Welcome to zero.

I'm Akshatrati.

This week the electrotech Revolution.

Here's a crazy start for you.

If you're driving a fossil fuel car, gasoline, diesel, whatever, more than seventy percent of the energy you put into the car is wasted as heat.

Only thirty percent actually moves the car, and that's after more than a century a phenomenal effort to make the internal combustion engine as efficient as possible.

By comparison, if you're driving an electric car, more than eighty percent of the energy moves the car, and that's of course now, when the electric car story is just beginning.

This kind of enormous efficiency gain that comes from stopping burning molecules and powering things with electrons is one of the key pill of what my guest today kings Mill Bond calls the electrotech revolution.

This, he believes, is a moment in time where electricity related technologies start to challenge the dominance of fossil fuels.

Kings Mill is a strategist at the think tank Ember and has had a long career working across finance for Deutsche Bank and City Bank, as well as a strategist for nonprofits like Carbon Tracker and the Rocky Mountain Institute alongside his colleagues at Ember.

He published a report late last year full of cool statistics showing how that revolution is unfolding, which countries are speeding ahead and which are falling behind, with countries like the US backsliding on electro tech.

I wanted to invite Kingsmill to talk about why he is so certain that the electro tech revolution is inevitable and what happens to those that are left behind.

Kings Mill, Welcome to Zero.

Hi, Sank, I'll see let's start.

With what you've been currently obsessed with.

Your team calls it the electro tech revolution.

What is it?

So?

The electrotech revolution is simply a name that we've given to a series of technologies which are rapidly upending the energy sector.

And in broad terms, those technologies can be classified in three different parts.

You have supply, demand, and connections.

So supply is the very rapid growth of solar and when demand is the rapid growth of electric vehicles and other electrication technologies.

And connections is possibly the least appreciative but the most interesting part, and it's all of the connections in the middle.

So it's it's batteries, and it's smart grids and its software, and it's this rising idea of an energy net.

And it's all the technologies which connect the supply and demand.

Of electrons, including artificial intelligence.

Including AI.

And I think it's very interesting that AI is very clearly a tool of electrication and it's part of the electrication story.

Why do you call it a revolution?

Why is that the term to use right now?

Because it is so rapid and it's so disruptive.

And that's the difference I suggest between revolution and evolution.

So evolution would be slow and gentle and nobody would get hurt.

Revolution means that you move from growing Chinese oil demand to declining oil demand in a single year, and then people who have planned for the old system to continue get damaged.

Right, So the first one hundred years of electricity were an evolution, but now it becomes the thing because of all these technology sets, from solar panels and wind turbines and electric motors and batteries and heat pumps, they're all converging to a point where their use is so easy that you can have a revolutionary change.

Yes, you put it much more elegantly in the night actually so indeed, the coming together these technologies, you know, after decades of evolution, when they come together, they create revolutionary force, and you know it's possibly to overstate.

Then the same thing is when that's how you get perfect storms, when lots of different weather fronts come together the right place at right time.

That's what's now happening in the energy system as we finally, after decades, actually have figured out how to deploy these technologies at speed and scale.

So I wanted to slice andize this in different ways.

But let's start with something that I got asked a lot last year.

So we did this series called Bottlenecks, where we published a bunch of features on Bloomberg and had conversations here on this podcast.

And the main thesis was that even as Western countries are now seeing a real boom in electricity demand and that's like first time in decades, they are struggling to build all that electricity supply because of bottlenecks of things that people don't think about, so stuff like transformers and cables, but also skilled workers and engineers, and that's holding back electrification.

One question that we got in response to that series is, wait, you're a climate journalist, Why is this a climate story through.

Two parts of the energy transition.

People often forget this.

So the first part is the decarbonization of electricity generation, where we have solar and win and it's worthwhile saying, for example, that all of the growth in electricity demand now comes from solar and wind, to every single new electron added to the system on a system basis is clean.

But then the second part of the energy transition, and the one that's most frequently forgotten, particularly in the West, actually is electrication.

You have to electrify everything, So you need to do both of these things if you wish to push out fossil fuels.

But it's not just as unoacchat not just a question anymore of pushing out fossil fuels is a question of getting economic and geopolitical advantage.

But in this case, a lot of the electricity demand in Western countries is being driven by data centers, and a lot of those data centers are taking whatever electrons they can get, whether that comes from fossil fuels or not, or in fact they're building a lot more gas supply, So even a system wide electrification is driving the reduction in fossil fuel use.

For the first time.

Now there are these pockets where just this massive growth and electricity is being driven by fossil fuels.

Why then, is still electrification a climate story.

First of all, you need to distinguish between an individual actor and the system, obviously, and then secondly, you have a need to electrify everything.

And if you have a small amount of fossil fuels going into your electricity generation, which then replaces fossil fuels, then on a net basis, you are reducing your fossil fuel demands.

So but in concrete terms, in Europe at the moment, seventy percent of our electricity generation is from non fossil sources, but eighty percent of what we're trying to electrifize from fossil fuels.

So by definition, every time you add electricity to the system, it is pushing a more fossil intensive out, so it is a far superior solution.

And then there is the efficiency story that comes with electrification.

So there's this really nice phrase that I've heard you talk about, which is electrons are disciplined and molecules are fiery.

This is amry Loven's phrase, of course, yes.

And that leads to energy outcomes that are very interesting.

So what is it about electrification and efficiency that makes it a driver of change?

So when you're talking about electrication, it's quite interesting.

There are two areas.

If I take the nick Air framing, you can actually divide all useful energy into two parts, heat and work.

And whenever electricity is replacing molecules in work solutions, which in English means transport above all, then you have a three or four to one efficiency advantage.

When they're replacing molecules in heat heat they have that advantage if they use heat pumps.

But the really interesting story is when electricity replaces fossil molecules in transport, we have a three to one efficiency advantage.

And then also further up the chain, when solar replaces coal or gas in the generation of electricity, you also have a three to one efficiency advantage.

So on a net basis, the system we currently have uses about six hundred exidules of primary energy to get two hundred exidules of useful energy.

If you were to decarbonize electricity generation and electrify it would be about two hundred to two hundred.

So you have a massive reduction in primary energy demand, which just makes everything considerably easier.

Yeah, it is surprising on most people don't know that the internal combustion engine in a car is essentially wasting seventy five percent of all the energy just as waste heat and not turning it into transport, whereas an electric car is eighty ninety percent efficient.

Even if you count for the electricity coming to you via this transmission system, that there are some losses.

If that's the case, that there are all these advantages that electricity and the electricity system has for people, for economies, for the climate problem, for bills, why is it that electricity and electrotech revolution doesn't sell itself to degree.

The answer to that is that we are now selling it actually, and you know it's not of course, just as the many other people who have many different parts of the system which they are deploying.

I think to answer your question, in the first part of the electric revolution, the deployment of renewables, as you know, solar's been doubling every three years, and WIN has been growing also very rapidly.

So actually on the decarbonization of electricity, it's pretty much job done now.

All of the growth is now coming from MBA statistics from twenty twenty five, all of the growth came from solar and wind.

So we've reached the peak increasingly clear in China, and we were on the other side.

But that's only, as I say, one piece of the system is about twenty percent of final energy demand.

The really exciting story in the story of twenty twenty six onward is electrication and increasing the speed with which electricity can replace molecules in the system.

And that's that's not been happening nearly as quickly.

That's only been growing at three or four percent the year.

It needs to happen quicker.

Now we have the second largest consumer of energy, the United States, a government that isn't particularly interested in either electrification or in clean energy, and the Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, you know, is talking about this all the time.

One of the most recent things he said is, look, wherever clean electricity has taken off, it has led to higher electricity prices and do as a result of de industrialization.

You know, Germany is a classic case in that, but you could count the UK in it as well.

Do you think higher electricity prices are just a feature of electro tech or are there other ways to deal with this?

Issue.

Well, as you know, it's a pretty complicated issue.

So one of the very obvious pushbacks to this framing that decarbonization increases electricity prices.

The counter argument is China, which of course has amongst the world's cheapest prices for electricity and is very rapidly been deployed in solar and when and you know, the answer basically is, if you do it right, you can get your prices down.

If you do it wrong, then your price don't fall.

And there's a huge amount of policy improvement and policy learning that needs to be taken from successful countries and deployed in other countries in order to get electricity prices down.

And I think this is one of the big things actually now that's stop people are starting to think about in the UK, is being talked about increasingly in Europe.

How do we use these cheap renewable sources not merely to decarbonize, but also to get costs down.

What did Europe get wrong?

Then?

One of the things that one of the errors that's been made is a failure to recognize that electrication is the core and second vector of change, and therefore people have loaded costs onto electricity generation.

So right now in Europe as an example, electricity is being taxed at two or three times the level of taxation on gas.

Now, if we're right and we need to electrify and we need to encourage electricity to push gas out of the system, obviously that needs to be reversed, and there are some countries, notably Sweden, where they don't do that, and Denmark course has just famously taken the tax off electricity.

So one areas we need to reduce the cost being loaded onto electricity.

A second thing we need to do is just need to make it considerably easier to electrify.

So all these these historic rules and structures that we have which bolster the old system, we need to we need to rewrite them.

There's a lot of work then to be done in that area.

The third thing is that we need to stop pouring money into that's fake twenty to fifty solutions such as carbon capture and other very high cost solutions.

Let's take all of that money and put it into reducing electricity prices and then get let the market do the work.

One thing you highlight in your electrotech revolution thesis is that because of these forces, the electrotech revolution is inevitable because the physics drives it, the efficiency drives it, and if you have the right policies, the cost will also start to drive it.

If that is the case, then why are we here in twenty twenty six where the US is going after Venezuela and oil and there is this worldview being created among the Canadians, among the Australians that you know, the fossil fuel system still has plenty of legs and one that we must pursue.

So, as one of your previous intellecutors, Sheldon white House pointed out, if the fossil fuel industry is able to take over a government, then they will support policies which favor the fossil of your industry.

Really, as simple as that, and we shouldn't be surprised that incumbents amounting a massive fight back and resisting changes as powerfully as they can, because obviously this new technology shift, as with other technology shifts, will wipe them out eventually.

And of course therefore, if they can buy themselves another five or ten years, that's what they're doing.

But it doesn't really detract from the fundamental drivers, as you say, of physics, efficiency of economics, and now increasingly of geopolitics.

And I think this is another angle which is becoming increasingly apparent, will become increasingly apparent in twenty twenty five the more that petro state power is exercised aggressively around the world, and Venezuela's another good example of this, the more that people will be scared to become dependent upon imported fossil fuels and will hunt for their own domestic resources.

And that's what electrotech can del So if you decarbonize electricity and electrify and demand, then you're getting your own sunshine and your own wind and your own talent building the electricity system, and it's all homegrown.

And one of the things that you've done throughout your career, whether that was at Carbon Tracker or Rocky Mountain Institute or now at Ember, is that you've tried to not just make this narrative point, but actually thrown numbers underneath it which show this in one hundred different ways.

There are hundred slides in the Electrotech Revolution deck, but on the opposite side you also get numbers thrown around.

So one that Chris Wright tries to bring up again and again, he's like, look, If you look at that total amount of energy consumed in nineteen seventies, eighty five percent came from fossil fuels.

You look at the number today, eighty percent comes from fossil fuels.

What even has clean tech done for the world?

How do you answer that?

Well, first of all, actually, just numerically, this is a you have to be quite cute with the numbers, because it's basically it's gone from ninety five to eighty over about forty years, so it has been falling the share of fossil fuels.

But actually there's a much more fundamental.

And that's in primary energy.

The primary is there's a much more fundamental response to this, which is you're looking at the wrong numbers, folks.

So when to give a good analogy, perhaps when you look at bread demand, do you count the wheat harvest?

No, you look at final demand bread demand.

When you look at the car industry and you're trying to figure out whether tesla or bid or Toyota is a better bed for the future, do you look at the number of Toyotas in the streets.

No, you look at the market share of sales.

So there are two errors which are being made by incumbents.

The first is they are looking at primary not useful.

They're looking from the supplier perspective, not the consumer's perspective.

And then the second is they're looking at stock not flow.

And when you look at when you flip it round and look at the amount of useful energy which is pouring into the system from renewable sources.

In the electricity sector, solar and wind are one hundred percent of the growth in final demand, electricity is about fifty to sixty percent of the growth.

So there's a huge shift going on.

And again, as a kind of finance person, it's worthwhile standing back and saying, of course there are you know, any legacy industry will always be dominant as a share of the total at the top.

But that's not what you want to look at.

You want to look at the share of change, or even the change of change.

One place where you have this new report out where you can see the change is in India.

And you know, I come from India.

I've always thought that given the size of the country, given its state of development right now, where the Indian energy transition goes is where the rest of the world's energy transition will go.

What did you learn from doing this work, what does the report conclude.

So we're extremely excited about this analysis that we're just putting out because there is this conventional, orthodox narrative that India and the emerging markets must follow the same path that the Western China did, and they must go from biomass to fossil fuels and that's their path to greater energy demand.

And you see that in the pages of the Exon Forecast and in the implicit assumptions to the EIA, for example.

What we're finding is that India specifically as an illustration of what's happening in other emerging markets, but India is taking a new path, and India is taking its own path to an electrotech future.

And in very simple terms, rather than going from biomass to electrons as your primary final energy source via fossil fuels, they're avoiding the fossil detol They're going straight to electrons.

And its very interesting.

There's a very interesting well, we think we like this a kind of turnary chart we'd produce in our analysis which shows that Europe and the US fifty years ago went down the fossil path, are now coming back towards the electric solution.

China also started cascading down the fossil path twenty five years ago and now is coming back to the electric solution.

India cleverly is going straight there.

So to compare, if you compare and contrast the situation in India today with the situation in China when it had a similar level of GDP capital which is around twenty twelve in PPP terms, you see that India has got a whole suite of new solutions available to it.

So it's got very cheap solar, It's got so soloplus batteries now forty dollars per may got hour.

It's got very cheap batteries available to it.

And therefore India is getting seven percent of its eletricity from solar today, where China has zero at a similar level of GDPP capita, and it's got nineteen percent electrication which is all almost the same level as the United States, even though it's GDP per capital is dramatically lower, and ev market shafers is five percent and sixty percent sixty percent in three wheelers.

So India's just doing a lot of very very different stuff to what other countries did at a similar level of GDP per capita, and as a result of that, India's fossil fuel demand is dramatically lower than that of China, specifically at a similar level of GDP per capital And to give you the stat some India, Indian demand for coal is around one mega or our per person, where China was two and a half.

And it is looking and as you know this year, Indian coal demand capita fell is looking increasingly like Indian col demand per capita is never going down the old China route.

And the same story with petrol, where Indian demand for petrol capita is around one hundred liters where China was two fifty.

And India's not going down this other path.

It's taking its own path.

So this is where you're flipping the stock and floor story here, because most of the time you talk about India and you say, oh, look they are building all the solar They're like, but look they're also building all these coal power plants, which is the flu part.

There are, yes, in plan currently lots of new coal power plants that are going to still come.

But what you're saying is, yes, they may build more coal power plants, but as a total proportion at their level of wealth, they're actually a much cleaner country already.

We're not flipping the stck of flowpar because if you look at the flow story, seventy five percent of the growth in twenty twenty five in electricity generation came from solar.

So the particular argument that you're talking about about India building new coal fired capacity, the key point here is that you don't want to look at the capacity of coal.

You want to look at how much coal is burnt.

And what's happening is that coal is shifting from baseload to backup, and these facilities are moving from operating at eighty ninety percent operating at twenty thirty percent, And as you know, China's gone through fifty percent.

India is now heading but I believe towards fifty percent capacity utilization in its coal sector.

So people need to understand where the electricity is being generated from, and actually from a flow perspective, as I say, it's increasingly from solar.

Now.

Again, it's not entirely surprising, and it's the same thing with all technologies.

When you had the mobile phone revolution, did you want to put all the money into building fixed line phone systems?

Now?

You didn't.

Now you've got all this electrotech, why bother with the old fossil tech when the new stuff is cheaper and cleaner and faster and local.

And of course, India specifically and many other emerging markets has a massive fossil fuel dependency problem or almost all of India's oil and gas is imported, and actually quite a large chunk of its coal as well.

And therefore, for India both to grow and have an energy independence and to reduce the terrible burden of one hundred and fifty billion dollars of fossil fuel imports five percent of GDP every year, India needs to find other solutions, and of course they're doing that because they can.

After the break, I asked kings Mill what would derail the electrotech revolution?

And if you're enjoying this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

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Recently, Felicity Future wrote, I really liked the Moderator and the Argentina episode was super interesting.

Thank you, Felicity.

I kind of like the Moderator too.

Now be the devil's advocate and tell me what derails the electrotech revolution.

So what derails the electrotech revolution would be if China suddenly found a huge oil deposit and then an a very cheat one, and then decided that they didn't need these technologies.

That would be one thing which could certainly not necessarily derail but hold it back for a while.

I guess a lot of people have pointed to the rising conflict between China and the United States as something that's going to hold back change, but in fact what's actually happening on the ground is it's speeding up change because now China has an incentive to deploy their technologies, possibly to allow their technologies to be deployed more rapidly in the emerging markets.

And at the same time, people are getting nervous about the amount of petro state power being exercised by Trump and his coterie and therefore a hunting for domestic solution.

So actually, strangely enough of that tension is I would suggest speeding up change.

You guys have also talked about this idea of an electro state, that countries like China, like India are now going down the path where their development is coming through electricity, where their economic story will come through electricity.

Define electro state.

An electro state, as we define it, is simply a country which is getting its electricity from renewable sources and its final energy from electricity.

So of course nobody's got one hundred percent and one hundred percent, but increasingly countries are gravitating to getting the electricity from renewable sources and their final energy from electricity.

So that's how we define it.

And there's one further I would be lax if I didn't mention one further angle to this, which is using your electric state advantages to deploy power as an electro power.

The point is that anyone I would suggest can become an electro state, very few countries can exercise power because that's the difference between electricity and fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels enabled you to have power over others.

Electro state technologies allow you to have power over yourself.

Well, that's an interesting way of thinking about it because most people in the energy space understand what a status which is, you know, first being that most of its income comes from petroleum in some form, and that they use that income to drive power and drive geopolitical tensions around the world.

So in that sense, you know, America wouldn't fall in the classic category of a petro state because its economy is not hugely dependent on fossil fuels, and yet it does fall in the definition of a petro state these days, with using its geopolitical power as the world's largest producer of oil and gas.

If you flip it, China is starting to use some of its electrostate power for actual geopolitical power, right It's going to all these developing countries where it is deploying electrification resources, whether that is in the grid itself, which it's doing in plenty of places, or whether it's supplying electric cars.

But electrostate itself doesn't lead to an automatic state of power, whereas petrostate does.

Yes, exactly, And I think that's you know, that's the great difference between this new world we're entering into, which is not so Darwinian, not so hobbsy, and shall we say, it is giving people much more local distributed power.

So when it comes to this argument, I very frequently hear from my friends in the fossil fuel industry that Europe, for example, should worry about being dependent upon China for electrostate imports, and that there is an equivalence between electrotech imports and fossil fuel inputs.

This clearly is incorrect, and the main reason it's incorrect is because you're again confusing stocks and floats.

So if you buy a solar panel, it lasts for thirty years, your solar panel supply cuts you off.

You've got thirty years to find another one.

If you buy a barrel of oil, you have to burn it the same day and then the next day you have to buy another one.

So it's just completely different to your degree of dependency.

That's one angle, and if I made there's one other I think very important point here, which is that in the old world of fossil fuel dominance, a very small number of countries, by geographic chances, sitting on a very large share of the energy resources.

In the electrotech world, anyone can do it.

And it's not just the fact that everyone's got sunshine and wind, but everybody can build if they want to electrotech systems.

And it's very interesting.

Everyone talks all the time about how China dominates solar panel and battery production, and that is true, but there are plenty of other pieces in the electrotech system, so cables for example, and software and transformers, and there are plenty of other countries actually who are rising already supplying this, and I would suggest we're probably at a moment of peak Chinese dominance in electrotech system and as the rest of the world starts to wake up and realize that this is the energy future.

In India is a classic example of this, we will actually see that dominance full but.

We are seeing very interesting things play out as a result.

So India, yes, you're right that it is trying to build its own supply chain for all sorts of electrotech.

But just this past week we've heard from Reliance, which was trying to build its own lithiumian battery supply, that it has halted that project because the Chinese wouldn't provide the equipment that is necessary with Chinese make to make the batteries in India.

We've also seen, for example, in the Net Zero Industry Act in the European Union, which is asking its member states to start to reduce Chinese dependence on all sorts of electrotech.

Italy is the first country that has come out with a rule that is requiring a pretty strict definition of what Chinese contribution to its solar industry counts as, and as a result, it can only now access ten percent of the solar modules that are produced in the world, which is still plenty.

You know, Italy is a small country.

It'll get its supply.

But imagine if all of Europe has to suddenly do that.

There is a risk that the Chinese dominance in electrotech starts to actually not be an advantage for the world in the future as it has been so far because it's been cheap to get that stuff.

Yeah, it's a really good point that if nothing changes then it will be dangerous.

And this, I guess is why things do need to change, and actually, in fairness do need to continue to change, because again that there are these very famous statistics being produced by a number of people showing that the Chinese investment abroad in building electrotech facilities is now two hundred billion dollars, which is at a level comparable to the Marshall Plan, and there are now facilities being built all over the world from from Europe to India, to Southeast Asia to South America, which and we need to be careful about this.

Obviously, we need to It needs to be done in a good way.

It needs to be done in a way that allows the technology expertise to be transferred over time.

And as you say, actually it's not guaranteed that that will happen, and that's the function of governments to seek to ensure that they get these technologies effectively.

But I think if I may push back at one other point, take India for example, India in the last decade has gone from having around twenty two billion dollars of electronics production to one hundred and thirty billion dollars, so fivefold increase.

It's gone from making two million phones to three hundred million phones.

So clearly there's a huge amount of talent and capacity, and there are bound to be teething troubles.

But I think when you're kind of looking at the direction of travel and an increasingly clear recognition in the emerging markets that this is the future, people will build these facilities.

Beyond economics and even geopolitics, one place where at a government level everything is trumped is national security.

And what we've seen is that the electrical system, like any energy system, has real challenges when it comes to being resilient in the face of say, cyber attack.

So famously this year, when the capture of Maduro happened in Venezuela, the Venezuelan power grid was disabled by the US.

These kinds of cyber risks are real in a digital world.

They happen in all sorts of places, but the grid itself.

The more central it becomes to running a country, which it already is in most countries.

But if we are looking at this electrification pathway, it really becomes the source of energy.

How do you think of the electric tech revolution in the face of a resiliency and a security problem?

So I guess the first point to be made is this is not new.

We've had a cyber attacks and our electricity system for decades, also on the.

Fossil fuel system, because the gas pipeline in the US, if you remember during the pandemic, was famously under cyber attack.

We still don't know who exactly caused it, but there was an issue with fossil fuel transport as well exactly.

And all of our systems come under attack at different moments.

And the part of the answer is we need to deploy the resources as countries or many countries doing in order to ensure that that we have greater resilience.

But I mean, if I extrapolate your argument to its absolutely logical conclusion, we should kind of all using stones because that can't be hacked.

I mean, ultimately, if we wish to have a modern society, we have to deploy very powerful cybernetic security.

But there's actually one very there's one very interesting new idea which is now materializing from Sweden, from Jonas Bergersen, who has come up with an energy net system which is now being deployed in a land and is possibly going to get rolled out in Sweden.

Then in the same way as broadband internet protocol spread globally, this energy protocol could also spread globally.

And this energy protocol is much more resilient because it's all local systems.

Each one is separated from the wider grade galvanized I think is the technical term, from the wider grade, and therefore they you can't control, you can't call cascading blackouts in the entire grade if you have one little piece of this system.

And again I just I mainly mentioned this is one of the very interesting new ideas which is bubbling up from entrepreneurs such as Biggerson in order to help to solve the problem.

Why is this story much harder and much slower in a way?

Right?

This happened most recently in the telecom industry, where you went from you know, dial up internet to to fiber internet, or you went from telephones on your desk to mobile phones and a bunch of companies lost as a result.

Are you saying this is harder because the incumbent industry is just so much larger, has so much more political influence than any other industry that was kicked out as a result of technology change.

Yeah, I put you figure right, that's the point.

I mean, the energy system generates two thousand billion dollars of rent every single year.

Rents the difference between how much it costs you to extract the oil and how much you get paid for it.

And that's an awfully large amount of money that you can use to try and slow down change.

And what actually is even more interesting is, in spite of all that money, in spite of the constant cascade of lies trying to prop up the status quote, change is just ongoing.

It's so powerful.

One aspect that we haven't touched on in the electrotech revolution is the idea of sectors that have not yet been electrified.

So you know, batteries are doing a lot to try and make the grid become more and more clean as a result.

But what about industry, because there's all these hard to abate sectors as they are called, steel, cement, aviation, shipping, how is the electrotech revolution going to come to them?

So it's not a relevant question in twenty twenty six, not to dismiss it in any way, but let me give you a couple of analogies.

I mean, the first one would be, I'm sure, actually you were very good at maths at school.

You know, you went through school let out shining, and you had your initial exams and you eventually get to your university finals in maths.

And we don't ask seven year olds to take university finals in maths, right, We first of all teach them algebra.

And it's exactly the same in the energy transition.

We don't need to be doing the really hard stuff at scale everywhere today.

We need to do the easy stuff, the easy to solve sectors.

And the great lesson over the last decade is the more you solve the easy to solve sectors, the wider solution suite, cheaper the electrotech solutions, and the more opportunities arise to solve the harder ones.

So we actually, if I may say so, we have made a bit of a category error by focusing so hard on the hard to solve sectors in twenty twenty six or for the last decade.

Actually, we definitely need to do that.

So I'm not suggesting for a second that the people doing this hard and brilliant work to decarbonize the hardest to solve sectors shouldn't be doing.

Of course, they should be doing it, and I salute them.

But from a system perspective, what we need to be doing is we need to be removing the barriers to entry in order to speed up deployment of solo and speed up electrication.

And actually, if I made sort of conclude on this, one of the reasons why it's been so hard to electrify end use in Europe, so Europe's been stuck around twenty to twenty two percent for about fifteen years.

One of the reasons why is because we've had these people trying to figure out twenty fifty solutions and building hydrogen hydrogen highways through Germany and coming up with totally mad ideas like bioenergy, carbon capture and storage for twenty to fifty and thinking about pouring this stuff into the other These are all completely irrelevant in twenty twenty six.

But what they're doing is they're loading costs onto the old system.

They're confusing the public, they're slowing down change, and they're stopping us from getting and from doing what we need to do, which is get the electricity price down and just electrified stuff.

I'm not sure on the policy side, I quite agree on the narrative side may be true.

But you know, for Europe to have essentially brought in renewables policy in the early two thousands and pour hundreds of billions of euros through Germany through Spain is what allowed Solo to become this cheap because the Chinese were supplying it, etc.

And so you need to do that for the twenty fifty technologies now.

But I think I agree with you that the narrative side, perhaps the fact that we talk about, oh but what about this stuff that hasn't been solved, as a way of distracting from the from the real advantages that the technology has brought is probably real.

Yeah, just to push back a little bit of this, I mean the ultimately what has worked has been small modular technologies, and not everything has worked.

And you know, if there's been a great lesson, as a done farm at Oxford points out, it's really been if you leant into small modular technologies you could replicate at scale.

And though that's where we've had a lot of success.

So our very simple observation is so learn we're into para electronics, electrication, AI and software and these are all classic technologies where the costs of falling over time.

We should lean into them and hunt for solutions there that will then create a foundation on which our children could actually figure out the hard source sectors eventually.

Thank you King Smell, thank you many chat, and thank you for listening to zero.

Now for the sound of the week.

The louder one was the sound of a mechanical shutter on a mirrorless digital camera, while the quieter one was the electronic shutter on the same camera.

I recently bought a new mirrorless digital camera with film simulations and have been nerding out about how so much of the camera is still quite analog and Old School.

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This episode was produced by Oscar boyd Our theme music is composed by wonder Lee.

Special thanks to Samersadi, Moses Adam, Laura Milan and Sharan chen I.

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