Clean Disruption | RethinkX

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In 2014, Tony Seba published Clean Disruption, whose ideas and predictions were considered radical and even crazy at the time.

The next 10 years proved him to be closer than anyone else in predicting what we see today...

Our latest page-by-page retrospective looks back on Clean Disruption from the lens of 2025...

Rethinking the status quo across the energy and transportation sector forecasts that garnered Tony so many fans - and enemies...

Buy Clean Disruption 2025

Clean Disruption and the work it inspired at RethinkX offer a vision of the future that is profoundly optimistic

A vision in which disruptions driven by better, cleaner technologies usher in an era of unprecedented abundance and prosperity for humanity. But achieving that future will require us to successfully navigate what are sure to be turbulent times ahead. And to that end, Clean Disruption gave us a roadmap of the opportunities to seize and the pitfalls to watch out for.

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Technological disruption is not a chaotic and impenetrable mystery, but rather is a set of understandable processes we can anticipate and leverage to make better choices as individuals, business leaders, investors, and policymakers as tectonic forces begin to shift the ground beneath our feet.

Explore disruption

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"Tony was perhaps the first person to fully make the case that clean energy and transportation technologies weren’t just going to eventually become viable, but were going to quickly become so overwhelmingly competitive that they would simply make the older technologies obsolete..."

- Adam Dorr, RethinkX Director of Research

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OPTIMISTIC VISION

Clean Disruption 2025 offers a vision of the future that is profoundly optimistic- where disruptions driven by better, cleaner technologies usher in an era of abundance and prosperity for humanity.

NAVIGATION

Achieving this future will require us to successfully navigate what are sure to be turbulent times ahead... Clean Disruption 2025 provides the first step in the right direction...

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ROADMAP

Clean Disruption gave RethinkX a roadmap of the opportunities to seize and the pitfalls to watch out for... The team at RethinkX have revisted these remarkably accurate forecasts and found incredible accuracy...

Explore key predictions we got right...

Purchase the Book

Tony Seba's Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation 2025

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LATEST ENERGY REPORT

Understanding Stellar Energy

This groundbreaking report from RethinkX explains how solar power, wind power, and battery energy storage can deliver a superabundance of clean energy at near-zero marginal cost to create Stellar Energy systems, that will fundamentally transform our world and help build a future where all people in all societies everywhere can flourish as never before.

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NEW BOOK FROM RETHINKX CO-FOUNDERS

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Stellar is a the brand new book from RethinkX's co-founders, Tony Seba and James Arbib. Stellar is a guide to understanding the biggest transformation in history, and how we can all be part of it. It’s about the end of the old system, the rise of something new, and the incredible possibilities ahead.

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Is it impossible to have a 100% renewable grid, because it is too inefficient to build solar, wind or battery capacity that we only use for a small fraction of the time?

No. Our research has shown that 100% SWB-based energy systems are not only feasible, they are also by far the most affordable energy systems going forward.

Since publishing our landmark findings in 2020, many other research teams around the world have reached similar conclusions, that 100% SWB based systems are possible, and are by far the most affordable energy system for our future.

Beyond the findings of our core analysis, it is also worth recognizing that the critique of solar and wind power on the basis of their utilization rate has never been valid. The validity of investments in energy assets, like any other asset class, are determined by their economic value, not by arbitrary standards of physical efficiency. If a low utilization rate invalidated the use of an energy asset, that would apply to conventional technologies as well as SWB—and we already have hundreds of billions of dollars in conventional generating assets that are only utilized a small fraction of the time.

For example, California already only uses its full electric power generating capacity about 50% of the time. 'Peakers', or power plants that are only used during periods of peak demand, are typically utilized less than 10% of the time, yet the low utilization rate of gas-powered peakers did not prevent society from investing in them.

Moreover, virtually all regions worldwide require by law that power plant utilities maintain a significant 'operating reserve', meaning a legally-mandated excess of capacity, just in case there is unexpectedly more demand than ever before. Some of this operating reserve is required to be 'spinning reserve' (i.e. the generators are actively spinning) which can be deployed near-instantly if needed. A portion of power plant (typically gas) hours are dedicated to providing spinning reserves, meaning that they literally sit there burning fuel just in case it is ever needed on a moment’s notice! So, in addition to a low utilization rate, spinning reserves based on fossil fuels are also very costly and wasteful—unlike equivalent reserves of SWB which do not burn fuels when in standby mode.

Read the full answer here

Myth: Solar, wind and batteries cannot support the entire global population.

False. 100% SWB is possible in every region on earth that has access to sunshine or wind resources and is willing to invest in the infrastructure needed to harvest and store it. This includes the high-latitude regions.

In the past, global advantages in energy production lay with the regions that have natural endowments of fossil fuels, and the distribution of these resources is starkly uneven. In the future, however, the energy advantage will tend to lie with the tropical and equatorial regions with the most abundant sunshine. More importantly, no single region will possess an overwhelming energy advantage or disadvantage, because unlike fossil fuels sunshine and wind are everywhere.

Read the full answer here

Myth: It is impossible to build enough battery storage to power our civilization with clean energy.

False. Our previous research has shown that long-term seasonal energy storage is not required in order to meet 100% of existing electricity demand.

Our current research confirms that weeks or months of energy storage is not a requirement for the electrification of transportation and heating. Most geographic regions need only a few days' worth of battery energy storage.

Several days' worth of energy storage for the entire planet is still an extremely large quantity of batteries, but it is well within the range of what is feasible to produce over the next two decades as the disruptions proceed. Once the batteries are produced, their stock can largely be recycled over time. This means the raw materials requirement for battery stock will exhibit a large one-time pulse during the initial build out, followed by a much lower requirement for ongoing upkeep.

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Does the scarcity of raw materials needed to make lithium-ion batteries mean that we won’t be able to build enough batteries for our energy demands?

No. There is no fundamental shortage of raw materials. Lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel and other metals are relatively abundant on the Earth's crust. History shows that there are virtually no examples where supply failed to meet demand.

The highest-quality ores are of course finite, but mining can target lower-quality ores as economic incentives necessitate.

Proven reserves (commonly cited as the limiting quantity) only reflect exploration and production to date. Actual materials in place are vastly larger, and recoverability depends on technological and economic factors—both of which change dramatically in favor of production when demand creates the necessary incentive.

There are no historical examples of supply failing to meet demand for materials that are not scarce. Gold, platinum, and gemstones are fundamentally scarce in a way that the metal ingredients in lithium-ion batteries are not. Cobalt, for example, is at least 10,000 times more abundant than gold, but only 50 times more cobalt is produced each year (about 123,000 tonnes) than gold (about 3,200 tonnes) at present.

Temporary supply shortages around material bottlenecks do occur. These shortages spark additional investment in exploration and production whenever market demand signals that additional supply is needed.

Grid storage applications don’t require high-performance lithium-ion batteries, and can instead use types of batteries that use only abundant materials. There are six major lithium-ion battery chemistries in commercial production today; lithium cobalt oxide, lithium manganese oxide, lithium iron phosphate, lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide, lithium nickel cobalt aluminium oxide and lithium titanate. Lithium itself actually comprises only a small fraction of the battery’s mass–typically less than 5%. Cobalt, manganese, and nickel types are the highest-performance chemistries at the moment, and these are also the least-abundant metals. Iron, phosphorus, aluminum and titanium are abundant.

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Can we build batteries fast enough to maintain exponential growth of renewables and EVs?

Yes. Battery supply will be the limiting factor to deployment of renewables and EVs. However, the demand from these sectors will create massive incentive to ramp up battery supply.

Tesla decided to build the first gigafactory when it realized there wasn’t enough global capacity to meet their own demand for batteries. Since starting Gigafactory 1 in Nevada in 2016, dozens of other major factories have been built, and more are in the pipeline. The planned capacity for battery production is approaching the TWh/year scale.

Battery supply will be the limiting factor, or bottleneck, for the deployment of renewables and EVs. But by the same token, the enormous demand from those sectors will create massive incentives to ramp up battery supply. This bottleneck will therefore constrain but not prevent the disruption.

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Myth: Switching to clean technologies will be expensive, and the cost of converting to an electrified civilization is more than the cost of maintaining the current system.

False. Switching to clean technologies will save money.

The reason why disruptions happen in the first place is because the new technologies outperform the older ones in terms of cost and capability, and therefore outcompete them on a purely economic basis. (Watch this video to learn more about Disruptions from Adam Dorr, Director of Research at RethinkX)

Disruptions would not occur if the new technologies were not overwhelmingly cost-competitive. It therefore follows that adopting the new technologies will cost less, not more, than continuing with older technologies. And this is purely in economic terms, without including the environmental, social, health and other externalized costs of fossil fuels and combustion engine vehicles.

The costs and capabilities of SWB have been consistently improving for several decades. Since 2010, solar PV capacity costs have fallen nearly 90%%, onshore wind capacity costs have fallen more than 50% and lithium-ion battery capacity costs have fallen over 90%.

These cost improvements are consistent and predictable, and each of the technologies will continue to traverse a remarkable experience curve throughout the 2020s. SWB will be overwhelmingly competitive on a purely economic basis in all regions by 2030.

Read the full answer here