You’ve probably heard the saying: there are decades where nothing happens, and then there are weeks where decades happen. Lately, it feels like this perfectly encapsulates the state of the global energy sector. As renowned energy strategist Kingsmill Bond puts it, “a century of evolution is converging into a decade of revolution.”

Last week, I tuned into one of my favorite podcasts, Volts, and was thrilled to hear David Roberts introduce Kingsmill Bond as his guest. Their conversation revolved around the concept of ‘electrotech’, a term Kingsmill credits to his colleague Dan Wolter, and why they believe the “clean electrification is inevitable.”

The discussion was wide-ranging, touching on everything from the jaw-dropping speed at which solar and batteries are falling in price, to China’s quiet transformation of clean electrification into a national industrial strategy, the unraveling geopolitics of petrostates, the looming death spiral of fossil incumbents, and how artificial intelligence is emerging as the perfect sidekick for an electricity-powered world.

Kingsmill and the team at Ember produce some of the most rigorous, up-to-date analysis of the global power sector in the world. Their conversation was so insightful that I couldn’t resist writing about it. So, I reached out to David and Kingsmill to ask if I could capture the main threads and hopefully leave you with the same electric sense of possibility I walked away with.

Full credit, of course, goes to David Roberts, Kingsmill Bond, and the Ember team. If any of this resonates, do yourself a favor and subscribe to Volts podcast. Few voices in this space combine clarity, empathy, and insight like David’s, and the world is richer when independent journalism like his thrives.

Let’s dive in.

Why The Name “Electrotech” Matters

Lately, the term “electrotech” has been gaining popularity alongside cleantech and climate tech. But what exactly makes it different? While all three relate to solving the climate challenge, electrotech occupies a unique and increasingly critical space.

Cleantech, or clean technology, is a broad umbrella. It includes anything that reduces environmental harm, improves resource efficiency, or mitigates climate change. Solar panels, wind turbines, water treatment innovations, sustainable agriculture, and carbon capture technologies all fall under this category. Climate tech is similarly expansive, often encompassing tools and solutions aimed at decarbonization across industries, from low-carbon cement to biofuels.

Electrotech, by contrast, is much more specific. It’s all about electrification. At its core, electrotech focuses on replacing fossil-fuel processes with electricity and optimizing how electricity is generated, stored, distributed, and consumed. This includes electric vehicles and their charging networks, grid-scale and behind-the-meter storage, smart grids, AI-enabled energy management, and the electrification of heating and industrial processes.

So why does electrification matter so much? Surprisingly, the answer comes down to something wonky but fundamental: the second law of thermodynamics. This law says that whenever energy changes form, say from the chemical energy in gasoline to the motion of a car, some of the energy inevitably disperses as heat or becomes less useful for doing work. That’s why no machine or process can ever be 100% efficient.

In everyday terms, this “energy tax” is the waste heat or lost energy you can’t put to work. It’s nature’s way of saying, “You can transform energy, but you can’t do it for free.” Electrifying processes wherever possible helps us avoid much of this tax, making our systems dramatically more efficient.

There’s also a technology and market angle. Cleantech often involves material- or chemistry-heavy innovations with long development cycles. Electrotech, on the other hand, is highly digital, modular, and software-driven. It’s about control, optimization, and integration across systems, which makes it easier to scale quickly and achieve measurable impact. Investors increasingly see electrotech as a digital-first lever to accelerate decarbonization.

Peak Oil Has Already Happened

For most people, including many seasoned energy professionals, the mental model of the world is that global fossil-fuel demand is still rising, and will keep rising for decades. That belief shapes policy, investment, and public debate.

But it’s wrong.

The reality unfolding in the data is far more dramatic. According to the latest global numbers from Ember and the IEA, fossil-fuel demand has already peaked and, in several cases, have already begun to decline. And these declines aren’t being seen in fringe sectors, they’re showing up in the four largest parts of the global energy system:

Electricity generation (~40% of global fossil use): Peaked in 2025.

In the first half of 2025, solar and wind alone covered all net new electricity demand globally. For the first time, the world is adding more clean electricity than it needs for growth, meaning the biggest fossil-fuel sector has hit its crest.

Industrial energy (~25% of global fossil use): Peaked in 2014.

Electrification in light industries such as textiles, machinery, food processing, and more, especially in China, quietly stopped fossil-fuel growth a decade ago.

Buildings (~12% of global fossil use): Peaked in 2018.

Heat pumps and efficiency upgrades have flattened fossil demand for heating, cooking, and hot water. The curve bent six years ago.

Road transport (~25% of global fossil use): Peaked in 2019.

The largest use of oil comes from cars, trucks, and buses. Just prior to the pandemic, it reached its high-water mark. Since then, EV adoption in China and emerging markets has pushed demand onto a structural decline.

Add it up, and more than 80% of global fossil-fuel demand has already peaked or is peaking right now. This is, arguably, the single most under-appreciated fact in the entire energy conversation: The age of ever-rising fossil-fuel demand is already over.

We Waste Two-Thirds of All Energy

Here’s a mind-blowing fact most people don’t know: of all the coal, oil, and gas we extract from the ground, roughly two-thirds is wasted before it ever does anything useful.

It might sound unbelievable, but here’s the breakdown:

• Coal: When we burn it to generate steam for electricity, about 60% of the energy is lost as heat up the smokestack or in transmission.

• Oil: When we refine it into gasoline and put it into a car, nearly 80% is lost as engine heat and exhaust.

• LNG: When we frack it, liquefy it, ship it overseas, regasify it, and then burn it in a power plant, roughly 50–60% of the initial energy is lost along the way.

Across the global energy system, we currently convert only about one-third of primary energy into useful work. The rest literally heats the atmosphere. Kingsmill Bond and David Roberts kept coming back to this point because it’s the single most important fact most people have never heard.

Electrification changes everything

An electric motor, whether in a car, a factory, or a heat pump, is roughly 90% efficient. End-to-end losses drop from ~65–70% to ~10%. That means the same useful energy (motion, heat, light, industrial output) can be delivered with less than half the primary energy we use today, and eventually with one-third or less.

This is why charts showing “renewables are still only 10–15% of primary energy” are so misleading. Electrotech doesn’t need to replace the full red bar of primary energy. It only needs to replace the thin blue sliver that actually reaches the customer.

As Kingsmill Bond puts it: “The target is three times smaller than it looks. When people finally internalize this one fact, the entire mental model of the energy transition flips from ‘impossible moonshot’ to ‘inevitable efficiency revolution.’”

Electrotech Will Not Drive Increased Mining

A very common pushback against renewables goes something like this: “Sure, solar panels and batteries are clean if you only focus on once they’re operational, but think of all the mining for lithium, cobalt, copper.”

At first blush, it sounds plausible, until you actually look at the numbers.

Consider the fossil-fuel system. Every year, we extract and move roughly 16–18 billion tonnes of coal, oil, and gas, not including the massive amounts of rock and overburden that must be displaced to get it. And this isn’t a one-time event; we have to do it again every single year, forever. That’s a staggering, never-ending flow of material.

Now compare that to the global build-out of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric vehicles. All totalled, it requires about 1 billion tonnes of minerals such as copper, silicon, aluminum, lithium, and the rest. That’s right, one billion tonnes. And unlike fossil fuels, you only need to do this once. After that, most of the materials can be recycled. Over the lifetime of the infrastructure, fossil fuels move roughly 10 to 100 times more “stuff” than the entire electrotech build-out ever will.

On top of that, once minerals are embedded in a solar panel or battery, they can be recycled at rates of 90–95%. And this isn’t just theoretical. Companies like Redwood Materials are already doing it at commercial scale. Fossil fuels, by contrast, offer no such circularity: once you burn them, they’re gone forever.

The Final Domino: China

The last major holdout for fossil-fuel demands has been China, whose industrial boom dominated global energy trends for two decades. Since 2008, China has accounted for roughly 95% of the world’s net growth in fossil-fuel demand.

But even here, the shift is unmistakable. Chinese coal demand for power is already falling year-on-year, down 3–4% in 2025 so far. Meanwhile, China is adding roughly 600 GW of solar and wind this year alone, which is more than the rest of the world combined. EVs now make up over 50% of sales, and electric trucks account for ~20%. Overall electrification is rising by about 10 percentage points per decade, heading toward 35–40%.

Every serious analyst outside the oil majors now expects China’s total fossil-fuel demand to peak in 2025 or 2026, which is several years ahead of the official 2030 target. And as Kingsmill Bond put it on the podcast: “Peak demand in China will be the pivot moment in the entire system. All major developed economies (OECD countries) peaked back in 2007 and once China peaks in 2025-ish, who’s left? Nobody. The global peak is here.”

The Great Leapfrog

You often hear about emerging markets as a “future opportunity” for clean energy, but this viewpoint is sorely outdated. The reality on the ground is that nearly two-thirds of all emerging-market electricity demand (by volume, not by number of countries) already gets a higher share of its power from solar than the United States does.

We’re talking about countries like India, Brazil, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and South Africa. The places that were supposed to be the great growth hope for oil and LNG exporters for the next thirty years. Instead, they just skipped the fossil era entirely.

A few 2025 snapshots:

• Vietnam: ~30 % solar in the power mix and climbing fast

• Nepal: ~75 % of all new vehicle imports are electric (mostly two- and three-wheelers)

• India: electric three-wheelers already >70 % of sales

• Brazil: solar now ~20 % of generation and rising

• Pakistan: imported enough solar panels in the last two years to cover ~40 % of national demand

As Kingsmill Bond puts it, “This is the soft underbelly of global oil demand being carved out in real time.”

Three Drivers That Make Electrotech Unstoppable

Electrotech isn’t just another buzzword. It’s a revolution powered by forces that are converging in unprecedented ways. There are three fundamental drivers that make this shift not just possible, but inevitable: physics, economics, and geopolitics.

1. Physics: Electrotech Is 2–3× More Efficient Than Fossil Fuels

The first and perhaps most undeniable driver is physics itself. Today, roughly two-thirds of all primary energy is wasted as heat. Internal combustion engine vehicles, for example, burn gasoline and lose nearly 90% of that energy to exhaust, engine heat, and friction. Electrified systems, by contrast, achieve ~90% energy delivery efficiency, meaning only about 10% of energy is lost.

2. Economics: Technologies Get Cheaper, Commodities Don’t

The second driver is economics. Unlike fossil fuels, which are finite and subject to depletion, technologies improve with scale. Consider solar power: in 1976, it cost around $100 per watt; today it’s roughly 10 cents per watt. Fossil fuel prices, in contrast, are essentially what they were in 1900, adjusted for inflation.

3. Geopolitics: From Fossil-Fuel Importers’ Vulnerability to Energy Independence

The third driver is geopolitics. About three-quarters of humanity lives in countries that import more fossil fuels than they produce. The good news is that nearly every country has 10–100× their energy demand in renewable potential. 

Learning Curves Beat Depletion

Fossil fuels get more expensive over time, since you start with the easiest or cheapest deposits first. Everything that comes later is deeper, farther, dirtier, and riskier. Innovations in drilling or fracking can slow the price rise, but they cannot reverse it. Adjusted for inflation, the result is astonishingly flat: real oil prices in 2025 are roughly the same as they were in 1975, 1925, or even 1875.

Technologies, on the other hand, do the opposite. They follow the same exponential learning curve we’ve seen since the transistor (Moore’s Law). As a result, costs steadily creep down over time.

Technology	1970s–1980s Price	2025 Price	Cost Fall
Solar modules	~$100 / watt	~$0.10 / watt	99.9%
Lithium-ion batteries	~$6,000 / kWh	~$60–80 / kWh (China)	>98%
Wind turbines	~90%	—	Dramatic drop
LEDs, computers, internet bandwidth	—	—	Same story

Beyond the main drivers of the energy transition listed above, the so-called “messy middle” of the system is joining the ride. Grid-forming inverters, smart EV chargers, demand-response software, and HVDC transmission cables are all dropping in price year after year. The entire system is learning, becoming more efficient, more flexible, and more capable with every iteration.

This leads to one natural conclusion. The more electrotech we build, the cheaper and better it gets. The more fossil fuels we extract, the more expensive and dirtier they become. Economics 101 says there’s only one possible long-term equilibrium.

From Petrostates to the Solar Belt

For decades, global energy politics have been dominated by fossil fuels. Around 75% of humanity are fossil-fuel importers, dependent on a handful of exporting countries for their electricity, heat, and transport. That imbalance created immense geopolitical leverage for nations sitting on oil, gas, and coal reserves.

Kingsmill frames this power imbalance as renting versus owning. For decades, most countries have been renting their energy from a small set of owners. Renters pay the price, bear the risks, and have little control. Owners, by contrast, capture the rents, set the terms, and dictate market dynamics. In the fossil-fuel world, petrostates were the landlords and everyone else was paying the bill.

Now, the dynamics are shifting. China isn’t just exporting solar panels; it’s exporting entire solar factories, giving countries the ability to produce their own clean electricity at scale. The result? Wealth and influence are moving away from the 5% of the global population concentrated in petrostates and toward the 80% living in the solar belt, which is the vast regions of the world blessed with abundant sun and wind.

The Multiplier Nobody Saw Coming

One of the most underappreciated multipliers in the energy transition is artificial intelligence. Kingsmill Bond frames it perfectly: “AI is the electrification of thinking.” Just as electrification transformed motion, heat, and light, AI transforms decision-making in real time, at global scale, and with unprecedented efficiency.

AI enables the real-time matching of variable supply and flexible demand. Solar and wind may not always produce electricity exactly when it’s needed, but AI can orchestrate everything from industrial processes and EV charging to building heating and cooling, ensuring that electricity flows precisely where it has the most value. The result is dramatically reduced energy waste and higher system efficiency.

The potential is staggering. According to the IEA’s Energy and AI report (2025), AI-driven optimizations in electricity use can deliver substantial efficiency gains.. For instance, electrification of end-uses like heat pumps in industry or electric vehicles in transport already provides 2–4× efficiency improvements over combustion-based alternatives, with AI further enhancing these through 10–20% additional optimizations in operations and resource allocation. This represents a massive net positive, magnifying the impact of electrification across the grid, industry, and transportation by accelerating emissions reductions and supporting faster deployment of clean technologies.

Conclusion: The Electrotech Tipping Point

The story of energy is no longer about gradual change or distant possibilities. It is about an unfolding revolution; one in which electricity, not fossil fuel, becomes the backbone of human activity.

The shift is grounded in physics, economics, and strategy. Electrification delivers 2–3× the efficiency of fossil-fuel systems, dramatically reducing the energy needed to power cars, factories, and homes. Technology costs continue to plummet, while fossil fuels remain subject to geological and economic constraints. Meanwhile, countries once locked into dependence on imported hydrocarbons are leapfrogging into energy independence, armed with sun, wind, and rapidly scaling storage.

Beyond the numbers, a subtle but profound multiplier is at work. AI and software-driven energy management are orchestrating a complex, variable system with unprecedented precision. Every solar panel, battery, and EV charger becomes a node in a smarter, leaner, more resilient grid. The result is not just less waste, but a new model for how energy, capital, and innovation coalesce.

The implications are enormous. Fossil fuels are no longer on a path of endless growth. Peak demand has passed for most sectors, and the decline phase is already visible on balance sheets, markets, and industrial deployment. Meanwhile, electrification and AI-driven optimization are accelerating faster than conventional wisdom allows, creating a tipping point that is as inevitable as it is transformative.

In short, we are witnessing more than an energy transition. We are witnessing a revolution in efficiency, autonomy, and power itself. We are entering an era in which clean, electrified systems will define the very architecture of the 21st century. Those who grasp this now will see not just the decline of the old fossil paradigm, but the rise of a smarter, faster, and more equitable energy world.