Matthew McGrath

Residency project

Flying on dead donkeys: the unintended consequences of the global clean energy transition

The global switch to clean energy is the biggest rebuild of how we power our lives in more than a century. It is also producing consequences nobody planned for. Policies that look coherent on paper can fail, or backfire, once they meet real infrastructure, markets and people. Take sustainable aviation fuel. UK airlines need to have 10% of their fuel from greener sources by 2030, yet there may not be enough waste material in the world, animal fat and offal included, to make that much. As one observer put it, we’ll all be flying on dead donkeys.

My Frontiers residency, hosted by Professor Richard Cowell at Cardiff University, looks at these gaps between political ambition and what actually happens on the ground. I’m drawing on research into why real energy systems behave so differently from the models used to design them: path dependency and lock-in in Cardiff’s work on energy governance, unexpected policy outcomes at Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, and how money and stranded-asset risk shape the pace of change at Oxford. This isn’t a list of failures. I want to understand how complex systems really change, and where they surprise us, for good or ill.