Grid Investments in the Age of Electrification, AI and Data Ascendency
by Ron Pernick, Clean Edge
When Clean Edge was founded back in 2000, we had a very clear sense that a host of emerging clean technologies – spanning renewables, the grid, transportation, and more – would experience learning curves and growth trajectories more akin to the internet and computers than to extractive energy sectors such as oil and gas. In hindsight, this thesis seems obvious, but at the time it was a radical concept that was just being embraced by a small cohort of tech and investment experts who had witnessed similar breakthroughs in the high-technology sector. After 25 years, clean tech and high tech are now firmly converging, especially at the intersection of the electric grid.
The statistics speak for themselves:
• Solar and wind are now the most cost-competitive and fastest-to-deploy sources of energy across most of the globe.
• Solar and storage have exhibited learning curves of 20% and 18%, respectively. A “learning curve” is the decline in cost for every doubling of manufacturing output globally – much like Moore’s Law for transistors on chips.
• Globally, on average, it takes nearly eight years to build a new nuclear power plant (much longer in places like the U.S. and U.K.) while it takes one and a half to three years to build a solar farm with integrated energy storage. New natural gas turbines are currently backlogged out to 2028-2030.
• In 2024, renewables represented a record ~90% of new electricity capacity additions both in the U.S. and globally.
• More than 17 million electric vehicles were sold worldwide last year and reached nearly half of all passenger vehicles sold in China, the largest global market by far with an estimated 11 million EVs sold.
• Datacenters are moving into the hyperscale, with Meta and others now building GW-size plants that require from 1 GW to 5 GW of operating power, enough capacity to power an entire city.
Which brings us to the electric grid. As renewables penetration grows, electrification of heat and transportation takes off, and new power-hungry AI-driven datacenters expand, the need for a modern 21st-century grid is not a “nice-to-have” but a necessity.
Read Ron's very informative and useful article here - https://greenmoney.com/new_version/grid-investments-in-the-age-of-electrification-ai-and-data-ascendency
====
