with commercial relevance. In short – start with skepticism in any STEM-based publication that goes beyond basic and applied sciences.
The Replication Crisis
This push to publish has led to the replicability crisis – results from papers are not reproducible by others, meaning the results were either erroneous or straight up fake. Worse these fake results get cited a lot more. From the linked wiki article:
“In 2021, a study conducted by University of California, San Diego found that papers that cannot be replicated are 153 times more likely to be cited. For papers published in Nature Science, non-replicable papers were 300 times more cited than replicable ones.[101]
These studies are often highly sensational findings, so they get cited a lot.
Want to get tenure? Get cited a lot. Want to get cited a lot? Publish fake splashy articles.
What’s this mean for you? You can’t trust most splashy papers that have been published.
The other major problems with academics playing in commercial space
STEM academics are trained in and by people who are familiar with applied sciences and nothing else. As soon as they step into commercial spaces without any applicable experience we should disregard that portion of their work. Below are the major gaps that you can find in just about any article by STEM academics that stray into commercial implications.
Look for these signs in articles before making business or policy decisions based on articles.
Most academics have no direct industry or sector experience
Most PhDs don’t have sector experience. Those with sector experience largely were never high enough in the food chain to get representative sector experience. As a result almost no STEM PhD student understands the commercial sector they write on. It also turns out that all real information about how a sector works is under NDA, so an academic without prior real-world experience can’t get an idea of how a sector really works. Their only option is to take publicly available information, which is usually marketing material, and then propagate it. If one or more of these are true, any commercial implications in articles are poorly formed opinions and should not be admissible for decision making.
They have no commercial experience
Commercial experience usually involves working on a full deal cycle. It doesn’t come from being an analyst (unless it’s front line bizdev support) or from being a consultant. There are real-world commercial issues that block most projects from being completed, and people without commercial experience have no clue what these are.
An example for one of the papers above: BEVs vs fuel cell costs. Battery charging gets more expensive as you put more on the grid because they require upgrades to local transformers, local substations and power distribution lines, regional substations and large scale power distribution lines, new power plants, and massive grid balancing studies to add more BEVs to the grid. If a writer had run a single interconnect project and seen the $250/kw - $500/kw cost for interconnect, they’d realize how silly their projections of BEV costs are.
They have no finance experience and don’t know how infrastructure gets funded
ROI is not a concept in most academia. The idea of cost of capital, internal rate of return, and other important ROI metrics were not something a STEM PhD would encounter or be that familiar with. Budget contingencies, cost over-runs, cost-sharing, and free cash flow to allow for equity or debt raises are so far off from their view that they aren’t ever considered.
They have no product experience
A huge part of product dev is understanding cost-downs from plant scale, production volume, and moving down the cost curve – all parts of product strategy and product dev. Without an understanding of cost curves, especially the increasing costs of adding more battery-powered things to a grid that can’t handle it, any commercial suggestion from a STEM article is irrelevant.
Their advisors are usually equally inexperienced
Professors are typically PhD students that graduate, excel at research, and then get promoted to a position of leadership with zero training or assessment of their leadership skills. They also rarely get real world experience.
There are exceptions. But if an article doesn’t have one of those exceptions, it’s likely junk.
What this means for H2
Generally speaking, if an academic starts suggesting commercial policy or implications, they don’t have the experience or skill for that. Don’t invest based on what they say, don’t push for policy based on what they say.
It doesn’t take long to do a linkedin search for the primary author and their advisor – usually the advisor is the second or third author. If they don’t have deep commercial experience, and none of the other authors are from industry, the commercial implications should be disregarded.
Who you can trust
Good (most science that largely stick to basic and applied science):
Scientists that are publishing repeated, observable natural phenomena (IPCC, many but not all climate scientists). To be honest, this is most science, and you will never read about it because it isn’t sexy
Professors with applicable real world experience – often found at business school and government schools but be sure to check their credentials. Some will be in STEM, but this is very rare
Generally scientists publishing basic and applied science work are good – especially once their exact work or similar work has been repeated
Reg Flags:
Those publishing anything that claims to have commercial implications
Anyone publishing anything in a field where they don’t have 5+ years of private sector experience at a relevant level
Anything having to do with splashy topics like hydrogen, BEVS, or clean energy
Definitely bad
Anything sensational with major commercial implications published by a STEM research group with no commercial experience
Pretty much everything I’ve seen comparing hydrogen to anything else, or anything that claims to understand commercial implications of anything hydrogen
Also really anything that talks about electricity that doesn’t discuss how difficult it is to expand the grid
Conclusions
Academics need to publish to survive. They also need to try to tie their work to real-world relevance. That’s all fine, but it should be taken as prose – not as commercially relevant for policy or projects. Once an academic crosses this line, their work goes from science to opinion, and their opinion is less relevant than many people with serious commercial experience.
Generally I have strong support for climate science. It’s when the scientists start to propose entirely unrealistic commercial changes that you should put down the article, forget about it, and go live the rest of your life.
