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Michael Liebreich
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Michael Liebreich

Things Michael Says on Podcasts

Host of Cleaning Up. CEO, Liebreich Associates. Managing Partner, Ecopragma Capital. Co-Founder, PragmaCharge. Founder and Contributor, BloombergNEF. Ex UK Board of Trade. Ex Board of Transport for London. Olympic skibum. Dad.

“It's not going to be pop and it's gone, like the dot-com bubble. It's just going to be this kind of process of hopes slowly dying and ebbing away, sort of like a souffle just deflating as the air goes out of it.” — Michael Liebreich, Everything Electric Podcast “There's one operating well in Mali. There's one well, which apparently drives a five-kilowatt fuel cell. That's it. Nowhere else have they got hydrogen flowing at a rate that can be used, let alone a rate that can be used to make fertilizer.” — Michael Liebreich, Everything Electric Podcast “Measuring energy demand in primary energy is about as useful as measuring nutrition in acres because it's the input to the system. And if we're enormously inefficient and we waste most primary energy, which we do, then it's similar to saying, well, Africa may have vast amounts of acres under cultivation, but it's no good if it doesn't get to people and provide the nutritional needs.” — Michael Liebreich, Everything Electric Podcast “I find it scandalous that serious politicians, that energy ministers, will look at the economy and don't know what powers it. Measuring the energy use of our economy in primary energy units is like measuring nutrition by how many acres are used in agriculture. And yet that's what we're doing.” — Michael Liebreich, Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

Where to Find Them

Michael Liebreich hosts and writes Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change , writes Thoughts of Chairman Michael , hosts and writes The Cleaning Up Newsletter , writes Inevitable and writes The Electrotech Revolution . They have also been a guest on The Energy Gang (2 times) , Everything Electric Podcast (2 times) , Volts (2 times) , Still To Be Determined , Watt It Takes and AI, Energy and Climate Podcast .

Recently: “What’s The Cost Of Being Unprepared? | Deep Dive Ukraine 05: Ben Parsons” on Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change (November 2026); “How To Run An Electricity Grid In A State Of War | Deep Dive Ukraine 04: Vitalii Zaichenko & Volodymyr Kudrytskyi” on Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change (November 2026); “How Will The Russia-Ukraine War Come To An End? Deep Dive Ukraine 03: John E. Herbst” on Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change (October 2026); “We Need More Metals Than Ever. But at What Cost? | Ep279: Rohitesh Dhawan” on Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change (October 2026); “The Race to Rebuild Ukraine's Energy Infrastructure | Deep Dive 02: Andrii Gerus & Dmytro Boroday” on Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change (October 2026); “How Energy Security Became National Security | Ep278: Alexander De Croo” on Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change (October 2026).

What They Said

“It's not going to be pop and it's gone, like the dot-com bubble. It's just going to be this kind of process of hopes slowly dying and ebbing away, sort of like a souffle just deflating as the air goes out of it.” — Michael Liebreich, Everything Electric Podcast

Liebreich explaining why he tags news of cancelled hydrogen projects "hydrogen souffle" and not "bubble". He said there is still money, political capital and unfinished projects in the system, so the decline will take years.

Everything Electric Podcast · 2026-10-05 Permalink → Listen →
Everything Electric Podcast Around 02:51 into the episode
Michael Liebreich

…because there is still money in the system, which is sort of slowly bleeding out. But so we're not quite done, but it's not. I don't think anybody's really still holding the same hopes for hydrogen that they were in 20, well, 2019, 2020, 21, 22. And then 23, it pretty much started to ebb away.

Helen Czerski

So this is the deflation of a suit. This is a souffle gone wrong. It's all sort of slowly, the gas is hissing out of it.

Michael Liebreich

You're right. I should have explained the visual metaphor as somebody who's only ever tried to make soufflés once and they did a hydrogen souffle. In other words, they kind of went up and then, you know, sort of they went down my souffles. And so maybe I'm still bitter about that, which is why I call it the hydrogen souffle. But yes, that's the idea. And actually, the choice of word, it wasn't, you know, hashtag hydrogen bubble pop, because actually it was an acknowledgement that there is money in the system. There is political capital in the system. There are all these strategy documents. There are careers. And there are projects that are still. Not yet commissioned, so yet to come online, but they are kind of walking dead. And it will take some time for all of that to ebb away. So it's not going to be pop and it's gone, like, I don't know, the dot-com bubble. It's just going to be this kind of process of hopes, you know, slowly dying and ebbing away, sort of like a souffle just deflating as…

Helen Czerski

It's very, it's very memorable. I'm all for describing economic activity in food metaphors. I'm there with that. So, and I mean, it came from this, you've mentioned the hydrogen ladder and this list of, you know, you've had several versions of the hydrogen ladder. So they kind of start at the, is…

Michael Liebreich

So there is another version. I have actually pretty much finalized version 6.0 because 2023, October 2023, when version 5 came out, is already quite some time ago. And things have moved on. Principally what has moved on has been batteries have just become even cheaper. I mean, over that period…

Helen Czerski

Maybe you just need a kind of bucket at the bottom to put them all into different, you know, just falls off the end and into the bucket of doom or the abyss of doom or something like that. It

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“There's one operating well in Mali. There's one well, which apparently drives a five-kilowatt fuel cell. That's it. Nowhere else have they got hydrogen flowing at a rate that can be used, let alone a rate that can be used to make fertilizer.” — Michael Liebreich, Everything Electric Podcast

Liebreich on the recent excitement about geological hydrogen, sometimes called white hydrogen, found underground. He said the reported finds are mostly dissolved in water and don't come out when you drill.

Everything Electric Podcast · 2026-10-05 Permalink → Listen →
Everything Electric Podcast Around 10:28 into the episode
Michael Liebreich

…because I would love if I would love it, it would be so wonderful if it was just kind of cheap and easy. And if you didn't have to put in lots of work and so on. But unfortunately, it's just a horrible, horrible process, horribly expensive process right the way through the value chain.

Helen Czerski

…and arrive in our universe and say, how are you going to get things done? You go, oh, there's all this hydrogen. Everything's made of hydrogen, right? Except on Earth, where actually there's not that much hydrogen, and where there is, it's bound up with other things. It becomes very hard to use. So

Michael Liebreich

you'll know the answer to this probably where I don't. How much of that 74% in the universe is not bound to another atom? How much of it is free? Because on Earth, you know, there is a bit of free hydrogen. And that's the other thing in the last few years, everybody's gone crazy about geological hydrogen, white hydrogen, they call it. And, you know, and you get all these, you know, breathless stories. They found 98% proof, 90% proof hydrogen through some borehole. It's like, yes, but it's actually all of it dissolved in water. And none of it comes gushing out when you punch a hole in the ground. There's one operating well in Mali. There's one well, which apparently drives a five-kilowatt fuel cell. That's it. Nowhere else have they got hydrogen flowing at a rate that can be used, let alone a rate that can be used to make fertilizer, let alone the rate that would be needed if you actually wanted to put it in a pipeline to a place where they actually make fertilizers. So, I mean, hydrogen, yeah, there's a lot of it, but it's…

Helen Czerski

So to answer your question, I think most of the hydrogen in the universe is in stars, and that probably means it's in a plasma form. So it's not, it's, it's in neither case. It's not, it's, it's, it's the two atoms that make up H2 will be floating around because it's so hot they can't stay bound…

Michael Liebreich

to the solar system, we know that's true, right? Because the sun weighs a lot more than the earth and it's all hydrogen. Okay, good. So we've got a lot of hydrogen. Fine. I don't know how you can. But it's in the sun.

Helen Czerski

I mean, that's the point. It's in the sun doing undergoing nuclear fusion in the sun. That's the right place for hydrogen. It's very good at that. I mean, stars are actually very inefficient, but you know, they're very big, so it's fine. So I had a lot of

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“Measuring energy demand in primary energy is about as useful as measuring nutrition in acres because it's the input to the system. And if we're enormously inefficient and we waste most primary energy, which we do, then it's similar to saying, well, Africa may have vast amounts of acres under cultivation, but it's no good if it doesn't get to people and provide the nutritional needs.” — Michael Liebreich, Everything Electric Podcast

Liebreich was describing what he calls the primary energy fallacy: adding up all the fuel going into an economy and treating the total as the amount that needs replacing. His argument is that what counts is the useful energy that reaches the end use.

Everything Electric Podcast · 2026-10-05 Permalink → Listen →
Everything Electric Podcast Around 18:06 into the episode
Michael Liebreich

…And in fact, last year, very interestingly, both wind and solar, each individually, overtook nuclear power output. And together, they overtook gas, which I bet not many people know. If you put wind and solar together, there's more electricity produced from them than there is now from natural gas.

Helen Czerski

…of, I think we're going to have to get a lot better at understanding where energy actually is and isn't and where useful energy is, which is obviously what really matters. It's not about how much energy there is. It's about how much useful energy is accessible. And those are different things.

Michael Liebreich

Absolutely. And I'm doing a lot of thinking about this. And I very much look forward to your book because I'm sure it'll enlighten enormously. Because I do a lot of work on trying to educate people about things like what I call the primary energy fallacy, right? If you just add up all the energy that goes into our economy and you get a number in joules or in, you know, it doesn't, you can do it in any unit. You can do it in millions of barrels of oil equivalent or petajoules or whatever. But it's so many different resources added together that it's actually utterly, utterly meaningless because you've got, you've, well, as you know, it is, it's not useful energy. What you really need to be counting is how much do we need in the economy and then work back to how we fulfill that. And the thing I've come up with now is saying that measuring energy demand in primary energy is about as useful as measuring nutrition in acres because it's the input to the system. And if we're enormously inefficient and we waste most primary energy, which we do, then it's similar to saying, well, you know, Africa may have vast amounts of acres under cultivation, but it's no good if it…

Helen Czerski

And the clarification here for people who don't think about the physics all the time is that whenever if you get, if you get your energy by combustion, you effectively waste a lot of it as heat. That's why it's inefficient.

Michael Liebreich

Two-thirds of all primary energy is, I mean, it's called waste. Waste is actually not the right word for it. It's also called rejected, because if you want to have, if you want to ride up and down your building in an elevator and you've got a lump of coal, you actually, most of the energy in the…

Helen Czerski

Well, we can have our crusade on understanding Earth as an energy cascade that we can tap into. Helen,

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“I find it scandalous that serious politicians, that energy ministers, will look at the economy and don't know what powers it. Measuring the energy use of our economy in primary energy units is like measuring nutrition by how many acres are used in agriculture. And yet that's what we're doing.” — Michael Liebreich, Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

Liebreich and guest Jan Rosenow spend the episode on what they call the primary energy fallacy — counting the coal and oil that goes in rather than the useful energy that comes out, which makes the switch to electrification look far bigger than it is. Rosenow replies with a story about posting a Sankey diagram of rejected energy and getting a very senior European Commission official asking staff why nobody had told them about it.

Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change · 2026-09-23 Permalink → Listen →
Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change Around 00:00 into the episode
Michael Liebreich

I find it scandalous that you actually look at the economy, that serious politicians, that energy ministers will look at the economy and don't know what powers it. Measuring the energy use of our economy in primary energy units is like measuring nutrition by how many acres are used in agriculture. And yet that's what we're doing. Don't you find it just astonishing?

Jan Rosenow

It is. And when I posted the Senke diagram from Lawrence Livermore lab at some point, someone in the European Commission, very senior, that person asked their staff, why has no one told me about this? That person wasn't aware that we have these huge losses, this huge amount of rejected energy. And…

Michael Liebreich

Hello, I'm Michael Liebreich and this is Cleaning Up. Energy discussions can seem to be dominated by engineers presenting technical solutions, politicians talking in generalizations, lawyers and consultants having a field day, regulators left doing their best to keep the lights on, and investors…

Jan Rosenow

It is an absolute pleasure, Michael.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

Collections They Appear In

Climate & Energy