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By 2030, solar, wind and battery installations will disrupt our conventional energy systems
Why? The combined cost of solar, wind and batteries fell over 80% between 2010 and 2020.
It will decline over 70% from 2020 to 2030—signaling the disruption of our current energy.
The disruption of energy
The disruption of the energy sector will be driven by solar photovoltaics, onshore wind power and lithium-ion batteries (SWB).
These already outcompete conventional power generation and will displace fossil fuels and conventional nuclear power during the 2020s. These cost improvements are consistent and predictable, and each of the technologies will continue to progress throughout the 2020s.
Race to the top
Near-zero marginal cost and abundant energy will enable any nation or first mover to create an upward spiral of prosperity.
First movers who implement SWB superpower will be able to remove the costs of electricity for their populations, creating great social benefit. Any nation could be the first to reap these incredible rewards. It is a race to the top.
Witness the transformation
The economics of energy, currently based on expensive and scarce resources will soon resemble information economics, with superabundant kilowatt hours approaching the marginal cost of photons: zero.
As our electric power system are flipped from centralized, scarce and expensive to decentralized, superabundant and cheap, the ripple effects across our economies and societies will be even bigger than the disruption of energy itself...
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Rethinking Energy 2020-2030: 100% Solar, Wind and Batteries is Just the Beginning (2020)
ENERGY REPORT
Rethinking Energy 2020-2030
In Rethinking Energy 2020-2030 (published 2020) our analysis shows that 100% clean electricity from the combination of solar, wind and batteries (SWB) is physically possible and economically affordable across the entire continental United States as well as across most populated regions of the world by 2030.
Solar and wind are already the cheapest new generation options, and cost less than existing coal, gas and nuclear power plants in many areas.
The cost of SWB systems will decline over 70% from 2020 to 2030, making disruption inevitable. Electricity from a 100% SWB system in 2030 will cost less than 3 cents per kilowatt-hour.
New investments in coal, gas or nuclear power are financially unviable.
Coal, gas and nuclear power assets will become stranded during the 2020s, and no new investment in these technologies is rational from this point forward.
STRANDED ASSETS ENERGY REPORT
Rethinking Energy: The Great Stranding
In our Rethinking Energy: The Great Stranding report (published 2021), we explain how a large and rapidly expanding global financial bubble now exists around conventional coal, gas, nuclear and hydropower energy assets.
Conventional energy assets are severely mispriced, and their overvaluation is creating a growing asset valuation bubble in the conventional energy sector.
Coal, gas, nuclear and hydropower are no longer competitive with the combination of SWB, even using inaccurate mainstream levelized cost of energy (LCOE) calculations.
Solar and wind power reached cost parity and became cheaper than coal, gas, nuclear and hydropower several years sooner than mainstream analysts reported.
The widening gap between increasing conventional energy LCOE and decreasing SWB costs means that the SWB disruption will proceed faster than expected.
REGIONAL ENERGY PRIMER
Rethinking Energy: Germany's Path to 'Freedom Energy' by 2030
In our Policy Primer for German Energy Sector & Decision Makers (published 2022) we discuss how Germany is facing an unprecedented energy supply crisis as it rethinks dependence on Russian oil and gas imports. But this crisis also poses a unique opportunity...
Within the next decade, Germany can lead the world by creating a fully self-sufficient, zero-cost, clean energy system for less than the country’s current annual fossil fuel spending.
Germany could lay the foundations for a bold new era of long-term energy security and economic prosperity unlike anything seen before.
Our research shows that many different combinations of solar power, wind power and batteries can meet 100% of Germany’s roughly 500 terawatt-hours of electricity demand.
The key to meeting the current challenge is to fully understand technology disruption, its geopolitical implications and its race-to-the-top consequences.
“Just as the Internet disrupted many incumbent industries but facilitated the emergence of many more—and created trillions of dollars of new value—by reducing the marginal cost of information to near zero, the SWB disruption will have a similar impact by reducing the marginal cost of energy to near-zero for a substantial portion of the year.”
