Simon Michaux’s Purple Delusion: The Pseudoscience of Doom

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

Last Updated on: 19th March 2025, 06:06 pm

Simon Michaux has built a reputation on painting an apocalyptic vision of the energy transition, but his work consistently collapses under scrutiny. I’ve personally taken apart his comically bad lithium supply projections and his metal demand doomsday scenarios, and each time, the pattern is the same — wild extrapolations that ignore technological evolution, rigid static modeling that defies how markets and supply chains actually work, and an almost willful blindness to efficiency gains. It’s as if he’s committed to proving that decarbonization is impossible, no matter how many assumptions he has to warp to get there.

Now, with his Purple Transition, Michaux has moved beyond mere skepticism and into the realm of full-fledged alternative reality, constructing a convoluted energy roadmap that manages to be both wildly impractical and laughably inefficient. Instead of building on scalable solutions already proving themselves in the field — direct electrification, battery storage, grid interconnections — he proposes a haphazard mix of experimental and inefficient technologies that add unnecessary conversion steps, inflate energy losses, and ignore commercial viability altogether. It’s the equivalent of someone insisting we build a fleet of steam-powered airships in the middle of the jet age.

Thankfully, heavyweights like Karim Megherbi, Founding Executive Director of Orisun Invest, and Cédric Philibert, who spent two decades as a climate and renewables analyst with the International Energy Agency, have taken it upon themselves to systematically dismantle Michaux’s assumptions with thorough, data-backed rebuttals.

The latest round of debunking goes straight for the heart of his work, exposing not just the errors in his energy demand projections but the fundamental misconceptions that underpin his entire framework. His estimates for ammonia production, for instance, assume unnecessarily high energy consumption figures, ignoring advances in electrolysis efficiency and ammonia synthesis. His projections for steel production discount the role of recycling, failing to recognize that one-third of global steel is already recycled, significantly reducing energy demand. And then there’s his staggering misunderstanding of long-term energy storage requirements — so profound that he ended up proposing an utterly unworkable battery solution that would cost Germany alone €3.6 trillion while supplying power at 400 times the country’s actual demand.

Michaux fundamentally misreads grid balancing and storage needs. He misquotes Ruhnau & Qvist’s study on renewable grid integration, claiming that Germany requires 12 weeks of buffer storage when the actual recommendation is 24 days, not 84. More critically, he ignores how grid interconnections smooth variability over larger areas, reducing storage needs. Instead of acknowledging the scaling of high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission, dynamic load balancing, and smarter grid operation, he concocts a scenario where lithium-ion battery storage must bear the full burden of variability, leading him to absurd conclusions. If you thought bad takes on the energy transition were limited to fossil fuel lobbyists, Michaux is here to prove that pessimism can be just as detached from reality as corporate greenwashing.

Magherbi and Breyer’s assessment triggered me to finally point out how silly Michaux’ proposed transition alternative is. When he dropped this equally bad solution set to top off his terribly bad energy projection and his completely misguided minerals projection, I wasn’t surprised. He’s incompetent regarding energy and incompetent regarding mineral demand, so why wouldn’t he be incompetent at technoeconomic assessment of solutions? I’ve been meaning to get around to it for months, but now, it’s time.

Let’s dissect the four pillars of Michaux’s Purple Transition and why each of them crumbles under even the lightest touch.

1. Small Modular Molten Salt Thorium Reactors (MSRs)

Reality check: No, thorium reactors are not the energy silver bullet Michaux wishes they were. While MSRs have been on the nuclear industry’s wishlist since the 1960s, they remain firmly in the experimental phase. No commercial thorium reactor exists, no country is betting its energy future on them, and the most optimistic projections place commercial deployment in the 2040s or beyond. The core issues — fuel reprocessing, corrosion from molten salts, and regulatory uncertainty — are nowhere near solved.

Michaux’s logical fallacy? Appeal to future technology — relying on an unproven, undeployed reactor type as a linchpin for a net-zero strategy while ignoring the energy solutions we already have, wind, solar, water, batteries, pumped hydro, and transmission.

There’s a reason that CleanTechnica has a policy of not covering thorium nuclear reactors. Personally, if someone mentions thorium for energy, I find it’s a reliable indicator that they don’t have the slightest idea what they are talking about.

2. Iron Powder Combustion

Iron powder as a fuel source is a neat academic idea that works in very specific niche applications. It could be burned for industrial heat and then theoretically recycled using green hydrogen. But here’s the thing: it’s an extra, inefficient conversion step that nobody needs.

Do you know what burning metal is? Rusting. Do you know what turning rust (iron ore) into iron and steel is called? Refining. It’s very energy intensive and a major part of what we have to decarbonize, yet Michaux thinks this is going to replace gas and coal in industrial heating.

Direct electrification of industrial heat — via electric arc furnaces, resistive heaters, and induction heating — already outperforms this Rube Goldberg machine. Michaux’s mistake? Overcomplication — adding unnecessary complexity and energy losses instead of using the simplest and most efficient solutions available. If you have clean electricity, you use it directly. You don’t need to detour through burning metal.

3. Ammonia as an Energy Carrier

Ammonia is already a massive global commodity, primarily used for fertilizer. It can be used as a fuel, but it’s far from an optimal one. The round-trip efficiency of converting electricity into ammonia and then back into energy is dismal — losing 70% – 80% of the original energy in the process.

It’s also a hazardous substance that requires careful handling by trained professionals. Burning ammonia produces toxic nitrogen oxides (NOx), which means any large-scale use would require expensive pollution controls. The real-world use case for ammonia? Fertilizer.

But Michaux presents it as some universal replacement for direct electrification, which is flat-out wrong. His logical error? Ignoring efficiency losses — assuming that because something can be burned, it should be burned. He also ignores the reality that health and safety concerns would mean that no jurisdiction would provide permits for it. In reality, electricity should be used as electricity wherever possible.

4. Alternative Battery Technologies (Sodium, Chloride, Magnesium-based)

Ah, the perennial “we need a different battery chemistry” argument. Sodium-ion batteries? Promising for grid storage and low-cost EVs, but they are not a replacement for lithium-ion, just a complement. Magnesium batteries? Still in the lab stage. Chloride batteries? Not even a thing beyond academic papers.

This stems from his frankly embarrassing mistakes highlighted above, first doing his own hubristic of all future energy demands with his own mix of selected solutions, then misreading basic literature and multiplying storage requirements more, then insisting that lithium-ion batteries with nickel and cobalt were the only current solution.

Meanwhile, lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries — already in mass production — are proving that lithium scarcity isn’t even the crisis Michaux claims it to be. His logical fallacy? Cherry-picking — highlighting unproven technologies as essential while ignoring the ones that are already commercially scaling today.

This is the only part of Michaux’ alternative plan that is remotely connected to reality, and he still gets innumerable things wrong. His Purple Transition isn’t just misguided — it’s a textbook example of how bad assumptions lead to bad conclusions. He starts with exaggerated electricity demand figures, assumes the worst-case scenario for existing technologies, and then tries to solve imaginary problems with future technologies that don’t exist at scale.

It’s like building a house of cards and then trying to balance peacocks on top of it. Every component relies on the next one working perfectly, and if even one fails, the whole structure collapses. Meanwhile, the real energy transition is happening with proven, scalable technologies — direct electrification, wind and solar, battery storage, and smarter grids.

Michaux is just the latest in a long line of professional doomers — self-styled experts who insist the energy transition is impossible, who overinflate the scale of the challenge while systematically ignoring the solutions that are already working. He belongs in the same club as Vaclav Smil, Nate Hagens, and other techno-pessimists who love to catastrophize every aspect of decarbonization while offering no viable alternative beyond throwing up our hands and sticking with fossil fuels.

Their core tactic is always the same: pick a single limiting factor — whether it’s lithium, copper, grid integration, or storage — and extrapolate it into an insurmountable obstacle, conveniently ignoring how engineering, innovation, and market adaptation solve such bottlenecks in the real world. Meanwhile, they refuse to acknowledge the staggering material inefficiencies of fossil fuels, acting as if today’s energy system isn’t already an environmental and economic catastrophe in slow motion.

And let’s be clear — this kind of doom-mongering directly benefits the fossil fuel industry. By painting renewables and electrification as doomed to fail, they provide a convenient intellectual cover for those who want to delay investment in clean energy. Every oil and gas executive with a vested interest in prolonging the status quo can point to Michaux or Smil and say, “See? Even the experts agree the transition isn’t feasible.” Their work gets cited in anti-renewable think tank reports, cherry-picked in congressional hearings, and repeated in bad-faith op-eds arguing that we should keep burning coal, gas, and oil because, allegedly, the alternative is “unworkable.”

This is classic fossil fuel propaganda — manufacturing doubt and exaggerating problems to slow down action, exactly as the tobacco industry did with lung cancer and Exxon did with climate change. The real tragedy is that people like Michaux think they are being the hard-nosed realists in the room when, in fact, they are playing straight into the hands of the status quo — delaying decarbonization, obstructing policy, and ensuring that fossil fuel interests get another decade or two of profitability while the world burns.

Michaux addressing the Shell Alumni network on January 16, 2025, delivering a talk on why the green transition won’t work — what a shocking twist. That’s right up there with finding out a tobacco-funded scientist isn’t convinced smoking causes cancer. If you ever needed proof that doom-mongering is music to fossil fuel ears, here it is on full display. When the industry most invested in slowing down decarbonization hands you the mic, maybe — just maybe — you’re not the fearless truth-teller you imagine yourself to be.

​While it’s unsurprising that doomer Nate Hagen and Shell Alumni would welcome Michaux’s narrative, it’s perplexing that reputable organizations such as the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (AusIMM) and academic institutions like the University of Queensland have provided him platforms to spout his wretchedly off base opinions. I’ve already called out the Finnish Geological Survey (GTK) for publishing his 275 pages of error filled, logic-free nonsense regarding energy demand and minerals supply in their supposedly peer-reviewed journal, but he works for them, so presumably they are stuck with him. But why would other institutes bother?

At the end of the day, Michaux’s work is a goldmine — not for energy solutions, but for energy analysts looking for what not to do. His Purple Transition is not an alternative roadmap; it’s an intellectual cul-de-sac. The world needs real solutions, not plot-free, cardboard character, energy fantasy novels dressed up as technical reports. That Michaux continues to get attention is because he’s the best PR money didn’t have to buy for the fossil fuel industry.