Rewiring the energy debate

The electrotech perspective

The debate on the future of energy is a mess. Ask a dozen pundits about the energy transition and you’ll hear a familiar chorus of gloom: electric vehicles stall, net-zero targets unravel, emissions climb, and the fossil fuel industry is emboldened. The world, we’re told, is failing to decarbonize. Energy transition? What transition? With Trump back in the White House and geopolitics pushing climate change further down the agenda, surely the whole project is doomed.

But this fashionable pessimism misses the bigger picture. Amid all the noise, one thing is clear: new energy tech is growing consistently, and with increasing impact. Today, the world invests twice as much in new energy technologies as it does in fossil fuels. In 2024 alone, the increase in solar generation matched the entire electricity demand of Germany. In China, nearly half of all new car sales are electric. Electrotech is accelerating so quickly that China may have already hit peak fossil fuel demand this year—and with China, so too will the world. You wouldn’t know it from most headlines.

The problem with today’s energy debate

We think a major reason for this disconnect is that the energy debate has polarized into two entrenched camps: the fossil gradualists and the net-zero puritans.

The fossil gradualists insist that moving away from oil, gas, and coal will be slow and painful. Fossil fuels, they argue, are humanity’s greatest discovery. Civilization simply requires barrels of oil and is shaped by legacy energy giants, which require governments to get out of their way to be successful. Their confidence comes from over two centuries of delivering energy at unmatched scale and complexity. Any gains from new energy that don’t fit in with their legacy views are dismissed as minor and products of subsidies and ideology.

On the other side, the net-zero puritan camp sees the energy system as a pollution problem to be solved. Through its lens, the world consists of tons of emitted carbon to be abated. Governments must take the lead, create a comprehensive plan to abate all emissions before 2050, and enact it by expanding regulation. Meanwhile incumbents must take responsibility and adapt to the net-zero trajectory. This camp wants action not so much out of opportunity, but out of necessity, compelled by the inescapable physics of climate change. It also tends to downplay progress in new energy because it falls short of the ideal, immediate change needed.

While these camps may appear diametrically opposed, their world views are more aligned than either may like to admit. Both assume that today’s energy transition is driven mainly by climate concerns and policy. Both seem to implicitly assume that fossil fuels are part of the ‘natural’ state of the economy—something only painstaking intervention can steer us away from. And both tend to treat the economic growth, energy security, and industrial opportunity emerging from the transition as side effects, rather than as central forces of change.

As a result, neither view has much explanatory power for what’s happening in energy right now. Neither has the logic to make sense of the scale or speed of the current shift—especially in places they never expected to lead. They didn’t anticipate China’s rise as a clean energy powerhouse, nor did they foresee how fast technologies like batteries, solar, and EVs would become cheap and competitive.

To make sense of what’s happening in energy today, we need a new lens. We propose a third way: the electrotech revolution. This sees the transition not as swapping dirty fuels for cleaner ones, but as building a fundamentally better and more efficient energy system organized around electricity. This is being realized through the deployment of electrotech—a new wave of electricity-based technologies including solar, wind, batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps, smart grids, and digital controls. On the supply side, solar and wind are replacing fossil generation. On the demand side, transport, buildings, and industry are electrifying. And in between, batteries and digital systems tie it all together, enabling real-time coordination, flexibility, and control.

This change is unfolding in a cascade of classic technology disruptions, of the kind we’ve seen play out many times before. Like past shifts in computing, telecoms, and transport, change is being driven not by top-down mandates or incumbents, but by bottom-up innovation, market momentum, and prescient governments investing in the next generation of technologies. This view foresees rapid, disruptive change ahead as electrotech adoption is driven by forces far deeper than just climate action.

Electrotech, not cleantech

It’s important to distinguish electrotech from the broader, fuzzier notion of “cleantech.” Unlike cleantech, electrotech excludes non-electric solutions such as carbon capture (CCS), biomass, and blue hydrogen—technologies that have repeatedly underperformed. Bundling them all together under the cleantech label has dragged electrotech down, obscuring its success beneath the failures of its less capable cousins. To the average reader of energy news, the extraordinary progress of solar and batteries is too often eclipsed by headlines about squandered public funds and greenwashing by underperforming biomass, hydrogen, or CCS schemes—missteps that unfairly taint the reputation of electrotech by association.

To unleash the full potential of electrotech, we need to unchain it from this green-tinted framing— starting with the recognition that its origins long predate the climate movement.

Electrotech predates climate action

We’ve been electrifying the world for over a century. Long before Kyoto protocols or net-zero targets entered the conversation, electricity was transforming modern life. It began in the 1880s, when electric lights and motors started to replace flame and steam. From these early steps, global electricity demand grew at around 7% per year after 1900, powered by lighting, industrial machinery, and the rise of household appliances.

Then, in the mid-20th century, a surge in electric devices accelerated the spread of electricity across homes and industries. Televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, and radios became mass-market products, driven by advances in assembly-line manufacturing and falling component costs. These decades saw the rise of the modern electric lifestyle.

On top of that came the electrification of information technologies from the late 20th century onward. Semiconductors, originally developed for radios and mainframes, laid the foundation for new information tech. Clean lab manufacturing techniques from the chip industry eventually enabled mass production of solar panels, battery cells, and other key electrotech components. As computing advanced—from mainframes to personal computers to smartphones—so did our ability to manage energy in real time.

In many ways, electrotech is a child of the IT revolution. Look closely, and the lineage is unmistakable: the components, the manufacturing techniques, even the companies and people involved. The precision processes used to mass-produce chips and smartphones now build battery cells and solar panels. The same factories, often with the same workers trained in high-tech assembly by firms such as Apple, now power the rise of electrotech. There is more in common between a laptop and a solar panel than between a solar panel and a gas power plant. This overlap explains why electrotech is scaling so fast—it’s not just nascent new energy tech but a continuation of the digital revolution into energy.

Today, three clusters of electrotech are converging: renewable electricity supply, electrified demand, and digital coordination. This convergence is what makes our current moment so significant. In just the past five years, renewables have become cheaper than fossil fuel power, electric vehicles are outcompeting gasoline cars on cost, battery storage is getting cheaper than most fossil fuel peaker plants, and digital systems are taking virtual control of everything on or behind the grid, from EV chargers to heat pumps. Each of these technology clusters could have driven a major transition on its own. But together—interacting and reinforcing one another—they are turning what was a century of evolutionary progress into a decade of revolutionary change.

The drivers of electrotech run deep

Now that we’ve traced where electrotech came from, we can turn to what’s driving its rapid uptake. And again, it’s not primarily climate action. The momentum behind electrotech today is powered by three fundamental forces: physics, economics, and geopolitics—forces that would remain just as compelling even if climate change weren’t part of the equation.

The physics of change

Fossil fuel combustion is inherently wasteful. Whether it’s the engine in your car or a gas-fired boiler heating your home, combustion systems squander a massive portion of their energy input. Globally, about two-thirds of energy fed into the energy system is lost in combustion processes before we get anything useful out of it. That amounts to roughly $4.6 trillion annually—literally going up in smoke.

Electrotech bypasses this inefficiency. With no combustion, energy moves via electric currents—direct, clean, and efficient. Wind and solar power don’t require a fuel and hence don’t waste energy in their generation process. Electric vehicles use around three times less energy than petrol cars. Heat pumps are about two to four times as efficient as a gas boiler. From a physics standpoint, electrotech offers a far simpler and more elegant approach to energy. To use Amory Lovins’ terms, it’s just smarter engineering to build systems around ‘obedient electrons’ instead of ‘fiery molecules’. Much of the rationale for electrotech lies here—in the quiet but unrelenting logic of thermodynamics.

The economics of change

The second driver is cost—and more specifically, where that cost comes from. Electrotech costs are rooted in manufacturing. Fossil fuel costs are rooted in digging up fuel.

Fossil energy is built on extraction. Its core input is a combustible commodity that must be found, drilled, and burned—again and again. The more energy you need, the more fuel you must extract, and the higher the cost. Electrotech doesn’t rely on fuel. It runs on sunlight and wind, which are free. Its costs lie in producing the technologies—solar panels, batteries, motors, inverters—that harness and use that energy.

Because these are manufactured goods, electrotech benefits from scale and learning. And because many of them are small and modular—for example, solar panels or battery cells—they scale and learn faster. Each unit built and deployed drives down the cost of the next. Fossil systems, by contrast, don’t scale this way. They get more expensive as reserves deplete and we have to dig deeper.

The electrotech cost reduction has been dramatic. Over the last three decades, the cost of solar power and lithium-ion batteries has fallen by well over 90%. EVs are now at or near price parity with petrol vehicles in many major markets. In China, new electric models retail at $10,000—mass-market products built through scaled manufacturing and strategic investment.

And once electrotech is at its end of life, you can just recycle its contents. Where legacy energy burns through resources; new energy simply borrows them. We’ve shown in previous work that, for example, the amount of mining needed for the EV transition is not only marginal compared to fossil extraction, it is also temporary. With time, we can get most of our new minerals from recycling old technology at its end of life.

In short: electrotech economics is manufacturing economics. The more you build, the cheaper it gets. Fossil economics is extraction economics. The more you dig, the more it costs. The economics of the two systems move in opposite directions, and once you reach a cross-over point, there is no way back.

The geopolitics of change

Energy security used to mean securing access to fossil fuels. The old energy order was built on concentrated reserves, sprawling supply chains, and petrostate politics. As a result, most of the world’s population came to depend on imported energy—at the cost of both financial stability and national sovereignty.

But electrotech flips the script. Sunlight and wind are everywhere, meaning nearly every nation on Earth can produce its own energy—at scale. The potential is transformative: Saudi-level energy abundance and independence for all.

Of course technology is neutral, but its characteristics shape the kinds of systems it enables. Fossil fuels, concentrated in specific regions, tend to require large-scale, centralized infrastructure, and control. Electrotech, by contrast, is decentralized, modular, and broadly accessible. As energy independence becomes a growing priority, more countries will realize that local, distributed renewables can deliver a level of democratic self-sufficiency that fossil fuels never could. Those who sow electrotech reap sovereignty.

Governments around the world are already acting. Today, one-fifth of Global South countries generate a higher share of their electricity from solar and wind than the Global North. That is not because Kenya or Morocco is more climate-conscious—it’s because they’re less burdened by legacy systems and dogma. They see electrotech for what it is: a path to energy independence.

Staying at the technological forefront is also vital for national defense. The war in Ukraine shows that modern warfare depends on battery-powered drones, robots, and decentralized power systems. In an increasingly volatile world, nations will seek to develop the cheapest, strongest, and fastest electrotech to defend themselves. Diesel-powered tanks and ships will soon be as out of place and ineffective on the battlefield as cavalry and sailing ships.

These are drivers of electrotech, not cleantech.

It’s important to make the distinction here: these three drivers of change—physics, economics, and geopolitics—also show how electrotech stands apart from other cleantech. The same forces that propel electrotech forward often hold other cleantech back. Carbon capture is inefficient, expensive, and non-modular. Hydrogen and biomass, while potentially useful in niche cases, don’t scale well, lack modularity, and often only shift rather than reduce dependence. Even if they contribute to emissions reduction, they aren’t powered by the same dynamics driving electrotech; if anything, they’re hindered by them.

Climate change, of course, still matters. It remains a key reason to accelerate the rollout of new energy technologies. But for electrotech, it is no longer the only—or even the primary—driver. Unlike other cleantech, electrotech doesn’t need climate arguments to keep its momentum—physics, economics, and geopolitics already make the case.

The implications will go further and come faster

Having misunderstood the origins as well as its drivers, it should perhaps come as no surprise that leading energy analysts have consistently missed the mark on forecasting electrotech. Costs continue to fall faster than expected. Adoption moves quicker than forecasts predict. At a certain point, this isn’t just random error—it’s bias. The repeated underestimation of electrotech reveals a deeper miscomprehension of how change works.

And it’s not just about how quickly these technologies grow within a single market. It’s also about how easily they jump across to new sectors and countries. Take batteries: it wasn’t long ago that experts thought they could barely power a family car, let alone a long-haul truck. (See the 2008 IEA report on EVs if you want to get a sense of just how limited our expectations used to be.) Today, batteries are on track to electrify nearly all of road transport—and they are set to enter shipping and aviation as well.

Transitions are noisy and nonlinear. Trying to model them precisely is a recipe for disaster. Much ink—and terabytes—has been spilled trying to forecast the exact pace and shape of the transition, only to get it exactly wrong. That does not mean we have no way to predict what will happen. Step back and look at the broad pattern of electrotech adoption, and something familiar emerges: the S-curve.

This shouldn’t surprise us. As Doyne Farmer and others have shown, S-curve uptake is how technology transitions almost always unfold. Not business-as-usual, but S-curve-as-usual.

Yes, some markets may underperform from one year to the next, while others overdeliver. In 2024 German EV sales stalled, against expectations; yet EV sales in the Global South surged somewhat unexpectedly—so that on the whole we still see global acceleration. The same goes for companies: some may falter, like Tesla at the moment, but others step in, such as BYD. When the drivers of a technology revolution are so fundamental, they become like gravity working on a river; a lot of turmoil in the rapids but eventually all water ends up downstream.

The new electro world order

China made the mental shift to electrotech a while ago, which is why it went all-in on solutions; today leading the world not just in manufacturing, but also in deployment. As we wrote last year, China has become the world’s first electrostate: a country that derives a large share of its domestic growth and international power from electrotech. And many economies in the Global South are now trying to follow China’s lead, as is the West.

China may be ahead, but that doesn’t mean the West has lost. This isn’t a zero-sum game. In the emerging electro world order, there’s room at the top for many. Electrotech offers every country the tools to achieve energy independence; and as recycling advances, most regions will eventually be able to supply the materials they need from their own retired infrastructure. The promise here isn’t dominance for one, but autonomy for all.

Yet to seize this opportunity, the West needs to jump over its own shadow. Over the past two decades, energy debates have become entangled in a culture war over climate duty. That framing has blinded us to the more fundamental drivers of change. It’s not that climate change isn’t important—but right now, it’s not the primary driver. We’re confident it will return as a central priority on the global agenda. But in the meantime, electrotech helps solve other urgent challenges too: from energy independence in wealthy nations to energy access in the poorest.

A typical flashpoint in this culture war is the obsession with endgame problems. How do we cut the final 10 to 15% of power emissions? What about sectors where we don’t yet have viable alternatives to fossil fuels? These are framed as critical questions, when in reality they are no constraint on the 75% of the energy system that can already be targeted with today’s electrotech. We fixate on the edge cases of 2040 or 2050 and demand “fully costed pathways” decades into the future—based on today’s technologies and the assumption that innovation stands still.

This approach misses one of the most basic principles of strategy making: plans are not strategies. A plan can unravel as soon as one key assumption changes—something that happens constantly in periods of rapid change, often before the plan is even finalized. A strategy, by contrast, is built on theories of how the world works and how to act within it—and remains useful even when the facts evolve.

The electrotech view is a strategic one. It sees the energy transition as driven by more efficient technologies, with economics that improves through manufacturing scale and modular design, and a natural tendency to empower their users. This is far from a radical idea—it’s how most successful technologies have advanced and scaled, in energy and elsewhere.

From this belief we’ve found three very simple questions that help us identify which technologies are likely to succeed over time:

• Does it make the energy system more efficient?

• Is it small and modular, so it can be manufactured at scale and benefit from learning curves?

• Does it enhance the independence and security of its user?

If the answer is yes to all three, you probably have a winner. If it’s two yesses, it’s a potential winner with an Achilles heel. If it’s only one yes, the opportunity is likely limited. If the answer is no to all (think CCS for example), it’s a distraction. If the answer is no to all but there are no alternatives, it is still a distraction; and an indication it may be time to start a fundamental R&D program to generate solutions that will get you at least some yesses.

What you absolutely want to avoid is assuming that incumbents will solve these challenges. It’s a classic disruptive technology mistake to center thinking on what incumbents are or aren’t doing. In 1905, Ford was a tiny player—but it mattered more to the future of transport than the entire global horse-and-cart industry. That’s how disruption works: new entrants push out incumbents; from Kodak to Blockbuster to Nokia. If you anchor yourself to legacy players, you’ll sink with them.

Many existing companies will fail in this transition. But many new ones will succeed. Those seeking an “orderly” transition by following the pace of incumbents—especially the most conservative ones—will follow them right into decline. Those who want to win will embrace disruption and double down on the new.

And we do need to win. The electrotech revolution isn’t all sunshine and opportunity—there are serious risks to falling behind. While future energy systems may no longer depend on fuel, they will depend on software, control systems, and digital infrastructure. If countries don’t develop those themselves, they’ll end up reliant on others—and vulnerable to them. Civilian electrotech also has clear military spillovers, as seen with the rapid rise of drones and autonomous systems. And if AI turns out to be as energy intensive as many expect, the nations that can scale renewable power and battery backup the fastest will hold a decisive strategic advantage.

That’s why we must stay at the forefront of this new energy wave—because if we don’t ride it, we may drown in it.

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It’s time to rethink the energy transition. To paraphrase Einstein, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we conceived of them. We first got to know of global warming through the lens of carbon emissions, but the path towards resolving it may be better seen through the lens of electrotech. We’ve entered an era defined by technological competition and energy security. By focusing on electrotech now, countries and companies can navigate the instability of the coming decade with greater resilience. And in doing so, they also lay the foundation for long-term stability, free from climate disaster.