"It was not supposed to be like this"

“It was not supposed to be like this,” the Financial Times’ editorial board complained in a column lamenting the troubles of the EV industry that are interfering with global transport electrification plans.

It is a sentiment likely to resonate strongly with transition investment fund managers, who saw their largest quarterly outflows between January and March, at a total of $458 billion, according to Reuters data released recently.

The sentiment is also popular in Europe, where companies are packing and leaving for greener pastures in the United States, whose government is giving more money to wind and solar developers.

The popularity extends to the UK as well, where transition cheerleaders are encountering “supply chain strains” that were, apparently, unexpected. It is increasingly looking like the energy transition is fraught with unexpected turns of events. If only someone could have seen it all coming.

Alas, it was impossible. After all, who could have foreseen that European governments won’t have an unending supply of money to pour into local wind and solar developers to keep them alive as costs rise as costs tend to do when interest rates rise?

Who could have possibly foreseen that EV makers will find it impossible to make their new cars as cheap as ICE vehicles (or Chinese EVs), reduce charging times to a few minutes, and build extensive charging networks in a matter of a handful of years?

What sort of genius would it have taken to foresee that the regulatory push to promote, nay mandate, transition technology would increase the cost of energy, discouraging people from adopting said technology and disappointing investors in that same technology, resulting in lower tech adoption rates, cash outflows and more trouble for industries and government donors alike?

No one. No one could have foreseen this. Welcome to the Age of Hand-Wringing, in which those who made mistakes because of some extremely wrong assumptions are now warming up for another round of mistakes based on a whole new shiny set of wrong assumptions. Both sets have the same focus: China.