Kimi K3 won’t hold the top spot long. Some American lab will reclaim it in a month, then lose it again. Model leaderboards flip constantly now — a 17-place jump in one release cycle, per Arena.ai’s own numbers. Chasing churn is a trap. The big story is in the economics that make releases like K3 possible at all. Hint it has something to do with structure and electricity!

Start with Kevin Walmsley’s numbers. Chinese AI models now process 98 trillion tokens a month against 53 trillion for US models. Chinese token demand more than doubled in a single month; American demand grew 43%.

DeepSeek’s latest model runs at 14 cents per million tokens against $5.00 for ChatGPT — a gap of roughly 35x.

Real companies are switching on that math alone. Lindy moved 100% of its workload off Claude to DeepSeek and called the savings a survival issue. US commercial real estate firms are running lease reviews for pennies instead of dollars. Chinese models now handle up to 46% of US enterprise token volume.

None of that is about Chinese labs being smarter. It’s about them being radically cheaper to run, at scale, indefinitely. And cheap-to-run is not a research achievement — it’s an input-cost story.

That’s where StudioAlpha’s piece on Kimi K3, WAICO, and Xi’s Shanghai speech lands the harder point. Xi didn’t show up in Shanghai with a model demo. He showed up with an offer: training slots, cooperation centers, a new 29-country institution headquartered in Shanghai, and infrastructure for countries priced out of American frontier systems. That’s a bid to become the default AI supplier for most of the world, not just the top scorer on one leaderboard. Another example of China positioning itself to lead the electrotech revolution sweeping the globe.

Electric Feel

Both pieces are describing the same underlying asset from different angles. Walmsley is looking at the output — tokens sold at a tenth of the American price. StudioAlpha is looking at the geopolitical packaging — infrastructure diplomacy wrapped around cheap models. Neither piece names the input that makes both possible: electricity.

Training and running a frontier model is, at bottom, an energy bill. China’s installed power generation capacity hit 3.96 billion kilowatts by the end of March, up 15.5% year over year — roughly three times US installed capacity. Solar capacity alone grew 31% in a year; wind grew 22%. China is not matching the US watt for watt. It’s building a grid three times the size and still accelerating, while US and European demand growth stays flat by comparison. Don’t believe the hype. The hyperscalers are not building nor using nearly as much electricity as it seems.

Wall Street just confirmed it from the other side of the ledger. At least ten power and clean-tech companies went public in 2026 in the USA, raising $11.6 billion — a sector record, and more than software or biotech IPOs raised over the same stretch. Fervo, Forgent, Madison Air, Constellation: all pitching some version of the same thesis.

One investor tracking the wave put it plainly: you can ship chips from Taiwan and memory from Korea, but you cannot ship electricity — it gets generated next to the data center or not at all, which makes power the one layer of the AI stack that can’t be outsourced.

That’s not a bet on an existing edge. It’s capital chasing a shortfall: US data centers need 41 gigawatts today and a projected 77GW by 2030, nearly double, in four years. China isn’t racing to close that gap. It’s already sitting on it.

Put the two datasets side by side and the picture sharpens. American AI capex from five companies alone is forecast near $764 billion this year, headed past a trillion by 2027 — eight times China’s roughly $100 billion. But that American spending is mostly buying chips and data centers to squeeze more output from a grid that isn’t growing much. China’s spending, comparatively modest, sits on top of a power base that’s already three times larger and still compounding at double-digit rates. Cheap electricity doesn’t show up as AI capex on anyone’s spreadsheet, but it’s doing more of the actual work than the chip totals suggest.

Two caveats: American per-capita electricity use is still higher than China’s, and the US retains a real edge in advanced chips and frontier research funding — American firms pulled in roughly $286 billion in private AI investment in 2025 versus about $12 billion in China. Cheap power doesn’t hand China the smartest model. It hands China the cheapest model that’s good enough.

This is the part that outlasts any single model release. Export controls can slow China’s chip access. They can’t fast-track an American grid that takes a decade to permit a transmission line. Benchmark wins swap hands weekly — Kimi K3 today, something else in August. Electrification doesn’t swap hands. It compounds, quarter over quarter, and it’s the one input in this race that the loser can’t buy back with a bigger check. Sorry Elon but China is bigger than Texas…

So when Polymarket flags a Chinese model beating Claude Fable 5, the right reaction isn’t to relitigate the benchmark. It’s to notice that the model is downstream of a resource advantage the US isn’t currently positioned to close. Cheap tokens, aggressive global distribution, an AI diplomacy offer to 29 countries — all of it sits on the same foundation. Not smarter engineers, not better research. Cheap electricity, at scale, built faster than anyone else is building it.

Sources: Berno, “Climate got a new customer”; Hediger, “China’s Next Move in AI”; Walmesley, “We were wrong about DeepSeek. Now Chinese AI companies export trillions of AI tokens.”;

The first is Ember’s new report on China’s battery storage sector, From Scale to System: Navigating the Next Phase of China’s Battery Storage. The second is The Energy’s story on an Australian startup called Gridcog, which just closed a $12.5 million Series A with an investor list that reads like a map of where grid complexity is heading next.

Put side by side, they describe the same problem from two different altitudes. China is rewriting the market rules that let a battery earn money in more than one way at once. Gridcog is building the software that lets someone actually operationalize those rules across thousands of physical assets. Market design and software infrastructure — two halves of the same problem. Neither one is about pouring more concrete.

The Australian export nobody’s talking about

Start with Gridcog, because it’s easier to understand. Founder Fabian Le Gay Brereton describes the product as “SimCity for energy projects” — grid modelling software that lets developers and investors simulate a project’s technical and commercial outcomes before they commit capital. Four-hour battery or eight-hour? Develop in Germany or Poland? Gridcog runs the simulation and shows you the cash flows.

It started small — behind-the-meter solar — then grew to cover utility-scale renewables, batteries, and EV chargers. Now, per Brereton, the fastest-growing category on the platform is data centres. Not because operators need help sizing the asset, but because they need to prove something to regulators and neighbours: that a new facility can interact with the grid flexibly enough that it won’t quietly push costs onto everyone else. Social license, modelled in software. That’s a use case that barely existed two years ago.

The Series A itself is the tell. Alongside existing backers AlbionVC and Australia’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the round was led by ABB Electrification Ventures, with Axpo Ventures, DNV Ventures and Verbund Ventures joining in. Brereton says that lineup reflects where growth is concentrated — Germany, Austria and Sweden specifically — and Gridcog has opened satellite offices in Berlin and Madrid to chase it, while keeping engineering back home in Perth and Melbourne.

Why would a company built in Australia find its second act in central Europe rather than, say, the US?

Because Australia already ran the experiment Europe is now living through: extreme rooftop solar penetration, Virtual Power Plant trials, AEMO’s Consumer Energy Resources roadmap, the SA big battery. High DER density, volatile pricing, grid congestion, and thousands of small assets all needing coordination close to real time. Gridcog’s software wasn’t designed for a hypothetical future grid — it was built to survive the one Australia already has. Europe is now catching up to that same complexity, and Gridcog is exporting the tooling that already learned how to model it. The US is yet to seriously open markets to competition and digitisation in an irony of our times…

China already answered half the question

Set the Gridcog news next to Ember’s China study and the shape of the bigger problem gets sharper. China now has close to 150 GW of installed lithium-ion battery storage as of early 2026, and in June the government raised its 2030 target for new energy storage to 300 GW. But the more interesting number isn’t capacity — it’s the plumbing underneath it.

For years, China built storage largely by mandate: renewable projects had to co-locate batteries alongside them, whether or not those batteries were well-utilized. Document 136, issued in February 2025, ended that mandate. Document 114, in January 2026, went further and introduced national capacity remuneration for standalone storage. The result, per Ember, is a market flipping from co-located batteries — which once made up more than 70% of utility-scale capacity — toward standalone systems chasing multiple revenue streams at once: arbitrage, ancillary services, capacity payments. Fleet-wide utilisation has more than doubled since 2022, yet co-located batteries still run roughly 100 fewer cycles a year than standalone ones — evidence that market design, not hardware, remains the binding constraint even in the world’s largest storage market.

That’s the China story in one line: the rules now exist to make a battery’s value additive rather than singular. What’s left is operational — actually wiring up thousands of distributed, heterogeneous assets to respond to those price signals in real time, at whatever timescale the market clears on.

Two halves, one problem

This is where the pieces meet. Ember is describing the market-design layer: the rules that determine whether a battery is worth building. Gridcog is one instance of the software-infrastructure layer: the tooling that determines whether that battery can actually be operated well once it exists. China has spent several years solving the first problem at enormous scale. Australia — almost by accident, through regulatory improvisation under DER pressure — ended up solving a version of the second, and Gridcog is now packaging that solution for export.

Neither layer requires building anything the world hasn’t already built. That’s the real insight sitting underneath both pieces: the constraint on the next phase of the energy transition isn’t steel in the ground, it’s code — market code and software code, running on top of assets that in many cases already exist. Code, not concrete.

Where this points next

The obvious next markets are the ones currently importing China’s market-design playbook without yet having the software layer to run it: Vietnam, the Philippines, much of Southeast Asia. They’re going to need something like Document 136 and Document 114 of their own. And once they have it, they’re going to need something like Gridcog to actually execute against it. Gridcog’s move into Germany and Austria isn’t only a European growth story — it’s a preview of a product category about to go global, one grid at a time.

Sources: Ember, “From Scale to System: Navigating the Next Phase of China’s Battery Storage”; The Energy, “Australian start-up Gridcog expands in Europe”

Bangladesh is also sitting on a technical solar and wind potential of roughly 156 GW and 150 GW respectively, and today is capturing barely 3.6% of its installed capacity from renewables — a fraction of the 33.8% global average (Eco-Business/Dialogue Earth; CleanTechnica). That gap between what’s possible and what’s built is a huge opportunity. A country starting this far behind doesn’t have to walk the same path the rich world walked — it can skip straight to the destination.

Dhaka just made that leap more likely. In June, the government cut the tax rate on the entire solar power sector to zero through 2035 — import duty, regulatory duty, supplementary duty, advance tax, all zeroed out on solar panels, inverters, mounting structures, lithium cells, battery management systems, the works. Households and businesses installing solar now also get a 5% rebate against their income tax bill (CleanTechnica). That’s aimed at hitting 20% renewable generation by 2030. Given that upfront capital is 70-90% of the cost of any clean energy system, zeroing out the tax on that capital is the single highest-leverage move a poor country can make.

But solar panels alone don’t win this. The same budget did something a lot of energy watchers missed: it went after transport. Two- and three-wheelers make up 78% of Bangladesh’s vehicle fleet — the rickshaws and auto-rickshaws that move most of the country. The government zeroed tariffs on electric buses and trucks, cut the tax on EV chargers from 39.75% to 0%, and simultaneously hiked tariffs on fossil-fuel vehicles as high as 156% (Mongabay/Eco-Business). Transport is 9% of the country’s emissions and a real killer — more than 235,000 people die every year from air pollution complications in Bangladesh. The target is 25% electric buses and trucks, and 30% electric private cars, by 2035.

This is where it gets interesting, and where the “leapfrog” case actually gets proven rather than just argued. Solar and electric transport aren’t two separate policy areas — they’re one system, if you let them talk to each other.

I’ve been able to see that firsthand over the last year working with SolShare. Just last month at Hosne Ara Garage in Dhaka, they ran a live virtual power plant with electric three-wheeler batteries charging off rooftop solar during the day and surplus grid capacity at night, then discharging that stored power back into the grid at peak demand. No simulation, no lab — batteries and the grid talking to each other in real time. DESCO’s managing director, who came to watch it work, called it “a crying need of the time” (SOLshare, LinkedIn). That’s the mechanism by which mobility demand stops being a burden on the grid and starts becoming the grid’s shock absorber — turning millions of small batteries already on the road into distributed storage nobody had to build from scratch.

The same logic is showing up in infrastructure. Bangladeshi researchers just modeled putting rooftop solar across all 16 stations and five depot buildings of Dhaka’s MRT Line 6 metro — the country’s first metro system. A 20.38 MW system generating over 25.5 GWh a year, a six-year payback period, 234% return on investment, fully self-financed with no debt, and 235,000 tonnes of CO2 avoided over 20 years (pv magazine). That’s not a subsidized showcase project — it pencils out on its own.

None of this erases the hard realities. Bangladesh is still poor in some ways, its grid is still fragile, and rolling out charging infrastructure and storage at scale takes local financing and technical capacity the country is still building. Transport operators I’ve talked to worry, rightly, about upfront EV costs and charging times.

But the direction of travel is now unmistakable: cheap solar, a fleet already electrifying, and a government that just removed the tax and tariff walls holding both back.

Fuel-importing countries in South Asia spent this year re-learning a lesson the hard way — that the cheapest barrel of oil is the one you never had to buy. Bangladesh, of all places, is showing the fastest way to stop buying it: not with one big fix, but by letting sunshine and rickshaws finish each other’s sentences. Watch Dhaka. It’s driving on sunshine, and it’s just getting started.

Sources:

• 0% Tax Rate for Solar Power Sector in Bangladesh — CleanTechnica

• How fuel-importing countries in South Asia can survive the next global conflict — Eco-Business / Dialogue Earth

• Bangladesh boosts EV adoption in bid to cut pollution, emissions — Mongabay via Eco-Business (original: Mongabay)

• Photovoltaics for metro stations — pv magazine

• SOLshare — LinkedIn post on live VPP demonstration for DESCO

There’s a tempting second act to that story. When whaling wiped out most of the great whales, some scientists expected the krill to boom — and instead, in places, it fell, because the whales’ iron-rich waste had been fertilising the waters the krill fed on. Giant and swarm, bound together.

It’s a beautiful piece of ecology. It’s also where I’d stop the analogy vis electricity— because a grid is not an ocean. Krill had no choice but to depend on whales. The energy swarm can be given something the krill never had: a digital backbone. Hold that thought. It’ll make sense...

Where the swarm is rising fastest

In the rich world, the shift to clean power is largely real and somewhat orderly — the typical new plant is a mid-sized solar farm (5MW), one of hundreds, built to plan. That’s the tame version. The wild version is happening in emerging Asia, and it’s moving faster than anywhere on Earth.

Take Pakistan. In 2024 the country imported around 17 gigawatts of solar panels — roughly double the year before — with almost none of it ordered by the government or big corporations. Over five or six years, cumulative panel imports have come to roughly the size of Pakistan’s entire national grid. Solar went from about 2% of the electricity mix in 2020 to a double-digit share, briefly overtaking every other source in early 2025. No national programme. No feed-in tariff. Just households, farms and factories doing the math on cheap Chinese panels versus an expensive, unreliable grid — and voting with their rooftops. A revolution from the rafters up.

Vietnam did it in a single burst: more than 9 gigawatts of rooftop solar in 2019-2020 across roughly 102,000 systems, with nearly 7 GW installed in December alone as a subsidy deadline loomed. An eightfold jump in a year.

The part the data can’t see

Here’s where it connects back to the krill. The best global dataset, Global Energy Monitor’s tracker, catalogues solar plants comprehensively only down to 1 megawatt, and its coverage between 1 and 20 MW depends on whatever government databases happen to exist. Below that — the rooftop, the balcony, the solar pump in a field — it mostly leans on national totals that, across Asia, are thin. The IEA reckons distributed systems are already about 42% of all solar capacity on the planet. Our instruments can barely see half of what’s happening.

Pakistan makes the blind spot vivid. Of all those gigawatts of imported panels, researchers at the World Resources Institute found only about 0.7 GW was utility-scale and grid-connected. The rest — the overwhelming majority — is small, distributed, behind-the-meter, and of a scale that’s genuinely hard to estimate. The swarm is out there. We just can’t count it. Like the krill: the biggest thing in the system and yet it is the least measured and understood.

The old giant is faltering — and that’s fine

As Pakistan’s best-paying customers defect to their own rooftops, the grid they leave behind still has to cover its fixed costs, so tariffs climb, which pushes more customers off the grid. Economists call it the utility death spiral, and Pakistan is a live example. It’s a real problem for the poorest, who can least afford a panel and get left holding the bill — and that’s worth solving.

Policy can help with an equitable adjustment. But let’s be clear about what this is: the failure of a business model, not the failure of the lights. A grid does not collapse because a few coal plants go idle, or because it isn’t gold-plated. The old centralised giant faltering is not a catastrophe to be prevented at any cost. It’s the expected result of one system handing over to another.

The mistake — and this is where the whale story would lead you astray — is to conclude that you must therefore prop the giant up, pouring capital into ever-bigger physical machines to keep the old grid alive. You don’t. The swarm doesn’t need a bigger cage. It needs a brain.

Code, not concrete

What Vietnam’s post-boom curtailment and Pakistan’s grid stress actually reveal is not a shortage of steel and concrete. It’s a shortage of coordination — millions of small assets generating, storing and drawing power with no shared intelligence tying them together. That missing piece is software, not infrastructure: forecasting, smart inverters, dynamic tariffs, home batteries and EVs orchestrated into virtual power plants. A nervous system for the swarm.

Australia is proving it works. It already leads the world on rooftop solar — roughly 4.2 million homes, about 27 gigawatts, more than 60% of all new renewable capacity, meeting well over half of total grid demand in some daylight moments. And now the swarm is growing a memory to go with its pulse: a home-battery rebate launched in July 2025 has put behind-the-meter storage into more than a quarter of a million of those solar homes in its first ten months — several gigawatt-hours already, on a path toward 40 GWh and two million batteries by 2030. Every one of those batteries is a small node the grid can lean on at dusk.

Contrast that with the other path. Australia also placed an early bet on physical overbuild — the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro megaproject — which has become a national byword for cost blowouts and delay while battery prices quietly collapsed underneath it. The monolith is looking like the most expensive way to solve a problem that cheap, coordinated, distributed assets are already solving. High-capex concrete versus low-capex code — and the economics keep pointing one way.

The swarm pays off — twice

Here’s the part folk miss most: coordinating the swarm with software doesn’t just keep the lights on. It makes power cheaper, for everyone, including the people who never bought a panel.

The evidence is already on the board. In the first quarter of 2026, home and grid batteries became the most frequent price-setting technology on Australia’s main grid — soaking up cheap midday sun and discharging it into the evening peak, displacing expensive gas, flattening the spikes. The result: average wholesale prices fell about 12% year-on-year, and regulated household benchmark prices across the eastern states are set to drop by roughly 8 to 10%. A well-coordinated swarm is not only more reliable than the old giant — it is cheaper than it.

And then the piece de resistance. From 1 July 2026, that is yesterday, the same digital web that coordinates all those small assets began handing households something the old grid could never offer: free electricity. Under Australia’s new Solar Sharer scheme, any home with a smart meter can opt into a three-hour block of zero-cost power in the middle of the day — noon to 3pm in South Australia, 11-2p elsewhere — passing the swarm’s midday surplus straight to consumers, renters and non-solar households included. A grid built from millions of small things, woven together by code, that is cheaper, steadier, and now, for part of every day, free.

The lesson

South and Southeast Asia is writing the playbook for how the Global South powers itself this century, and it has a rare advantage: it’s building the swarm before it’s locked into the old giant’s assumptions. The task isn’t to gold-plate a grid or prop up faltering monopolies with megaprojects. It’s to give the swarm the nervous system the krill never had — the software, the batteries, the smart tariffs — and let a million small things do what, together, they’ve always been able to do.

The swarm is the future. It’s already here. It just needs a brain, not a bigger body — and when it gets one, the power gets cheaper for everyone.

Shine on ☀️

Sources: Global Energy Monitor, Global Solar Power Tracker (Feb 2026); IEA distributed-solar share; Ember and WRI on Pakistan’s imports, grid-connected share and death-spiral dynamics; EVN / PV-Tech on Vietnam’s 2020 rooftop surge; Clean Energy Council, CSIRO and AEMO on Australian rooftop solar and DER penetration; energy.gov.au / DCCEEW on the Cheaper Home Batteries Program (launched 1 July 2025) and the Solar Sharer Offer (from 1 July 2026); AEMO Quarterly Energy Dynamics Q1 2026 on wholesale prices and battery price-setting; AER on 2026–27 Default Market Offer household prices; RenewEconomy and independent analysts on Snowy 2.0. Note: no plant-level dataset captures the sub-megawatt systems that dominate the Asian story; distributed figures are national aggregates and, by every source’s own admission, understate the true total. Krill biomass: Atkinson et al. Whale biomass and the iron-recycling effect: Savoca et al., Nature 2021.

(For the record: the version you’ve probably heard — that ants outweigh humans — is the one that’s wrong. A 2022 study settled it: ants come to about a fifth of human biomass. Elephants, though? Ants bury them.)

We get this backwards because we picture the elephant. It’s enormous, it’s unforgettable, it fills the frame. The ant is a rounding error you step over. But the ant wins on numbers — trillions of small things beat a few giant ones.

The American power grid is doing the exact same thing right now. And most people are still picturing the elephant.

What actually got built

When you imagine a “power plant,” you picture a monster: cooling towers, a coal mountain, a gigawatt of steam. So I pulled the generator-level records — every utility-scale plant (1 megawatt and up) that came online in the US — and worked out the median. Not the total everyone quotes. The middle plant. The typical one.

The median new US power plant completed in 2025 was 5 megawatts.

Not 500. Five. Half of everything built last year was smaller than that — a couple of paddocks of solar panels, not a smokestack in sight.

The average was 66 MW, more than thirteen times the median. That gap is the whole story. A handful of big projects drag the average up, exactly like a few elephants in a room full of ants. But the typical plant — the one in the middle of the line — is small, quiet, and multiplying fast.

The ten-year picture

I ran the same numbers for 2015 and 2020 to see the trend. Here’s what a decade did:

Read the bottom two rows together. Capacity built per year tripled. The median plant never left single digits. America isn’t replacing thousand-megawatt monoliths with new monoliths — it’s replacing them with a swarm.

Follow the swarm

Break it down by technology and the shift is even clearer:

• Solar built 2.9 GW across 350 plants in 2015. By 2025: 30 GW across 614 plants — ten times the capacity, same tiny 5 MW median. Small, everywhere, and relentless.

• Batteries are the twist in the tale. Eight plants in 2015, barely a footnote. In 2025: 126 plants, 12 GW — now the second-biggest source of new capacity in the country. And each one is about 22 times bigger than a decade ago. This is the one piece of the grid that’s scaling up while everything else scales out.

• Gas and wind went the other way — a shrinking handful of large plants. In 2025 just ten new gas plants and twenty-nine wind farms came online all year.

No new coal or nuclear plants — none where every unit came online that year — in any of these years, in either direction.

Why this matters

The old grid was elephants — a few colossal machines you could count on one hand, each one a single point of failure. The new grid is ants: hundreds of small solar farms and a fast-growing fleet of mid-size batteries, spread across the map, no single one of them essential.

That’s not a weakness. It’s the most resilient shape a power system can take. Knock out one ant and the colony doesn’t notice. It’s faster to build, easier to finance, quicker to connect, and it lands closer to where power is actually used.

So the next time someone tells you renewables can’t carry a real grid because the plants are “too small,” remember the ants. The elephant is easy to picture. The swarm is what’s actually moving the weight.

Shine on ☀️

N.B. — and here’s the kicker: everything above is 1 megawatt and up. That’s the floor for this dataset — the smallest plant it can see. But the fastest-growing solar in America is happening below that line, where the records don’t reach. Rooftop and other small-scale solar added roughly 6 GW in the US in 2025 alone — millions of systems, none of them counted here. And a new tier is arriving underneath even that: “plug-in” or balcony solar, the panel you hang off a railing and plug into a wall socket. Utah became the first state to legalise it in 2025; by early 2026 more than 30 states had bills in motion. So the real swarm is bigger than these charts can show — and the part growing fastest is the part too small to make the list. The median keeps shrinking. The ants keep multiplying.

Data: EIA-860M Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory. US utility-scale generators (≥1 MW), nameplate capacity, counting plants where all units entered service in the given year. Older years reflect the current operating fleet, so a small number of since-retired plants aren’t counted — not enough to move the median. Small-scale solar figure: EIA. Balcony-solar policy: NCEL / WRI, 2025–26. Ant vs. elephant figures: Schultheiss et al., PNAS 2022.

Pakistan’s Federal Budget 2026–27 held the line: no new taxes on solar panels or batteries. For weeks it had looked likely that the government — under IMF pressure to broaden the tax base — would impose an 18% sales tax on both. It would have raised clean energy costs for millions of households at exactly the moment Pakistan’s citizen-led solar plus battery surge is gathering pace. An official view had formed that the national grid needed protection from too much distributed solar. The budget rejects that view.

Bangladesh is going further. Zero percent tax on the solar sector, locked in through 2035. An income tax credit to households going solar. All part of a rooftop solar programme targeting 3,000 MW that’s underway. Power purchase agreements for 523 MW of new capacity were signed in January alone - much more since but the data drops don’t keep up. Suffice to say the country’s solar market is on track to quadruple by 2035.

These are rational responses to a structural reality: China’s manufacturing build-out has made solar panels, batteries, and storage cheap enough that removing taxes on them is practically costless, while the benefits — energy security, lower household bills, independence from fuel price shocks — are enormous.

Emerging Asia is receiving that gift and running with it.

The scale of what’s underway is hard to overstate. I will be pulling heavily from Ember’s Electric Asia report for weeks to come. It was published this month, and puts plainly what we know:

Asia manufactures over 95% of the world’s solar panels, 85% of its batteries, and 75% of its wind turbines.

Not “a lot.” Virtually all of it.

And some of what we don’t know. For example, the real reason that Asia is so ProElectrica?

Asia holds half the world’s people but just 4% of its oil and gas reserves — and… three-quarters of the electrotech factories that can replace the fuel it lacks. The continent that suffers most from fossil fuel import bills built the factories to escape them. That is not a coincidence. It is a decades-long strategic response.

Solar plus storage now undercuts three-quarters of planned gas plants on cost across the region. Not in a future scenario. Now. Asia was meant to be gas’ last big gasp.

India installed 38 GW of solar in 2025 — surpassing the United States for the first time. (BTW, That sentence should have led the business section of every paper but instead, Elon…).

Asia has enough solar and wind resources to supply at least 14 times its total energy demand.

The bottomline is that the continent that imports the most fossil fuel sits on a renewable resource so vast it could power the planet. The infrastructure to capture it is being built. Per Ember’s Electric Asia this phenomena is driving a great convergence in world history. Yay!

A reminder: Globally, solar met approximately 75% of all electricity demand growth in 2025 — not renewables, solar alone. Renewables hit 33.8% of electricity generation, surpassing coal (33.0%) for the first time in over a century. Battery costs fell 45% in 2025, after falling 20% the year before.

So where are we? Aside from a war and a speculative hype cycle in the Wall Street Casino?

This week, the New York Times ran a piece on what the Iran war has done to global oil trade so far. The Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil passes — was disrupted. Asian import bills ballooned.

The disruption was real. But the Times piece, in a passage that deserved more prominence, identified who benefits structurally from all of it:

“The push to build out and diversify energy networks is going to continue long after the war ends. And China is poised to benefit most from the expected boon in renewables. It is leagues ahead of the rest of the world in producing wind turbines, high-voltage cables, transformers, solar panels, batteries, software to manage energy flows and more.”

Wood Mackenzie’s conclusion: “China looks to be an out-and-out winner.”

In the short term, the winners may be Russia and the USA. Because oil profits this quarter.

But every week oil prices spike, the economics of clean energy improve. Every disrupted tanker is an advertisement for energy independence. And a country positioned to supply that independence is China. Hence their big win. And as Ember points out the second biggest manufacturer of clean energy products is the rest of Asia ex China!

As they build up that productive capacity, every government in Asia that removes a tax on PV panels or batteries is choosing that supply chain over the one that runs through the Strait of Hormuz. Pakistan and Bangladesh chose this week. They are winners too.

This is the story that got drowned out — by a SpaceX IPO, by an Iran ceasefire, by the usual noise. (NB The Times also ran a charming piece about Americans plugging balcony solar panels into wall sockets, written with the tone of fond discovery. Real phenomenon, worth celebrating. But framing it as the frontier of solar adoption in June 2026 is like writing about bicycles in Guangzhou in 1985 and missing what was coming.)

The reality they’re still missing in the States is that the energy system has already transitioned at the manufacturing and cost level. Deployment is now catching up. The countries leading that deployment are not the ones getting the headlines.

See Asia. Watch the grid investments, the budget decisions, the cost curves. Watch Pakistan hold the line on solar taxes under fiscal pressure. Watch Bangladesh zero-rate clean tech for a decade. That’s the story that matters. Shine On.

Danny Kennedy has worked in clean energy policy and investment across Asia, Australia, and the United States for thirty years.

Let me offer a different take.

Yes, I’ve read the piece. Yes, some of the data points are real. There is pain amongst my peers in the industry. And yes, I’ve been doing this long enough — advising investors, training industry leaders, banging the drum about rooftop revolutions and grid-scale storage disruptions — to know when a story has the facts but fumbles the thesis. This I fear is that.

The Economist’s Argument, Such As It Is

The piece assembles a set of gloomy data points: falling panel prices, solar curtailment, project delays, more than 40 firms gone through bankruptcy or delisting since 2024. It gestures toward overloaded power grids, long-term coal contracts crowding out renewables, and US trade pressure as compounding woes. Dark stuff.

Except — and here’s where I start to squint — it never actually explains what ties all this together or what it means. It just strings negatives into a mood. By the end, you feel vaguely that things are bad without being told precisely why, or what “bad” would even look like compared to “expected growing pains.”

That’s not analysis. That’s vibes journalism from one of the world’s great outlets. We deserve better. Just two years ago it was “the Dawn of a Solar Age” on the cover!? Which is it?

The Real Story: A Market Maturing, Not Imploding

Here’s what’s actually happening, stripped of drama.

China deployed solar at a pace that was — let’s not mince words — historically unprecedented. Nothing in the history of energy infrastructure scales like this. When you move that fast, the rest of the system struggles to keep up: grids, storage, market rules, financing structures. That lag is not a solar problem. It’s an integration problem. And integration problems are what success looks like at scale.

The main reason new solar capacity growth will likely be flat or even slightly negative in 2026 isn’t that “power grids are overloaded with the things,” as The Economist blithely puts it. It’s more specific than that: China shifted solar developers out of a feed-in tariff system — which gave them stable, guaranteed revenue — and into contracts-for-difference and open market exposure. Developers and their banks are still figuring out how to price and finance merchant risk. That’s a temporary friction in the financing stack, not a verdict on solar’s future.

The Economist notices the policy change, mentions it in passing, and then proceeds to ignore its significance entirely. That’s a bit like noting that a Formula 1 team switched tire compounds mid-race and then wondering why they’ve slowed down for a pit stop.

On Curtailment: This Isn’t Too Much Sun, It’s Not Enough Flexibility

The piece treats solar curtailment — moments when solar generation is clipped because the grid can’t absorb it — as evidence of “too much solar.” This is almost perfectly backwards.

Curtailment happens because coal plants can’t ramp down fast enough when the sun peaks at noon. Old coal plants aren’t designed for flexibility; they’re designed to run flat and long. When solar floods the grid midday, you need other assets to step back rapidly. Storage does this. Flexible gas or new-generation coal can do it. The old coal fleet cannot. China knows this — it’s actively retrofitting plants for flexible dispatch and building new ones that can ramp. The grid bottleneck is being addressed.

“Shortages at night” because solar only works during the day? System operators plan for this. That’s literally what they do. It’s called forecasting. The sun sets every single evening and has done so with remarkable consistency throughout recorded history. No one is surprised by this.

40 Firms Going Under Is... Good News?

Here’s the part that almost made me laugh out loud. The Economist cites over 40 solar companies collapsing as a sign of industry gloom. But if oversupply is the problem — and the article argues it is — then consolidation is the solution. Weaker producers exiting the market is the market working. That’s not collapse, that’s Schumpeter. Creative destruction doing its thing. I thought the Economist editorial policy was pro-market?

The piece also conflates solar panel manufacturers (who want higher prices) with solar developers and buyers (who want lower prices). These two groups have directly opposing interests on every pricing question. Bundling them into a single “solar industry in trouble” narrative is like reporting that a wheat surplus is terrible news for both farmers and bread consumers. The analysis falls apart the moment you separate the actors.

Abandoning Netflix for Blockbuster

Let me put this as plainly as I can.

The structural shift to solar and storage is not a trend. It’s not a policy preference. It’s not a subsidy story. It’s an economics story. Solar is now the cheapest electricity ever generated in human history. Batteries keep getting cheaper every year. The spillover dynamic (that’s an economic concept) is disrupting all manner of markets downstream of generation. Transportation for example can now go electric because low cost solar and renewables. Even Laos — Laos — has banned new ICE vehicle sales because of its low-cost hydro and super abundant solar future. The direction of travel is not in question.

What we’re watching in China right now is a sector being pulled out of policy protection and into real market exposure. I thought the Economist would like that. Of course that produces friction. It’s supposed to. Markets are messy. Transitions are messy. The middle of a revolution always looks like chaos to people expecting a straight line.

Going back to coal because solar integration is bumpy would be like abandoning Netflix because your Wi-Fi is slow and heading back to Blockbuster. The infrastructure problem doesn’t indict the technology. Fix the infrastructure.

The Forecast

Battery costs continue to fall. Grid investment in China is accelerating. Renewable consumption quotas rise each year — including new mandates for data centers, which are swallowing electricity like nothing we’ve seen. The conditions for solar to re-accelerate in 2027–2028 are already being put in place.

The bottleneck has moved from generation to integration. That’s not bad news. That’s a sign you’ve won the first phase of the battle.

The sun always rises. Act accordingly.

Shine on.

Danny Kennedy is the author of Rooftop Revolution and works at the intersection of solar investment, policy advocacy, and clean energy education through FutureKeepers. Follow at proelectrica.substack.com.

Something remarkable happened in April. For the first time in history, wind and solar generated more electricity than gas across the entire planet. Not in a country. Not in a region. Globally. In April 2026, renewables produced 531 terawatt-hours of electricity — 54 TWh more than gas plants worldwide.¹

I was in Singapore the same week that data dropped from the amazing folk at Ember. I was at a couple of parallel conferences — a gathering of finance and philanthropy leaders convened to think seriously about Asia’s energy and development future. It’s a good event, filled with genuinely smart, well-intentioned people. And yet, sitting in the room, I had the distinct feeling of being at a party where no one had looked out the window in a while.

Solar and batteries were discussed — but gingerly, as though it were a promising experiment rather than a $500 billion global industry already accruing disproportionately to Asia. The conversation had the polite tone of a seminar, not the urgency of people grappling with a structural revolution happening around them in real time.

And then came the moment that crystallized everything.

Nukes for Humanity, Drones for the UAE

The same day I spoke on a panel (where, I confess, it felt mildly impolite to mention the war impacting everyone outside in terms of inflation, anxiety etc), the Rockefeller Foundation and Temasek Trust jointly launched a new nuclear energy initiative. The rationale was energy security — clean, firm power for an uncertain world.

It was the day after the UAE’s nuclear facility came under drone threat from fighters in Iraq, in a war that began, ostensibly, over Iran’s access to nuclear technology.²

I want to be gentle here, because the people behind that initiative are serious and their goals may be sincere. But the irony was almost architectural. In a room full of people talking about firm, secure, “always-on” clean energy — the most prominent nuclear plant in West Asia nearly became a casualty of a conflict rooted in the very geopolitics of nuclear ambition.

Meanwhile, the sun was shining outside. Freely. On everyone. That great big reactor in the sky!

Across the Strait, a Different Conversation

A few days later I crossed to Batam Island, Indonesia — less than an hour from Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands by ferry, but a world apart in atmosphere. There, I visited a new photovoltaic module factory run by Haitai, a Chinese OEM that has made a significant investment in Indonesia’s manufacturing future. The bet is simple: the Indonesian solar market is about to explode, and being close to that market — with Indonesia’s 8% economic growth story and newfound policy appetite — makes industrial sense.

No one on the factory floor was debating whether solar would work. They were building it.

This is the cognitive dissonance I want to name clearly, and kindly: the gap between what the financial and public policy elite are discussing in air-conditioned conference rooms, and what is actually being constructed in factories, fields, and rooftops across Asia and beyond. The discussion lags the reality by several years — and that gap has consequences for how capital flows, and at what cost, how policy is shaped, and how quickly the benefits of this transition reach the people who need them most.

What’s Actually Happening Out Here

Let me take you on a potted tour. Because the data is extraordinary, and it deserves to be said plainly. But this is only the tip of the iceberg from the last couple of week’s news flow:

Philippines. After declaring a national energy emergency in March, the government activated a whole-of-government mandate for energy security. Regulatory bottlenecks for renewables are being dismantled. Rooftop solar inquiries are up 500% since the crisis began. This is not a green ambition. This is a survival response.³

Vietnam. The country has revised its power development plan, targeting a minimum of 47% renewable electricity generation by 2030. Vietnam is already the region’s largest EV market, and its government has expanded EV tax incentives in direct response to the Iran War’s impact on fuel prices.³ HSBC recently extended $4 billion in clean-tech financing to Chinese firms, much of it flowing into EV and solar exports to Vietnam and ASEAN.⁴

Indonesia. Beyond the factory I visited in Batam, the government is engineering a broad fiscal shift — expanding EV incentives with a target of 2 million electric cars and 12 million electric two-wheelers on the road by 2030. With the world’s largest nickel reserves, Indonesia is positioning itself to replace diesel imports with a domestic battery ecosystem. The logic is national sovereignty as much as climate policy.³ We’ve also talked about their 100GW solar archipelago plans.

Thailand. Advanced its net zero target by 15 full years, to 2050. Solar generation surged 72% in 2025. The country is adding 50 GW of renewables and 14 GW of energy storage by 2037. A major 1 GW module supply deal between China’s GCL-SI and Thailand’s Getz Energy was just signed to support that buildout.⁵ ⁶

Singapore itself. Already scaled solar to 1.7 GW and is executing multi-gigawatt cross-border subsea clean electricity cables from Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam — with a requirement that developers bundle storage at origin for 24/7 firm power delivery. Singapore, to its credit, is acting. The conference, perhaps, just needed a bigger window.³

We already know China and India — the two largest energy consumers in Asia — reached a historic tipping point together in 2025. For the first time, fossil fuel generation fell in both countries simultaneously: China down 0.9%, India down 3.3%.³ These are not small numbers. These are inflection points.

EVs are Part and Parcel of This

Electricity and mobility are increasingly the same conversation. The IEA’s Global EV Outlook, released this month, projects 23 million EV sales globally in 2026 — nearly 30% of all new cars sold worldwide. Southeast Asia is expected to double EV sales this year. Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia — all moving fast. Kuala Lumpur and Penang already beat their EV charging infrastructure deployment targets.⁷ ⁸

The spillover from solar into batteries into electric vehicles into electric everything else is not a future scenario. It is the present tense of industrial Asia.

It’s Not Just Asia

Africa’s doing it too with it’s first 10GW PV import month (I’ll save that for another post). For those who wonder if this is an emerging-market story — a note from Europe:

This week’s data shows rooftop solar demand has more than doubled since the Iran War began in February. One British energy company reported April sales ten times higher than a year ago. A German solar wholesaler tripled net sales in March to nearly €70 million. E.ON, Europe’s largest energy network operator, says customer requests have nearly doubled year-on-year.

The pattern is the same as 2022 — a geopolitical shock reprices energy risk overnight, and households rush to insulate themselves. As one executive put it: “We view the spike in demand as a structural shift that current geopolitical events are accelerating, not creating.”⁹

And Australia: right next door to Southeast Asia, the land down under has become perhaps the world’s fastest adopter of distributed solar and batteries. The Australian Energy Regulator has just confirmed the biggest power price cuts in years — a direct consequence of rooftop solar flooding the grid with cheap electrons and storing them behind the meter with batteries.¹⁰

The system is working. The technology is delivering. The costs are falling. This is not a trial.

So What?

China’s solar exports are hitting all time records while oil wars drag on.¹¹ This is not charity. It is commerce. It is nations choosing energy security, economic agency, and lower costs over the inherited architecture of fossil fuel dependency.

Here is the thing I want to say to the brilliant people in Singapore’s conference rooms — and I say it with genuine affection: the transition is not coming. It is here. The countries of South and Southeast Asia are not waiting for a cleaner technology to arrive at scale. They are building it, deploying it, and in some cases, leading the world in doing so. They are following China and India, whose solar success is already visible in their generation statistics.

When the US and other Western economies fully reckon with what has shifted — when the fossil fuel dependency that has structured their geopolitics for a century begins to visibly crumble — it will be the next shock emanating from Trump’s war. Not because the change happened suddenly, but because so many simply weren’t watching.

You don’t need to be among those who missed it.

If you want to stay close to this story as it unfolds across Asia and the world — follow ProElectrica on Substack and tell a friend. Share it. And follow FutureKeepers. Like this post and send to someone who needs to see. The window is open. The sun is doing its thing. Shine on!

Danny Kennedy is a co-founder of FutureKeepers and a Secretary of the Global Solar Council. He writes from the field.

Notes

1. Ember / Electrek: “In a first, wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026.” electrek.co

2. Reports on drone attacks near UAE’s Barakah nuclear plant, May 2026 (widely covered regional and international press).

3. Country-level data compiled by Assaad Razzouk; regional policy tracking via Global Renewables Alliance and national government announcements, May 2026.

4. HSBC $4B clean-tech financing: VnExpress Kinh doanh

5. GCL-SI / Getz Energy 1 GW module supply deal: PV-Tech

6. Thailand’s solar generation and net zero timeline: national energy planning documents and regional press, 2025–2026.

7. IEA Global EV Outlook 2026: Electrek — 23 million EVs in 2026, 30% global share, Southeast Asia doubling.

8. Malaysia EV charging: Kuala Lumpur and Penang beat EVSE deployment goals. Electrek

9. European rooftop solar demand surge: Reuters reporting across Germany, Britain, Netherlands; LinkedIn summary via Skander Garroum. SMA Solar shares up 50% since Iran War began. Reuters

10. Australia power price cuts confirmed by AER: MSN/AER report

11. China solar exports at all-time record in March 2026: Mongabay

The lights went out across Spain and Portugal last spring. Within hours, fossil fuel advocates had their talking points ready: renewables can’t keep the grid stable. You need gas. You need inertia. You need firm power.

They were wrong on the facts. And a landmark new report from the relevant body (ENTSO-E) just proved it - you can read about it here if you like. The point is:

The Iberian Blackout Was a Regulatory Failure, Not a Renewable One

What the post-mortems revealed was striking. The blackout exposed not a technical failure of solar and wind — but a policy one. Renewable generators had been legally barred from providing voltage control and other ancillary services to the grid. Outdated regulations, written for a fossil fuel world, prohibited them from doing the job they were already technically capable of doing.

As one Spanish grid expert put it: the rules weren’t keeping pace with the technology. We were operating a 20th-century regulatory system on a 21st-century grid — and the cost was enormous. Estimates suggest lifting these restrictions alone could save over 60% of voltage control costs, worth hundreds of millions of euros annually. Spain had 4.5 GW of renewable capacity ready to provide this service. It just wasn’t allowed to.

The crisis didn’t prove renewables are fragile. It proved that protecting fossil fuel incumbency is expensive, destabilising, and dangerous.

Meanwhile, the Last Objection — “But Firm Power!” — Just Collapsed

For years, the fallback argument against a full renewable transition has been reliability: solar doesn’t shine at night, wind doesn’t always blow. You need “firm power.” You need fossil fuels on standby.

The relevant body (IRENA) just put a number on what that argument now costs.

Solar and wind paired with battery storage already deliver round-the-clock power at lower costs than fossil fuels in prime resource regions. Firm solar-plus-storage comes in at $54–82/MWh — compared to $70–85/MWh for new coal in China and more than $100/MWh for new gas globally. IEA

We know that since 2010, solar costs have fallen 87%, onshore wind 55%, and battery storage a staggering 93%.

IRENA also found that in several economies, co-located wind and solar with storage are now competitive with the operating costs of existing fossil fuel plants — not just new builds. Legacy assets are being challenged too. IRENA

And the trajectory only accelerates. Firm wind-plus-storage costs are projected to fall to $49–75/MWh across major markets by 2030. IEA

The Real Cost of “Alternative Energy” (aka fossil fueled power)

Let’s be honest about what fossil fuels actually cost — because the price on the invoice is the smallest part of it.

The Hormuz crisis sent gas prices surging 42% in weeks. Wars are being fought over oil fields. Corruption metastasizes wherever petrodollars flow. Entire political systems are warped by fossil fuel rents. The “firm power” that gas supposedly provides comes bundled with price volatility, geopolitical exposure, and — increasingly — military conflict.

IRENA’s Director-General put it plainly: “As oil and gas markets remain exposed to geopolitical shocks, including ongoing disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, we must insulate our economies with resilient renewable systems.” IRENA

Energy security used to mean securing supply lines for fossil fuels. It now means escaping them.

The Moment We’re In

We are living through a genuine inflection point:

• Solar and storage can now provide grid stability services — voltage control, frequency response, inertia emulation — that were once the exclusive domain of spinning fossil fuel turbines.

• 24/7 firm renewable power is now cheaper than new fossil alternatives across the best resource regions on earth — which happen to include most of South and Southeast Asia.

• Regulations are finally beginning to catch up, unlocking billions in savings and opening new revenue streams for clean energy operators.

• Every geopolitical shock — every war, every sanctions regime, every tanker threatened in a strait — makes the renewable alternative more attractive, not less.

The old argument was: renewables are cheap but unreliable. The new reality is: renewables are cheap, reliable, getting cheaper, getting more capable — and the alternative is funding the next war.

The last excuse just died. The transition isn’t coming. It’s here.

Shine on ☀️

The Trumpster fire in the SoH has grown out of control. Some consequences are just now becoming clearer although we are by no means out of the fog of war. The human toll should not be forgotten, including US military dead, and simply moved on from. Still there are important lead indicators of some change this has wrought.

Trump’s war is the second fossil fuel supply shock in four years. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 severed the world’s largest fossil fuel exporter from its largest market. Now the channel through which more than 40% of Asia’s oil flows has followed suit. Ember calls it the new twin fossil shock, and the name is apt. These are not blips. They are structural disruptions, and the world’s energy system is reorganising around them in real time.

Where the first shock was largely a European crisis, this one hits hardest in Asia. Oil and LNG prices have spiked. Wholesale power prices have soared. And the countries most exposed — import-dependent, fast-growing economies across the Global South — are asking themselves a question that has suddenly become urgent: why are we still tethered to this?

The demand side is moving.

Ember’s fast-track analysis for emerging markets, produced in partnership with the Climate Vulnerable Forum, shows that the answer is already materialising. This is because solar-plus-storage is now cheaper than grid extension for any community more than a few tens of kilometres from existing lines. Forty-six percent of CVF nations had already overtaken the US in solar uptake. The 138 GW of solar panels these countries imported from China between 2020 and 2025 can generate electricity sufficient to avoid $20 billion in LNG imports annually — or $42 billion in diesel.

These folk already know they don’t need to follow the fossil-intensive path to prosperity. A more attractive electric fast-track is available, and the twin shocks are accelerating the pivot.

Look at what Britain has done. Since the war began, wind and solar have met 40% of Britain’s electricity demand, while gas fell below a quarter. New wind and solar capacity saved Britain approximately £7 million per day in gas purchases. In March 2026, gas power generation was 39% lower than in March 2021. As Ember reports: over 750 projects have begun construction or secured planning permission since October 2021, a pipeline of 60 GW. On eight days in March, wind alone provided more than half of Britain’s daily electricity.

Now turn to the supply side.

China is having a field day.

Exports for China’s “new three” industries — solar, batteries, and EVs — reached a record $21.9 billion in March 2026, up 70% year-on-year. Solar grew 84%. Lithium-ion batteries 69%. EVs 65%. Initial data published by the Chinese customs authority and analysed by Ember shows that exports of solar, batteries and EVs totalled $200 billion over the last twelve months.

“This is just the beginning,” said Ember’s senior analyst Euan Graham. “The knock-on effects of high energy prices will be unfolding for months to come. Clean technologies are an escape from soaring fuel costs for consumers and a long-term route for countries to reduce fossil fuel reliance.”

So what does this moment demand?

My friend Saul Griffith has just published a piece on his Substack called Pax Electricana. It’s the kind of thinking incumbent on the world right now. Saul argues for a new industrial order grounded not in oil chokepoints and carrier groups, but in electrification, decentralised alliances, and shared resilience among middle powers. Countries rich in renewable energy partnering with those possessing advanced manufacturing. Trading clean iron, aluminium, and copper instead of oil and coal.

It harks back to a piece I wrote at the beginning of this year: that the electric transition is not only an economic proposition but a peace proposition. The more countries generate their own power from their own sun and wind, the fewer wars need to be fought over fuel. The fewer straits need to be kept open by force. The fewer alliances need to be premised on access to someone else’s geology.

Even as Trump realises what many other failed leaders have discovered before him — that war expands and eats its own — the rest of the world is building something better. Not because of some grand coordinated plan, but because the economics and the technology have converged, and countries are acting in their own rational self-interest. The twin shocks are accelerating what was already underway.

The audacious duty of our times is to pursue this peace and prosperity together — to see them not as competing ideals but as the same project, powered by the same technologies, available to every nation willing to reach for them. Who knows - with these tools we may even abate the worst of climate change?

That’s the windfall hidden inside the wreckage.

Shine On.

This post draws heavily on the extraordinary library of work being produced by Ember, the energy think tank. I’ve been doing a deep dive there, trying to build on what they’ve published and make plain what it portends with Futurekeepers on YouTube. If you want the data behind the argument above, Ember is where to go.

When Pakistan’s consumer-led solar boom began a few years ago, the conventional reaction from development banks, grid planners, and fossil-system defenders was skepticism. Too chaotic. Too uncoordinated. A problem to be managed rather than a model to be followed.

That narrative is now collapsing in real time.

The Strait of Hormuz crisis has delivered an unplanned stress test to every import-dependent energy system in Asia. Look at the chart above — showing indicative days of oil cover under sustained disruption. South Korea and India are looking at 30–45 days. Italy, France, Germany face critical exposure by late May or mid-June. Sri Lanka and Pakistan? Already in shortage.

But here’s the signal that matters for investors: Pakistan’s solar deployment — derided as a “grid problem” — has already avoided more than $12 billion in fossil fuel imports since 2018. That’s not a policy outcome. That’s a market outcome. Revealed preference at scale.

The missing piece was always the battery

New modeling from Renewables First and TransitionZero makes the math explicit. Without grid-scale battery storage, a fuel price shock in 2026 causes RLNG generation to collapse by 94%, forcing coal to surge from 1.7 TWh to 33.4 TWh — a 68% spike in emissions and a $610 million increase in variable costs.

The fix isn’t exotic:

• A $488 million investment in 1.16 GW of batteries and 2 GW of wind by 2030 could cut RLNG operating costs from $3.09 billion to just $218 million

• The problem is structural: daytime solar peaks, evening demand peaks — batteries bridge that gap

• The ADB has now pledged support for Pakistan’s solar transition, recognizing the potential for solar to transform the country’s energy landscape — an institution that was previously cool on battery deployment now aligned behind the thesis

India’s data confirms this is a regional playbook

Ember published fresh analysis this week that should end the debate. Battery costs fell 40% in 2024 and another 31% in 2025. India’s first solar-plus-6-hour storage auction in early 2026 cleared at just $34/MWh.

Solar-plus-storage can now meet 90% of India’s electricity demand at $56/MWh — while new coal power is being auctioned at $55–$69/MWh. The crossover has happened. Storage is not the future. It’s the present.

India has 143 GW of installed solar as of February 2026 — just 4% of its estimated 3,343 GW of feasible potential. The runway is enormous. The economics are settled.

What this means for investors

Trump’s war has done what years of policy advocacy could not: it has made energy independence an acute national security question for every oil-importing Asian nation. The countries with days — not decades — of oil cover will be deploying solar and storage at pace as a matter of survival, not ambition.

Pakistan’s “messy” consumer solar boom turns out to have been the right call, early. The question now is who builds the storage layer across South and Southeast Asia — and who finances it.

Deploy, deploy, deploy. The existing technology stack is the answer. The market is telling you. Shine on!

Sources: Renewables First / TransitionZero — “Batteries are Pakistan’s Antidote to Volatile Fossil Fuel Prices”; Ember — “Battery Storage Is Now Cheap Enough to Unleash India’s Full Solar Potential” (April 7, 2026); Dawn / ADB Pakistan solar transition reporting; IEA/Bloomberg oil cover data.

There has been a lot of speculation this week that there is some great strategy being played out by the US’ oil-igarchy. Something about America taking control of Syria first to stop transcontinental railroads shipping Iranian oil to China, then Venezuela for the heavy crude on the Gulf Coast to refine by Americans. Now Iran to block that non-dollar denominated market as a way to say that there is a grand plan in this great game of history and so send other countries back to our debt.

This theory is, I think, an attempt to rationalize what is the irrational bloodlust of an old man who has lost his way or was misled by another criminal leader. But let’s take it on face value and then apply some simple thinking to it in the form of a standard debate. Below I rebut what has been said to me by people looking for crutches in this time of hospitals and schools being bombed with American munitions.

The Thesis Is Internally Coherent — and Built on a Crumbling Foundation

The argument is impressive. The sequencing — Europe victimized by Russia now dependent on the US, take out Syria, Venezuela, Iran, Qatar — is real. The Hormuz disruption is real. But the entire edifice rests on one assumption that is demonstrably false: “that oil and gas will remain the central currency of geopolitical power through the second quarter of the 21st century.” Here’s why.

1. You’re Seizing Control of a Peaking Asset

The frame is US energy dominance as a multi-decade lock-in. But the Electrotech Revolution data shows fossil fuel demand has *already peaked across every major sector*:

•⁠ ⁠*Industrial energy demand* peaked in 2014

•⁠ ⁠*Buildings energy demand* peaked in 2018

•⁠ ⁠*Road transport fuel demand* peaked in 2019

•⁠ ⁠*Electricity generation fuel demand* peaked in 2025

This isn’t projection — it’s already happened. The grand strategy is designed to control a commodity whose demand curve has already turned. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of seizing control of the global fax machine market in 2005.

2. The “No Alternative” Premise Is False for 92% of the World

The rant’s most critical claim is that Europe and Asian allies are “locked in” to US LNG with “nowhere left to pivot to.” This ignores the physics of the planet:

•⁠ ⁠*92% of countries have renewable potential over 10 times their current energy demand*

•⁠ ⁠*75% of the world’s population* lives in countries that are net fossil fuel importers — these are the exact nations with the strongest economic incentive to exit the system the thesis describes

•⁠ ⁠Solar infrastructure, once installed, *cannot be blockaded, sanctioned, or priced at $100/barrel*. You cannot embargo the sun.

The LNG lock-in thesis requires long-term contracts and regasification terminals. They exist. But the competing pathway — solar, storage, and electrification — has been falling in cost by ~20% per year and now beats new gas on price in most markets. Nations facing energy weapon coercion don’t sit there. They accelerate the exit.

3. Technologies Get Cheaper. Commodities Don’t.

The rant celebrates US energy dominance via a commodity. Here’s the structural problem:

•⁠ ⁠*Solar has fallen 99.6% in price since 1980*, following a predictable technology learning curve

•⁠ ⁠*Oil in real terms in 2025 costs roughly what it did in 1900* — 125 years of “development” and no cost improvement

•⁠ ⁠Fossil fuels fight a constant battle against depletion — they are *inherently inflationary*

•⁠ ⁠Electrotech follows Wright’s Law — *inherently deflationary*

Every year the US tries to sustain a petro/LNG-dollar system, the alternative gets cheaper. The “lock-in” window is not decades long — it’s measured in years before solar + storage undercuts new LNG infrastructure on pure economics, without any geopolitical motivation required.

4. The AI/Data Center Argument Is Inverted

Some claim the US is degrading China’s ability to power AI data centers by choking LNG supply. This assumes AI compute runs on gas. It increasingly doesn’t — and AI itself accelerates the transition away from that assumption.

Per the Electrotech Revolution: *for every 1 unit of energy AI consumes, it saves 6 units through efficiency gains* — via grid optimization, smart EV charging, predictive maintenance for renewables, and automated permitting. AI is not the problem for the new energy system. It’s the brain of it.

More critically: the cheapest electricity being built at scale globally is solar + storage, not gas-fired power. Nations deploying electrotech fastest (China, India, parts of South and Southeast Asia) are building *cost-advantaged AI compute infrastructure* on cheap renewable electricity — not LNG. The rant assumes cutting off LNG cuts off compute. In reality, it accelerates electrotech deployment.

5. China Is Not the Trapped Party — It’s Building the Successor System

The rant frames China as the trapped victim of the Malacca Dilemma, dependent on seaborne LNG that US naval power controls. Hu Jintau coined the term in 2003 - they haven’t been sitting on it. This claim misses what China has actually done:

•⁠ ⁠China manufactures *80%+ of global solar panels* and *70%+ of global batteries*

•⁠ ⁠China drove *95% of net global fossil fuel demand growth from 2018–2024* — but its own demand is now *peaking and dipping*

•⁠ ⁠China’s EV exports surged from 3.36M units in 2020 to nearly 30M by 2024, overtaking Germany and Japan combined

50% of China’s new vehicles are electric. China’s response to fossil fuel vulnerability has been to aggressively colonize the supply chain of the system that replaces fossil fuels. Blocking LNG doesn’t cripple China’s AI ambitions if it’s simultaneously building the world’s largest electrotech manufacturing complex. The rant describes a trap China has been systematically building its way out of for a decade.

6. The Great Leapfrog Means the “Captive Market” Won’t Stay Captive

The thesis assumes emerging markets remain LNG-dependent because they lack alternatives. The data says otherwise:

•⁠ ⁠*Two-thirds of emerging markets have already leapfrogged the US in solar as a share of electricity generation* (15% vs the US’s 6%)

•⁠ ⁠*Nepal: 75% EV sales share. Vietnam: 30%.* The US sits at approximately 10%.

•⁠ ⁠Emerging economies are not following the West’s carbon-intensive development path — they’re skipping directly to cheaper, faster-to-deploy electrotech

The nations that proponents of US oil dominance expect to be captive buyers of our LNG are the ones moving fastest to exit fossil fuel dependency entirely. Not because of climate policy — because electrotech is now the economically superior choice.

7. When Growth Stops, Capital Flees — And It’s About To

The rant assumes fossil fuel capital markets will remain investable throughout this supposed era of dominance. They won’t. We’ve already seen the template:

The US coal industry peaked in 2014. What followed was rapid valuation collapse as capital fled a declining asset class. The same cycle is coming for oil and gas, and it doesn’t require a full energy transition to trigger. It only requires the market pricing in expected peak demand.

High-cost producers — North American shale, deepwater, oil sands — are pushed into unprofitability by *even small drops in demand* from EV adoption and efficiency gains. A strategy of energy empire built on LNG is building on an asset class entering the “uncertainty” phase before capital flight. The architecture of dominance will become a stranded asset liability.

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The Bottom Line

The grand strategy described in various places is real as a description of moves being made. But it confuses *tactical control of a declining asset* for *strategic dominance of the century*.

The British genuinely did control global coal shipping routes into the early 20th century. It was real power. It became irrelevant as the world moved to oil. Churchill famously made the Royal Navy move to oil. Instead, the US is attempting to seize the global fossil fuel spigot at the exact moment the world is building the infrastructure to turn it off permanently — driven not by moral obligation or climate policy, but by physics, economics, and the self-interest of the 75% of humanity that would rather own their energy than rent it from someone with a navy.

The electrotech revolution is not a future scenario. Solar & wind are on the steepest part of the S-curve right now. Fossil fuel demand has peaked in every major sector. The new energy system is decentralised, deflationary, and — critically — unblockadeable once installed.

The question for the 2nd quarter of the 21st century is not who controls the oil spigot. It’s who builds the electrotech infrastructure fastest. On that scoreboard, the US is losing — and the grand strategy described in the rant does nothing to change that.

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Sources:

Ember, “The Electrotech Revolution: A New Energy Age is Inevitable” (November 2025)

Pakistan’s people-led solar boom has already avoided $12 billion in oil and gas imports. It could save a further $6.3 billion by the end of this year alone. This is a country that went from under 1 GW of solar imports in 2018 to over 51 GW by early 2026 — one of the fastest energy transitions ever recorded, driven not by government mandate but by citizens who did the math and acted.

Meanwhile, the rest of Asia is still doubling down on a $107 billion LNG bet that just got a lot riskier.

Here’s the cold math everyone should be looking at right now:

The world’s net fossil fuel importers spent $1.7 trillion in 2024. Every $1 increase in LNG prices costs the global market $20 billion more per year. LNG price volatility in Asia hit 40% in 2024 — 90% above its 10-year average. And every time there’s a crisis — Ukraine, Hormuz, the Red Sea — it’s the Global South that gets squeezed out first. Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India didn’t cut LNG imports by 13–17% in 2022 because they wanted to. They were priced out.

The contrast couldn’t be starker. The growth in global solar generation in 2025 alone could displace gas-fired electricity equivalent to every single LNG cargo that passed through the Strait of Hormuz that year — 600 TWh worth. Not in 10 years. Last year. China’s EV fleet alone is saving the country $28 billion annually in avoided oil imports.

Gas-fired power now costs 3–4 times the global average for solar. Every gigawatt of solar installed avoids $3 billion in LNG import costs over 25 years. And still, Southeast Asia accounts for just 2% of global clean energy investment despite representing 6% of global GDP.

Pakistan didn’t wait for a perfect policy environment. Citizens made the call — rooftop solar over an unreliable, expensive grid — and it’s now shielding an entire nation from a geopolitical crisis that is hammering everyone still tethered to fossil fuel supply chains.

Asia doesn’t have a renewables problem. It has a decision problem.

The case for going electric — solar, wind, EVs, storage — was already strong on cost. Hormuz just made it existential. Every new gas terminal locked in today is a liability, not an asset. Every GW of solar deployed is an insurance policy that pays out regardless of what happens in the Persian Gulf.

The question for Asian policymakers, investors, and energy planners isn’t whether renewables are ready. It’s how much more evidence you need before you stop betting the house on gas.

Sources:

• The Energy Security Fallout – Ember Energy Report

• Pakistan’s Solar Boom Shielding Country from Hormuz Disruptions – Dawn

• Iran Tensions Underscore Asia’s Renewables Pivot – IEEFA

• Oil and Gas Prices Soaring, Some Countries Ready with Solar – NPR

There’s a globally significant new report out called Solar Archipelago: Indonesia’s 100GW Leap to Energy Sovereignty that you won’t hear about on Dr Volts nor likely read about in Canary Media. But it may just foretell the world changing.

For those that don’t know Indonesia has 280 million people — the world’s fourth largest population. It has 17,000 islands spread across a stretch of ocean wider than the continental United States. They sit directly on the equator, bathed year-round in some of the most consistent solar irradiance on Earth: an average of 4.8 kilowatt-hours per square meter per day, every day, without fail. A technical solar potential of 7.7 terawatts. Solar Archipelago yes. But to date there’s not a lot of PV!

And, right now, tens of millions of people in Indonesia have no reliable electricity.

Not no electricity at all — Indonesia’s official electrification rate sits at 99.8%. But that number hides a brutal truth. “Electrified” can mean two hours of power a day from a sputtering diesel generator shared between a dozen households. It can mean paying three, four, five times what a Jakarta resident pays per kilowatt-hour, for power that’s unreliable and smoke-darkened. It can mean 16,700 villages classified as “under-electrified” — places where the power that exists cannot support the economic activity that would lift living standards.

This is energy poverty. And it is, at its heart, an economic problem.

President Prabowo Subianto has announced a solution: a 100-gigawatt solar program — 80 GW of village-scale solar managed through Indonesia’s village cooperative network, and 20 GW of grid-connected capacity. It is the most ambitious renewable energy initiative since independence.

At which point, a reasonable observer might say: we’ve been promised lots before.

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Haven’t we heard this before?

Yes. And the skepticism is grounded in data.

In 2014, Indonesia set a target: 23% of energy supply from renewables by 2025. A decade of effort followed. By 2024, renewables had reached 14%. The target has quietly been revised down to 17–19%.

Meanwhile, coal consolidated its grip. It now generates 67% of Indonesia’s electricity — and it isn’t just an energy source, it’s a political economy. For decades, coal has been intertwined with the country’s business and political elite in ways that make any serious phase-out difficult. The domestic market obligation — requiring coal miners to sell 25% of production to PLN at a capped price of $70 per tonne — made coal artificially cheap, which made renewables uncompetitive against a subsidized incumbent. PLN, the state electricity utility, has historically channelled that dynamic in its own favour: of the 10.5 GW of renewable capacity planned for commissioning in 2025, IESR estimates 9.5 GW will not be delivered on time. Procurement remains the chronic bottleneck.

Prabowo’s statements are bolder still than his predecessors’. At APEC last November he declared 100% renewable energy within ten years. At G20, the retirement of all fossil-fuel plants by 2040. Energy self-sufficiency within five years. Experts — like Fabby Tumiwa, the indefatigable CEO of the Institute for Essential Service Reform and the analyst whose work underpins both this post and the best 100 GW roadmap — have noted that past performance doesn’t support this ambition.

So why write about this as an opportunity rather than another chapter in a long story of “Indonesia almost”? Because something structural has changed — and this time it isn’t the rhetoric.

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The new numbers that make it possible.

Solar PV module costs have now fallen below $0.12 per watt. Lithium iron phosphate battery storage has declined to $70–90 per kilowatt-hour at the pack level — the same chemistry powering electric vehicles, scaled up for communities. Together, solar-plus-storage can deliver electricity to an Indonesian village at $0.08–0.12 per kilowatt-hour. That is 30 to 60 percent cheaper than the diesel generators those villages currently depend on.

Read that again. The clean option is now the cheap option. The economic rationale for diesel dependency is collapsing.

The IESR, working with Indonesia’s Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs, has published a detailed roadmap for the 100 GW buildout. The five-year investment required to reach an initial 26 GW: $51–78 billion. The five-year impacts, already quantified: 10.1 million kiloliters of diesel avoided, 24.3 million tons of CO2 avoided, IDR 112.4 trillion in regional GDP contribution, and 118,000 new green jobs — not in Jakarta, but in the villages, the islands, the places that have been waiting.

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And there’s more good news.

I’ve been studying the IESR analysis, and there’s even more that can be drawn from the roadmap.

The report quantifies five-year impacts. It stops there. But a solar-plus-storage system doesn’t last five years. It lasts 25.

When you run the full 25-year avoided costs — diesel fuel, coal fuel, gas fuel, avoided fossil capital expenditure, reduced subsidy burden, carbon revenues, and health and system co-benefits — the picture changes dramatically. What looks like a $240 billion investment (the midpoint of the full 100 GW buildout cost) becomes, over a quarter century, a strongly positive net present value. Not marginally positive. Decisively so.

The biggest single driver isn’t even the fuel savings, though they’re enormous. It’s the avoided fossil CAPEX — the power stations, pipelines, and import infrastructure that Indonesia will *not* have to build if it goes solar instead. That avoided infrastructure cost, combined with avoided fuel volatility (Indonesian fuel costs have grown at roughly 23% annually), is what turns the arithmetic from challenging to compelling.

I made a chart to illustrate this - see above. Think of it as a waterfall, starting at minus $240 billion and working upward:

- Avoided diesel fuel: a substantial step up

- Avoided coal fuel: another

- Avoided gas fuel: another

- Avoided fossil CAPEX: the largest single step — this is where the conventional framing misses the story

- Reduced subsidies: ongoing fiscal relief for the national government

- Carbon value: there may be growing revenues as carbon markets mature

- Health and system benefits: real costs, often invisible to energy accounting

The endpoint is a net NPV that is positive. In the midpoint scenario, Indonesia doesn’t just break even. It comes out ahead — significantly — over the life of the assets.

The IESR report has all the pieces to make this case. It just doesn’t assemble them. That feels like an unfinished chapter — and an important one, because the full-lifetime framing is exactly what Indonesia needs when it goes to international capital markets, to the JETP, to multilateral development banks, and to domestic investors asking whether this is real.

Honest framing shouldn’t be “Indonesia spends $240 billion on solar.” It’s more like:

That’s a different conversation. A more honest one. And a much more powerful one.

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The stories that balance sheets can’t capture.

I want to tell you about the fishermen.

Indonesian tuna is some of the finest in the world. But without refrigeration at the point of catch, a fisherman who goes out before dawn and returns with 200 kilograms of tuna by 8am faces an impossible choice: sell immediately at whatever price the middlemen offer — because the fish is starting to spoil — or lose a lot of the value. They might dry it to sell chips. But with solar-powered cold storage at the dock, that same catch can be kept, transported to better markets, and sold for two or three times the price. The fisherman’s income doubles or triples. Not from working harder. From having the energy access that connects his labor to the market properly.

This is what electrification does when it reaches people who need it most. It doesn’t just turn lights on. It connects latent human capacity to economic opportunity that was always there, waiting for the energy access that makes it possible.

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The honest challenges.

The 100 GW program is not straightforward to execute. The original design — 1 MW of solar and 4 MWh of batteries per village — oversizes systems for small communities and undersizes them for larger ones. Indonesia needs 100,000 trained solar installers and 80,000 operations and maintenance technicians that don’t yet exist. Regulatory frameworks haven’t caught up. The financing requires coordinating government budgets, multilateral banks, green bonds, and private capital simultaneously.

And then there’s the grid itself. Energy Minister Bahlil Lahadalia put it plainly in January: “Our current transmission lines are not designed to pick up power from places where we can build renewable power plants.” PLN’s new 2025–2034 plan calls for 48,000 circuit-kilometres of new transmission — equivalent to a straight line from Jakarta to London and back. Generation costs are no longer the problem. Getting the electrons to where the demand is, is. The new plan sensibly shifts 60% of new capacity to private developers while PLN focuses on transmission — which is the right division of labour, if it actually happens.

These are genuine challenges. But the IESR roadmap offers a practical path: a ten-archetype classification of village types, from 200 kW to 2.5 MW, matched to actual consumption patterns. Prioritise diesel replacement in the first two years. Capture immediate savings. Build implementation capacity. Then scale.

What Indonesia has that no previous program did is the scale to reshape global supply chains. A government of 280 million people committing to 100 GW sends a demand signal that moves manufacturers, draws investment, and creates conditions for a domestic industry. Indonesia already has 14 GW per year of solar manufacturing capacity. That’s not an accident — it’s a platform waiting for a program ambitious enough to use it.

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Why this matters beyond Indonesia.

I watch the energy discourse in the United States, in Australia, in parts of Europe, and I see a lot of conversation about the transition as an aspiration — something we’re working toward, a future state we hope to reach.

Indonesia isn’t treating it as an aspiration. It’s treating it as a present-tense economic decision, because the numbers make it the rational choice right now, for communities that can’t afford to wait for ideology to catch up with data.

The Global South is not following a path the rich world has blazed. In many respects, it’s ahead — less encumbered by legacy infrastructure, more motivated by energy access and sovereignty, more willing to move at the pace the technology and the economics now allow.

Indonesia’s 100 GW program, if it succeeds, will be one of the defining energy stories of this decade. I’ll be watching it closely, and reporting from it as it unfolds.

The Constraint Is Imagination. Our Moment Is Now.

We’ve entered the Year of the Horse.

Traditionally, that signals strong energy, rapid change, decisive forward motion. A horse bolting.

And this isn’t just any horse. It’s a Fire Horse.

That’s real horsepower.

Though, let’s be honest, we’ve had a few problems with combustion-based horsepower over the last century. Maybe this one is solar-powered. Maybe it runs on batteries. Maybe this is the year we redefine what power actually means.

Because here’s the thing: the constraint on the energy transition right now is not physics. It’s not capital. It’s not even technology.

It’s imagination.

Look at the Momentum

When momentum builds, it becomes a force to behold. But momentum directed with intention — not urgency, not panic — is transformative.

Just look at Australia.

In Q4 2025, the National Electricity Market exceeded 50% renewable generation, with wholesale prices down 44% year-on-year. Batteries are a huge part of the story, disrupting markets and pushing gas aside in what the Australian Financial Review called a “transformational grid overhaul.”

Some fun facts, if you want to see a horse bolting:

• Australia now has 28.3GW rooftop PV installed — compared to 22.5GW of coal.

• Solar delivered 14.2% of total annual TWh, and regularly supplies more than 50% of real-time demand.

• 4.3 million homes out of 10.9 million now have rooftop solar.

• 450,000 household batteries installed — with 183,000 added in the last six months in 2025.

That’s not theory. That’s not aspiration. That’s execution.

See what’s happening in Australia — and understand that this is not an outlier. It’s a preview.

Follow the Money

Globally, the momentum is unmistakable.

BloombergNEF reports that global energy transition investment reached a record $2.3 trillion in 2025, up 8% from 2024. Follow the money. Capital is flowing toward electrification, storage, grids, and clean tech at a scale that would have seemed implausible a decade ago.

Nat Bullard’s annual presentation makes the case visually and viscerally: solar, batteries, and EVs are scaling on exponential curves. Even Chamath is doing solar deep dives now. When generalist capital starts understanding watts and watt-hours, you know the shift is structural.

And then there’s China.

CREA’s analysis shows clean energy drove more than a third of China’s GDP growth in 2025 — with solar PV, EVs, and batteries at the core. That is extraordinary. The world’s largest manufacturing economy has a vested interest in accelerating the transition, not slowing it.

India and much of the rest of Asia are taking what Ember calls an “electrotech fast track.” Where China built its growth on coal and then pivoted, India is increasingly building directly on solar, storage, and electrification — leapfrogging the dirtiest stages of development.

This may be the most exciting horse-bolting moment of all.

When we look back at the inflection point — the turn from 2025 into 2026, the back half of the decisive decade — we may see this as the moment when the global South didn’t just follow, but led.

Yes, There Are Headwinds

We shouldn’t be pollyanna-ish.

In the United States, clean energy project cancellations hit $34 billion amid policy uncertainty. There is stress in solar and wind markets. Merger activity is accelerating. Political pivots matter, and Trump’s energy stance has had real effects that can’t be discounted.

And yet — even here — over 90% of proposed new generation capacity is renewable. The structural economics are too strong. Solar, wind, and batteries are simply the cheapest and fastest way to build new power.

That’s according to the Trump admin’s own Energy Information Administration.

You can slow momentum. You can’t easily reverse it.

So What’s the Constraint?

It’s not whether renewable electrification of everything is happening.

It is.

The question is whether we match that momentum with imagination to do what is needed next. Many questions remain:

Can we design better markets?

Can we create off-take demand?

Can we train more installers?

Can we deploy storage faster?

Can we build grids fit for purpose?

Can we tell the story in ways that unlock even more capital and public confidence?

Momentum without intention can be chaotic. A horse bolting without direction can cause damage.

But momentum guided by imagination and collaborative human skill? That builds civilizations.

Our job this year is not just to watch the horse run. It’s to help steer it — toward clean electrons, distributed resilience, better economics, and shared prosperity.

This is true horsepower.

Solar-powered. Battery-backed. Human-directed.

We are in the back half of the decisive decade. The opportunity is extraordinary. The risks of squandering it are real.

The constraint is imagination.

Let’s not be a bottleneck.

Shine on.

For a long time, the hard part of reducing conflict in the world was assumed to be political: diplomacy, alliances, deterrence, and norms.

These are no longer the only shifting constraints as evidenced by bad Uncle Sam over the weekend. But there’s another lever too: Money.

One way we, the people, may rein in the dogs of war is destroying demand for oil, which fills the budgets of the despots doing us all harm.

A quiet shift is underway in the global energy and transport system—one that steadily erodes the economic foundations of modern militarism by reducing demand for oil. Electric vehicles are not just a climate technology. They are emerging as the largest scalable peace dividend available.

Not because they make the world virtuous. But because they make oil less powerful.

Oil Revenues and War: A Structural Link

This is not a moral argument about “good” or “bad” countries. It is a structural one.

For much of the last century, oil revenues have translated directly into state power. Export earnings fund militaries, subsidize domestic stability, underwrite patronage networks, and enable projection of force well beyond borders. When oil prices rise, geopolitical risk often follows—not immediately, but reliably.

Whether it is Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Iran fueling terror, proxy conflicts in the middle east (this month’s example being in Yemen between Saudi Arabia and the UAE), or recurring tensions between petrostates like the USA and Venezuela, the mechanism is the same: oil demand creates revenue; revenue creates power.

Change the demand curve, and you weaken their power.

That is what EVs are now doing.

Demand Destruction Where It Matters Most

The common misconception is that EVs only matter once wealthy consumers in Europe or the US replace internal combustion cars en masse.

In reality, oil demand destruction has already begun—and it started elsewhere.

Two- and three-wheelers. Buses. Fleet vehicles. Urban delivery. These segments electrify faster because the economics are overwhelming: lower operating costs, simpler maintenance, and immediate payback. Millions of barrels of oil demand per year have already been displaced quietly through these channels.

What comes next matters even more.

As light-duty vehicles electrify at scale, the divergence from the oil-based economy accelerates. Road transport is oil’s largest demand center. Remove it, and the entire system weakens. Asia is the driver (pun intended).

This is not theoretical anymore.

China’s EV Flywheel Is Already in Motion

Much Western analysis still frames China’s automotive rise as a future risk—something that might be contained with tariffs, alignment, or industrial policy.

The numbers suggest a different framing: the adjustment has already happened.

China buys more cars than the US and EU combined. China’s domestic EV market has crossed the threshold where scale compounds quietly. Intense competition, massive volumes, and continuous iteration have created a self-reinforcing flywheel:

• A vast home market absorbs learning curves

• Dozens of manufacturers compete aggressively

• Battery supply chains are deeply integrated

• Prices fall faster than elsewhere

• Products mature before export

By the time this is widely acknowledged in Western discourse, the structure of the global auto industry will already have adjusted.

One concrete example: battery costs. Chinese manufacturers are now operating around $85/kWh, while many Western producers remain closer to $130/kWh. That $45/kWh gap translates to roughly $2,700 on a 60 kWh vehicle—before margins.

That difference determines which cars clear price-sensitive markets.

Export Reality, Not Export Threat

China exported roughly 5.9 million vehicles in 2024, up from fewer than one million in 2020! China is now the world’s largest vehicle exporter by volume, having surpassed Japan. Around 40% of those exports were battery electric or plug-in hybrids.

This is still not fully internalized in Western narratives, which continue to speak of Chinese exports as a looming threat rather than a present fact.

These vehicles are not primarily flowing into Germany or California. They are going to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and parts of Africa—markets that are price-sensitive, fast-growing, and often lack strong domestic automotive manufacturing.

As Michael Bernard has argued, even in high-tariff scenarios, Chinese components and local assembly will increasingly dominate. The combination of scale, battery leadership, and manufacturing intensity is difficult to block without permanently raising costs for consumers.

The flywheel keeps turning.

Emerging Markets Are Already Tipping

New data from Ember Analytics makes this clear.

By 2025, 39 countries have reached an EV sales share above 10%, up from just four in 2019. A third of these countries are outside Europe. China itself crossed 50% EV sales share for the first time this past year.

Between January and October 2025, EVs accounted for over a quarter of global new car sales, up from less than 3% in 2019!

Even more striking: emerging markets are now overtaking traditional automotive powers.

• Viet Nam has reached nearly 40% EV sales share, surpassing the UK and the EU

• Thailand has exceeded 20%, up from 1% in 2019

• Singapore, Thailand, and Viet Nam now outperform the EU average

• India, Mexico, and Brazil have higher EV penetration than Japan

• Indonesia has reached 15%, overtaking the US

Since mid-2023, all growth in Chinese EV exports has gone to non-OECD markets, with Mexico, Brazil, the UAE, and Indonesia emerging as top destinations.

This is where oil demand growth was supposed to come from. Increasingly, it isn’t.

Why This Matters for Peace

None of this means conflict disappears. Power struggles do not vanish because drivetrains change.

Lower oil demand means:

• Lower long-run oil prices

• Reduced export revenues for petrostates

• Less fiscal space for sustained military aggression

• Fewer resources to fund proxy wars and all kinds of repression

This erosion happens gradually, then suddenly. It is not dramatic. It does not make headlines. But it is persistent.

EVs do not stop wars by persuasion. They do it by changing balance sheets.

Asia’s Quiet Leverage Point

For Asia, this shift is especially powerful.

The region is:

• Where most future vehicle demand will occur

• Where consumer price sensitivity is highest

• Where Chinese EVs are most competitive

• Where oil import dependence is a strategic vulnerability

Electrifying transport in Asia is not just a climate strategy. It is an economic resilience strategy—and increasingly, a geopolitical one.

Every electric bus deployed, every two-wheeler electrified, every affordable EV sold into a new market slightly reduces the leverage of oil exporters over global affairs.

That leverage has been used, repeatedly, to fund violence.

Peace, Without Pretending

This is not a claim that EVs create a utopia. Politics remains messy. Arseholes exist. Conflict persists. Power never disappears.

But the world is being offered something rare: a way to reduce the material capacity for war without requiring global consensus.

No treaty required. No moral alignment necessary. Just cheaper vehicles, better batteries, and markets doing what they do.

Peace, in this framing, is not a slogan. It is a side effect of electrification at scale.

And it is already underway.

Shine On.

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The World is electrifying.

Quietly. Rapidly. With more ambition, innovation, and creative force than the world realizes. Asian communities are leading the charge!

Every week, breakthroughs happen across this vast region — a village goes solar, a city flips on its first battery farm, entrepreneurs build new climate businesses, transmission lines rise across mountains, families install their first rooftop systems.

But the dominant narrative still leans negative: crisis, delay, failure. America’s return to oiligarchy is the only news that’s fit to print.

ProElectrica exists to correct the record — and to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground all around the world:

Asians are leading a global energy transformation and we are only at the beginning.

Why This Substack Exists

ProElectrica is the deeper-thinking sibling of FutureKeepers, our AI-first social media outlet to inspire young Asian professionals with uplifting stories of the energy transition. Where FutureKeepers brings the spark, ProElectrica amplifies the signal.

This Substack is where we:

• Go beyond headlines to analyse why things are happening and what they mean

• Explore the mechanics of real change, the changing constraints of our time

• Meet the people electrifying Asia, Australia, America and other countries

• Break down the policies, technologies, and trends shaping the next decade

• Tell the human stories of the transition — not just the technical ones

• Build the community who will lead, accelerate, and benefit from this shift

This is the slow media layer — the analysis, essays, field notes, and builder stories that require more space than a 60-second video. I’ll try to keep it real and fun tho’!

If FutureKeepers is the firestarter, ProElectrica is the movement’s lighthouse.

What You’ll Find Here

1. Asia Electrifying — Deep Dives

Long-form essays about how, where, and why the transition is happening.

Country deep dives. Sector deep dives.

Narratives you won’t find anywhere else.

2. Field Notes from the Transition

Short dispatches from across Asia and the globe.

Installers, innovators, policymakers, founders, families.

Real stories from people who are already living in the future.

3. The FutureKeepers’ Community Stories

User-generated stories, interviews, and human-centered snapshots.

If you’re doing the work — or witnessing it — your story belongs here.

4. The Founder Journal (Building in Public)

I’ll be sharing the behind-the-scenes of building FutureKeepers as a media platform.

The vision, the dilemmas, the momentum, the mistakes, the breakthroughs.

A transparent look at what it takes to build a continent-scale movement media company from scratch.

I believe in building in public because movements grow through shared clarity — and shared courage.

The Long-Term Vision

ProElectrica is more than a newsletter and more than another place for an old white guy to pontificate about familiar climate hawk views. We want to uplift the leadership of places like Pakistan, which has really taken the hero’s journey this decade. And we want to listen to the voices of folk from China, Indonesia, India, Singapore and elsewhere who never get the spotlight they deserve.

We are also building the top of an activation funnel for young professionals who want to participate in the energy transformation.

Especially, but not exclusively, in Asia. We figure there is more than enough coverage in Substack and elsewhere of good work elsewhere but given that the climate will be won or lost here, let’s look at this half of humanity!

Over time, this will evolve into:

• national newsletters

• events and gatherings

• training pathways

• storytelling residencies

• possibly a digital platform to track progress toward 300 million solar-powerhouses

But every movement starts with stories of the future.

And every community starts with a conversation.

This Substack is for that conversation.

Who This Is For

• Young people deciding what kind of future they want to build

• Entrepreneurs and creators

• Policymakers and innovators

• Those who want to shape the future — not wait for it

• Anyone hungry for agency, not anxiety

If you believe Asia and the world’s story is one of possibility — you’re home.

We will introduce multiple language versions of the content for all our readers.

What I Ask From You

If something here inspires you, confuses you, challenges you, or sparks a question… tell me.

Comment. Message. Share your story. Share the stories and stuff you read here.

ProElectrica will grow through the people who shape it — and you are one of them.

Let’s Light Up the World

Thank you for being here at the start.

Together, we are advancing a movement.

Shine on!