The global energy transition in a single home

A message from President & CEO Dr. Max Holmes

My house was built in 1870. It has been heated by wood, coal, oil, natural gas, and now electricity drawn from the sun. In one sense, that is a mundane property record. In another, it is the entire history of human energy, compressed into a single address.

Wood came first. It always does. Since our ancestors learned to control fire, biomass has been the default answer to cold and darkness. The house would have had a cast-iron stove, fed by wood cut from nearby forests. This is how virtually every human being on earth stayed warm for tens of thousands of years, and many still do. It worked, but it was labor-intensive, land-hungry, and contributed to deforestation.

Coal replaced wood in the industrializing Northeast not because it was loved but because it was dense, cheap, and abundant. A ton of coal contained far more energy than the equivalent volume of wood and could supply cities that had long since stripped their surrounding forests. Then came oil—heating oil delivered by truck, burned in a furnace that could be thermostatically controlled. Oil heat was modern. It was convenient. It was what the house was running on when my wife and I bought it in 2000. The following year, we switched to natural gas, piped directly to the boiler—cleaner than oil, cheaper at the time, and widely regarded as a “transition fuel.” Last year, we made what I believe will be the final transition: heat pumps, powered by electricity, with solar panels on the roof and a contract for renewable energy for anything we draw from the grid.

The sequence—biomass, coal, oil, gas, electricity—is not just our home’s story. It is the arc of modern civilization. And the direction of travel has always been the same: toward fuels that are denser, cleaner, and more controllable, and away from those that are dirtier, heavier, and harder to move. Electricity, especially when generated from wind and sun, is the logical end of that arc. The sun and wind are limitless natural resources and our ability to harness them into electricity will only continue to be more efficient. The energy transition the world is now debating is not some radical rupture; it is the next step in a journey that has been underway since the first furnace replaced the first wood-fired stove.

The only real question is speed. And here, the conflict now consuming the Persian Gulf offers an unexpected answer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz following the outbreak of military conflict with Iran has removed close to one-fifth of global oil supplies from the market. Prices have reached $100 per barrel or higher. Nations that import the majority of their fuel from the Persian Gulf are facing genuine shortages. The head of the International Energy Agency has called it the greatest global energy security challenge in history.

The conventional assumption might be that an oil shock slows the energy transition—that higher prices make everything more expensive and governments retreat to fossil fuels out of desperation. History suggests the opposite. The 1973 Arab oil embargo helped to launch solar research, energy efficiency standards, and nuclear expansion. Countries around the world are again confronting the danger of energy dependence. That recognition tends to produce investment in alternatives, not capitulation to the status quo.

There are headwinds, of course. The current U.S. administration has been openly hostile to renewable energy, rolling back incentives and attempting to prop up coal and oil production. But administrations are temporary. Solar panels and heat pumps are not. The economics of clean energy have already crossed the threshold at which policy resistance can reverse them; what governments can do now is slow the transition at the margin, not stop it. And a geopolitical crisis that makes the cost of fossil-fuel dependence unmistakable—not in future climate projections but in today’s energy prices—has a way of clarifying minds.

My house has been through this before. It didn’t choose its fuels for ideological reasons; it followed the logic of cost, availability, and technology. The world’s energy system will do the same.

At a time when climate victories are scarce, an acceleration of the energy transition is reason for hope. Those with the financial means—and perhaps the broader good fortune to live in a time and place where the choice is available—can lean into this transition, doing what they can to speed the inevitable shift away from fossil fuels and toward what I believe will be humanity’s ultimate energy source: clean electricity generated from renewable sources.

The energy transition alone will not solve the climate crisis, but it is an essential step in that direction.

Onward.