Copyright Watts Up With That
By Portia Roberts Higher education is increasingly under attack for what and how students learn. Some of that is political. Some, deserved. “Energy” is now one such political battleground. Environmental studies have swallowed the energy domain, stripping it of realism and producing too many graduates unready for the real world. Will most undergraduates learn the physical and systemic constraints that drive energy realities? About the sources and systems behind the primary materials that keep the lights on, run factories, power data centers? Or about the tradeoffs inherent to all energy sources? Unfortunately, the animating theme of many “energy” courses today is ending of the age of oil and a narrative how about easily wind and solar can replace hydrocarbons. Yet even the International Energy Agency, once projecting peak oil demand in less than a decade, now projects a continued rise in oil demand for quite some time. Odds are few students will wrestle with these facts. Look at three realities. German citizens pay among the highest household power prices in the EU (and more than double the electricity cost in the U.S.) even after the energy shock eased from the Ukrainian invasion. Its factories have struggled, with output contracting through late 2024 and mid-2025. Coal units were even brought back during the crisis before coal generation fell again in 2024—evidence of policy whiplash more than mastery. China, by contrast, is “all-in.” It secures oil and gas supply—now the world’s biggest crude importer, predominantly from Russia and the Middle East—while also rapidly building coal, nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar facilities. Beijing dominates the world’s downstream chokepoints for electrification: most global lithium and cobalt refining, a large share of nickel, and ~90% of rare-earth processing, plus the bulk of battery components. The U.S. cannot easily compete here any time soon. Africa shows the cost of energy scarcity. The continent’s per-capita energy consumption is roughly one-eighth the European average and less than one-15th that of the U.S—and the health toll is severe. Household air pollution from cooking with solid fuels remains a leading killer. African electricity production, more than doubling in two decades, predominantly with gas and coal, isn’t even close to sufficient. Affordable, reliable energy is the bedrock of human flourishing. Societies with more use more–– and tend to improve their environmental footprint. Future employees, innovators, and leaders eager to tackle environmental challenges, create sound policies, reduce poverty, and build advanced industries—and argue from facts—must learn fundamentals about the systems that power literally everything. A new two-part review from the National Center for Energy Analytics asked a team at University of Southern California to examine more than 1,400 energy-related courses at the top 50 U.S. universities. Roughly seven in ten courses are climate-centric—organized around emissions reduction and activism—while only about three in ten are “agnostic,” meaning they offer a focus on today’s energy systems, markets, technologies, and trade-offs. The most-mentioned technologies in all syllabi are wind and solar; courses on fossil-fuel technologies barely appear despite their centrality to today’s energy system. Nonetheless, as the NCEA research found in ranking universities by the share of “agnostic” coursework, some schools do approach a healthy balance. But most of the top 50 do not. In too many catalogs you can earn “energy” credentials without a hard look at the realities of baseload power, capacity factors, dispatchability, materials and mining, LNG logistics, refining, or the geopolitics of fuels. There’s too much wishful training, not education. This is not an argument to ignore climate or environmental studies. It’s an argument to teach energy as a system. Physics, geology, engineering, economics, and geopolitics all matter. Electricity and fuels are not interchangeable. Heavy transport and petrochemicals have little to do with residential demand. Intermittency, inherent to wind and solar power, is not a moral failing; it’s a technical fact that must be managed. That data centers rank as only a small contributor to overall global energy consumption matters little when, in the U.S., AI is driving the first spike in electricity consumption in several decades. And yes, hydrocarbons remain pivotal even in optimistic transition scenarios. Graduates who don’t understand basic realities won’t be able to run the world we have let alone build the one we want. Reform is straightforward: First, raise students’ energy IQ by making “Energy Reality 101” core. Every policy, business, law, and general engineering student should be exposed to a quantitative survey covering realities of power vs. energy, reliability, cost, grids, mining and materials, fuel logistics, and the trade-offs across all major technologies—and the state-of-play for what is going on in the markets for oil, gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, not just wind, and solar. Second, rebalance the catalog. Departments should target a mix where at least a reasonable share of offerings cover systems and markets, the nature of technologies that dominate world supply (i.e., including fossil fuels), and a full scope look at trade-offs. That’s closer to the work and policy world students will later encounter. There would be some significant benefit to linking credit to site visits and practicums: grid control centers, substations, refineries and gas plants, ports and LNG terminals, mines and recycling facilities, wind and solar sites. Seeing maintenance, intermittency, safety culture, and permitting constraints speaks louder than intangible numbers and ideas. For better or worse, energy is politically charged. Any reform of curricula must be paired with durable protections for free speech and debate—something that has become far more obvious these days. Teach students how to argue with facts—especially on subjects where physics, economics, and environmental goals collide. Energy is complicated precisely because it underpins everything. The linkage between energy, and the technologies that supply it, are intimately linked to prosperity. Different areas of the system require different tools and timelines. But turning college syllabi into a single-destination campaign deprives students of the very literacy that innovation and stewardship demand. Portia Roberts is the policy director at the National Center for Energy Analytics.
