HOW TO SEE DISRUPTION BEFORE IT WINS
The Meridian Point with Kumar Dattatreyan
Guest: Glenn Marshall
----------------------------------------------------------------------
KUMAR: Hey, everyone. Kumar Dattatreyan here with The Meridian Point. Glenn is back, and we're going to talk. I don't know exactly what we're going to talk about. Probably energy and solar and the current situation our administration has created: the greatest opportunity for renewable energy in the history of the world. Who would have thunk it? Thank you, Glenn, for joining me. We're recording this on a Saturday morning, so this should be a fun conversation.
GLENN: Glad to be here, Kumar.
KUMAR: We've got all kinds of things going on in the world. We've got wildfires in Europe. We've got hundred-year storms arriving every few years. And really, there's a fix for all this, and it's probably here now in the latest geopolitical strife in the Mideast. The closing of the Strait has, in a way, given us an opportunity to come out the other side in better shape. What do you think?
GLENN: I'll start with a yes. The current administration is not very renewables-friendly, at least that's their official stance. But if you asked me today who I'd give the Climate Person of the Year Award to, I'd have to say President Trump. His closing of the Strait of Hormuz has done more than any other action I can think of to help renewables in 2026.
KUMAR: And what exactly has he done? What has the closing of the Strait done for renewables?
GLENN: It has given me, among others, a wake-up call. I woke up one morning and gas prices were up, and this was overnight. Twenty percent of the world's fossil fuels goes through the Strait of Hormuz, and now, overnight, they're not going through it.
KUMAR: I think he renamed it on Truth Social. I think he's calling it the Trump Strait now.
GLENN: Oh, is he? I wouldn't doubt it.
KUMAR: We all live in Trump world, I suppose. Next we'll rename the planet. But this is a serious matter. Countries depend on the Strait of Hormuz. Flights were cancelled and schools were closed for the countries right in that vicinity, because they run out of fuel fairly quickly. If you didn't have a lot of reserves, you're in trouble. So what has that done to renewables specifically? Have you done the research? Has there been a rise in the deployment of solar, wind and other renewables?
GLENN: It has. The data is still a bit early, but absolutely, solar has gone up a lot and EV sales have gone up a lot. Australia, for example: EVs were not the number one category of vehicle imports, and they don't manufacture cars in Australia. Now EVs are number one. Everybody's buying them because the price of gasoline and diesel just went through the roof. Poor countries spend a lot of money importing fossil fuels, a very large percentage of their income. Now they're thinking, we could keep doing that, or we could just collect free energy from the sun, which arrives here every day, and not go through Hormuz. It's a pretty easy choice. Energy security is a big deal.
KUMAR: I'm going to try to set this up so people understand the law we're going to talk about. Before we get into solar, it would be interesting to think about what connects a solar panel, the cell phone in your pocket, and the Model T. What do they have in common, if anything?
GLENN: You're clearly setting me up, Kumar. When you come up with a new product, like a cell phone, a fascinating phenomenon happens. Let's pretend you and I just invented the cell phone. We make one in our garage. We show it to our friends. They say, wow, that's pretty cool, how much do you want for it? Of course, we have to charge a lot because we made it by hand. They use it, they love it, they tell their friends, and their friends come to us and say, we want one too. We say, well, it took us a week to make by hand, give us some time, let me see if I can get somebody to mass-produce them. Because it's done in a factory instead of by hand, you can reduce the price, which causes more people to buy them. So let's say we charge ten thousand dollars for the first one. Then we get the factory to make a batch of a hundred, and they do it much cheaper, so we drop the price to five thousand, which causes more to sell. Then you go back and say, I want a dedicated line, and because I'm buying a thousand instead of a hundred, I want a better price. And they say, sure, if you buy the whole factory, we'll give you a great deal. What's fascinating about this is a phenomenon called Wright's Law. Every time you double the total production of anything, particularly mass-produced goods, the price drops by a constant percentage. For solar panels, it's around twenty percent, and this has been happening since the 1950s. They were insanely expensive when first invented, so expensive they could only be used on satellites. The reason they made sense for satellites is that it's really expensive to send a tank of gas up to a satellite. You're just not going to do that. So they kept making more, put them on remote outposts on Earth where it was hard to bring in power, tops of mountains and the like, and eventually the price came down to something reasonable. This twenty percent cost reduction happens with every doubling, and every doubling happens around every three years. There's a little variance, but very little. I was actually using two and a half years, which works out to about an eight percent reduction every year. Bottom line: every ten years, it drops in price by around ninety percent.
KUMAR: Wow. So you mentioned something in our conversations over the past couple of weeks about the International Energy Agency. They're using a linear model for solar, when historically the growth has been exponential. And a lot of countries are basing their energy infrastructure investments on this linear model, which hasn't ever been true.
GLENN: This is what I found astonishing, and I found it out relatively recently. Let me give some background. There seem to be only a few people I know of, you and I among them, who are recognizing this exponential growth. As you said, it happened with the Model T, it happened with cell phones, and it's happening with solar panels. It happens with most major technologies.
KUMAR: The internet was a fad in the eighties and nineties, and now of course you can't go anywhere in the world without expecting it to be available to you. And AI is doing the same thing. It grows exponentially.
GLENN: Modelers are cautious, and they should be. But they should also take feedback into account. Our model was wrong last year, so maybe we should change it for this year. I'm very puzzled by this, because the IEA takes data from all around the world and they're an independent organization. They're not being paid by big oil. They were originally started to deal with the oil crisis. They sometimes seem a bit tilted toward the oil industry, but the director, Fatih Birol, gets it about where we're going with renewables. I'm sure there are constraints and they're being cautious, but these linear projections are just plain wrong.
KUMAR: Cautious doesn't explain it. There has to be some pressure from energy lobbies around the world to report these numbers this way, because the history clearly shows the growth of solar and renewables, and the reduction in price, is not linear, it's exponential. I read recently that the price for one kilowatt-hour from solar is down to about twelve cents, which means a panel is dirt cheap. It's so cheap to install, and the price keeps going down.
GLENN: And it gets better. It used to be that the panel was the bulk of the cost. Now the permitting and the electrician are the biggest part of the cost. But there's a solution to that, and you're experiencing it down in the States. We're not there yet in Canada, to my frustration: balcony solar. You eliminate the electrician, eliminate the permit, eliminate getting permission from the electric company. You go down to Home Depot, buy it, and it's like a toaster, you plug it in. It started in Utah. It's legal in, I think, twelve states. I think Virginia is soon to be legal, where you live, if not already. Now, there are limits on how many you can have. Of course, if you're like me, you think, great, I'll put up twenty of them and I won't have to use any grid electricity at all. But they limit the amount of electricity you can generate. In Germany, they have more than one nuclear power plant's worth of balcony solar. It's amazing. And you have to do a custom install, but the Germans are making fences out of solar panels, which I find hysterical.
KUMAR: I think I've seen solar fences advertised. I don't know if they're available here in the U.S., but I've seen them in various outlets, primarily in Europe. And of course I'm seeing lots of articles about raised solar panels over farmland, even productive farmland, that increase the yield of the crop they're covering, or at least have no impact at all. Probably because of you, I've been reading more of these articles. I blame you. I'm getting more of them in my feed.
GLENN: It's a good thing, and this is a hugely important point. Some people complain about solar wasting land. That's not true. You put solar on land you already have. If you have a parking lot, the cars used to get hot in the sun. Put up solar panels and the cars get shade. The idea of dedicated land just for solar is silly. You put it on your roof and shade your roof. The best case is marginal grazing land with sheep. Sheep don't jump on the panels like goats do, and they don't knock them over like cows do. You raise the panels a couple of feet, and they create a little microclimate underneath that improves plant growth, which the sheep love. The sheep get shade, and the extra plant growth rejuvenates the soil. So you take marginal grazing land, put solar panels on it, and you improve the soil and get more money per sheep, even without the electricity. When you add in the electricity, it's around four times the income for the farmer. When farmers get hold of this, there's going to be a stampede. They'll all want solar panels. This is already happening in Texas. We have an awful lot of marginal grazing land, and once we put solar over all of it, we'll have more electricity than we need.
KUMAR: And more sheep, presumably.
GLENN: And more sheep. The idea is to augment your farming. But move quick on this, because they'll end up with too much electricity.
KUMAR: I'm curious, because there's a shortage of beef in the U.S. Herds aren't as big as they once were, for lots of reasons I don't fully know, but beef is really expensive at the store. I wonder if this could be a way to improve herd sizes, raising the panels high enough that cows can graze without affecting the quality of the land. Just a random thought.
GLENN: They are doing some work with that in Alberta. The problem is cows are big and heavy and they knock the panels over, so you need serious reinforcement. Cows weigh a ton, so you need a substantial structure. Sheep are more docile and they don't knock them over. Or maybe the cows get itchy and scratch against them, I don't know, but ruggedization has been the issue with cows, not with sheep.
KUMAR: I want to talk about other examples of Wright's Law, everyday examples we live but don't realize. I'm thinking of autocorrect that has grown into these AI agents. We've had autocorrect for a long time on our phones and in our applications. We type and get suggestions to correct spelling, even grammar. And now we have chatbots, which seem to be on a similar trajectory of exponential growth and democratization. Would that be an example?
GLENN: I don't think so. Autocorrect was a different category of technology, and AI is kind of completely different. Wright's Law is about a given technology. There's actually a general term for this, the experience curve, which is the more technically correct phrase when you generalize Wright's Law to an entire technology. But autocorrect is a different category, so I don't think it applies there. Cell phones are an example. Streaming video is an example, and Blockbuster was on the wrong side of that one. It didn't end well. Cell phone cameras are an example, and Kodak was on the wrong side of that. Kodak actually invented the digital camera, but they didn't want to touch their film business because it was so lucrative.
KUMAR: Steve Jobs said it: we're going to be cannibalized, and I want to be the one doing the cannibalizing.
GLENN: He was a revolutionary there.
KUMAR: Right, baking into the culture that they're always disrupting themselves, instead of waiting to be disrupted from the outside. Which feels like the world we're living in now. Whether intentional or not, the current administration has set us and the rest of the world on a course that will eventually eliminate the need for fossils, or at least reduce it significantly. There's still no substitute for fossils in certain parts of industry, like big mining operations. But for the rest of us, the world is moving toward renewables. Do you agree? You probably have more research to back this up than I do, but it feels like I see articles all the time about new solar and battery projects going up in Asia, Europe and the U.S.
GLENN: Here's the thing. People actually crunch the numbers, and solar, even without a battery, was the cheapest electricity in history, and it's dropping in price every single year. It was the cheapest, and it's dropped since. By 2030, it'll be ninety percent cheaper than it was in 2020, and it was already the cheapest in 2020. There's a Bloomberg analyst, Jenny Chase. In 2024, she had an article in The New York Times and she stated, and I quote, "By just 2030, solar electricity will be absolutely and reliably free pretty much everywhere." This means you have to buy the panel, which drops in price, but once you've purchased it, the energy is free. If you have a huge install, yes, you'll need insurance, so there's a tiny cost, but it's negligible. It's a one-time cost, and that's for the life of the panel.
KUMAR: You may have to maintain it here and there.
GLENN: You may have to replace a panel eventually, but maybe not for twenty years, or when the technology gets better. You can get a full system warranty. The panel is guaranteed to something like eighty percent output for up to thirty years. You can get batteries included with that, warrantied as well. They don't last thirty years, but they're guaranteed for the life of the product. They're automated. You don't need someone babysitting the thing. The sun comes up, it generates electricity and charges the battery. The sun goes down, it stops. There are long-duration batteries now. So why wouldn't anybody do this?
KUMAR: I'm curious. There are a lot of data centers going up around the world, especially in the U.S. Billions of dollars are being invested in new compute so the demand for AI can be met. All of them require power, exorbitant amounts of it, and today it's mostly natural gas or nuclear. Why isn't solar, battery and wind in the mix? People are talking about nuclear. Microsoft and a lot of the big companies are investing in these smaller nuclear reactors.
GLENN: First, on the small nuclear reactors: I don't want to be too tart, but let's say the nuclear industry is very optimistic on pricing and time to build. There's something called the levelized cost of electricity, which equalizes all the costs over the life of the product, the total cost to generate divided by the amount of electricity generated. Nuclear is three times the cost and going up, relative to the current technology leader, which is solar. Gas is a bit more than solar, but gas has fuel, and that's not dropping in price. In fact, utility-scale turbines are back-ordered until 2030 because manufacturers shut the lines down. They can see the writing on the wall. Now they're trying to start them back up, but this isn't a future growth technology, so they're pulling back. AI data centers are in a hurry, and they've apparently decided getting capacity out quickly, even if it costs more, is worth it. They're doing short-sighted things, in my view. They're using evaporative cooling, so they use a huge amount of water, as opposed to a radiator-style cooling. I know you drive an EV, but you don't have to fill your car with water every time you drive. With evaporative cooling, you effectively do. Some jurisdictions are pushing back and saying, no, you can't have the water, pay a bit more and put in a radiative cooling system. It uses a bit more energy to drive air through the fans, but then you won't use any water. As for the energy, go out into the boonies away from the cities, find marginal grazing land and put up solar panels. That covers your energy. It does need more land, but the data centers can't be bothered going out to rural areas and talking to the farmers. If you tell a farmer you'll quadruple his income, of course he's going to love that.
KUMAR: Creating systems of mutual benefit. One of the permaculture principles.
GLENN: Exactly. I wrote about that this week, Principle Five, creating systems of mutual benefit. These rural communities are dying. A lot of them are losing people. If you can bring in a data center, you need their approval, but if you're going to rejuvenate the marginal grazing land, you can work out a deal. It's a win-win. But if you want to build a data center close to a city, where there isn't much land, you can't do solar, or you'll have to do a purchase agreement with somebody out of the area. They're rushing and not doing that, and they're already getting serious pushback. The big utility turbines are back-ordered, so now they're using small turbines, which are actually airplane engines. They're literally taking used airplane engines, putting them in a box, and putting like twenty of them around a data center. What do you think the neighbors will think about airplane engines running twenty-four seven?
KUMAR: That's crazy. That's ridiculous.
GLENN: Can I make a point about pollution? Emissions from fossil fuels are responsible for eighteen percent of deaths worldwide. So you're putting in airplane engines, blowing out people's eardrums, and generating poisonous emissions that kill people. Do you think the neighbors will see you as a good corporate citizen or not?
KUMAR: Right. I hear you. We've been talking a lot about specifics. I want to pull back and zoom out, and talk about the nature of exponential change and why it's so hard for humans to see it when they're living in it, and why supposedly independent organizations like the IEA keep publishing data that isn't grounded in the facts. What do you say?
GLENN: The IEA is very curious. When I first saw this, I thought I must be wrong. How could this happen? So I researched it, and the IEA has been called out on this. You've been wrong every year for fifteen years. This is Statistics 101. You make a model, project it out, gather data, see the model's wrong, then adjust it so it projects more accurately. They're making the same mistake every year. I'm not the first person to notice this. I did a quick internet search and got a whole page of people complaining about it. It's really disturbing, because countries and companies are making investment decisions based on models that are provably wrong. Part of it is that humans just aren't used to exponential growth. It happens so quickly, it's over in a few years. When you're trying to make a prediction, linear is the way it normally works, and that's what we're used to.
KUMAR: Is it that we're wired that way, that we only see things linearly, so it's hard to think in exponential terms even when the data is staring at us? And I want to draw the parallel to how organizations run, because they're planning into the future too, maybe not taking into account the exponential nature of certain industries, or the competition around them, or AI in this case. What are your thoughts there?
GLENN: You're exactly right, Kumar. Exponential is quite rare, and the human brain optimizes for what we see, and what we see is linear. It's a survival thing. If your brain were optimized for exponential, which you rarely see, you'd have been eaten by tigers millions of years ago. So our brains are naturally oriented toward linear, and that makes sense. We understand exponential, it's high school math, and I'm a bit of a math nerd, so I find it fascinating. But it's not what you normally see. The caveat is that exponential does exist, so watch for it, because when it happens, you'd better be ready, because things change real quick.
KUMAR: So the nature of disruption is only going to accelerate as we move into the future. What's the future of the automobile in five years? What's the future of AI in five years? What's the future of energy production in five years, or even one or two? We don't have a model to predict those things, because we can't use a linear model. EVs looked exponential, and may still be, but from where I'm sitting it doesn't feel that way. It feels like the growth of the EV industry has stalled a bit, at least in the U.S. Is it not rising as fast as it was?
GLENN: There are a couple of things there. Remind me to come back to EVs, but I want to go back to an earlier point. I have some data on this. This is from Ember in the U.K. They're a credible data-gathering institute. In 2015, the total electricity generated worldwide by solar was one point zero seven percent. That's not much, about one percent. And a few years earlier it was only half a percent. Fast-forward to 2018, and it's two point one seven percent. In three years, that's impressive growth, but it's still only two percent.
KUMAR: True, but the increase is significant.
GLENN: In 2022, it's four point six two percent. Another doubling.
KUMAR: Another doubling. That's wild.
GLENN: It's still only four percent, pretty low, but that starts to get my attention. And in 2025, it was eight point eight one percent.
KUMAR: There you go. Another doubling.
GLENN: Exactly. Still only about eight percent, but that growth is impressive. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to look forward three years.
KUMAR: In 2028, it's going to be sixteen percent, presumably, with another doubling.
GLENN: It's been doubling for decades. There's no reason to think it's going to stop. So by 2028, we're looking at sixteen percent, and by 2031, thirty-two percent.
KUMAR: I'm trying to understand the psychology of humans around planning. I work in the transportation industry, the rail industry, and we're doing five-year plans right now. I don't know that anyone is thinking about energy infrastructure in terms of exponential growth curves. It's all linear.
GLENN: You're doing five-year linear plans, not exponential plans, and that makes sense. But somebody in the strategy and long-term direction department needs to keep an eye out for exponential things. And exponential will be happening to your transportation industry when it comes to fuel. Here's how I see EVs and solar playing out. The price of energy, according to Bloomberg, is going to be zero by 2030. Absolutely and reliably free, except for the installation.
KUMAR: Except for the installation. And what about transmission?
GLENN: This is generation to the plug. If you're a big data center, that plug is you. You'll have your solar, your battery, your data center, and the electricity from the panels to your data center. The transmission cost is zero because you built the line. We'll deal with transmission more broadly in a second. This is just generation and consumption, assuming self-use, so generation will be zero. Jenny Chase didn't talk about batteries. Batteries are actually dropping in price faster than solar panels. I was shocked by the energy secretary the other day. He said, and I quote, "The sun doesn't generate energy at night." Yes, that's correct, thank you, Mr. Secretary. No mention of batteries, which are dropping in price faster than solar panels.
KUMAR: That's curious, because I know batteries, and the motors that run EVs, use rare earths. Is it new chemistries being designed that don't rely so much on those rare earth minerals?
GLENN: The batteries don't use rare earths, it's the motors that do.
KUMAR: The motors, okay. But the chemistry in the batteries, though?
GLENN: The older chemistry is called NMC: nickel, manganese, cobalt. It uses a lot of nickel and it's more expensive. But the current generation that's really taking off is lithium iron phosphate, LFP, which is much cheaper and dropping in price very quickly. Iron is readily available, so that's where a lot of the action is. They thought sodium-ion would be the next great chemistry, based on salt, even cheaper than iron, but LFP has been dropping in price so fast that sodium-ion hasn't had a chance to take off. There's an incredible amount of research going on in batteries, and solar is still growing like crazy too, but batteries are just on fire, so to speak. And by the way, LFP batteries are much more fire-resistant than the earlier NMC technology, and sodium-ion is better yet again. The point is this technology is improving at a prodigious rate. There's a new technology called iron-air. One limitation of lithium-ion is that it's relatively expensive to build a battery big enough to last overnight. The sweet spot is around four to eight hours, typically four, now going up to six and eight hours of storage. Iron-air batteries are cheaper yet again. They're not as efficient, but they're cheaper, and they're good for a hundred days. So that takes care of what happens if the sun doesn't come up and the wind doesn't blow for a period, and it also handles seasonal variation when there's less sun.
KUMAR: I want to speak to this. What if the sun doesn't come up? What if the wind doesn't blow?
GLENN: If the sun doesn't come up, we're all dead. The sun's going to come up, at least for the next three or four billion years. In terms of reliability, am I going to bet on the sun, or on a nuclear power plant? The thing about Wright's Law is that it hasn't really applied to nuclear the way it has to solar and batteries. The cost of generating nuclear power has been pretty much the same for fifty years.
KUMAR: Right.
GLENN: It's actually worse than that. We got a big wake-up call after Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. We knew the technology was dangerous, and you've never been able to get insurance for it, because insurance companies won't touch anything that dangerous. We thought we had a handle on it, but it turns out we don't, and every few years we increase the safety requirements around nuclear. So instead of Wright's Law, where the cost drops, it's actually negative. The cost has been increasing. And small modular reactors, which everyone talks about, SMRs, have never been deployed in the G7, ever. There was one in the U.S. from NuScale, but it took longer to build than expected, which happens with pretty much every nuclear project, the cost went up, the people committing to it walked away, and the project was cancelled.
KUMAR: It's interesting to see the support for nuclear from this administration, touting its benefits, but the numbers don't support it as a viable alternative to fossils.
GLENN: This is a bit sharp. A friend used this phrasing the other day: would you like an atomic bomb in your backyard? It can have a meltdown. Chernobyl, hello.
KUMAR: It's an interesting way to see it, through the lens of Wright's Law. Look at all these technologies available for our generation. You see the price of solar and batteries plummeting, and the price of nuclear staying steady or increasing. Maybe natural gas has come down, maybe not, but the cost to the environment hasn't been factored in.
GLENN: I want to speak directly to nuclear. Nuclear made sense in the seventies. There was a lot of it being done, and if the safety issues hadn't shown up, maybe it would have been a reasonable choice. Unfortunately, the safety issues did show up, people demanded better safeguards, the cost went up, and nuclear as a generation technology petered out in the eighties and nineties. Gas dropped in price a lot, and basically nuclear's time passed. There was a so-called nuclear renaissance, as the industry called it in the early 2000s, and costs blew out yet again. I believe it was the Summer Nuclear Plant in South Carolina, or I keep mixing up North and South Carolina. They spent ten billion dollars on it, the cost kept going up, and they cancelled it. Ten billion dollars and they didn't get one watt of electricity. Because the executives lied about it, they actually went to jail, and the taxpayer is paying that ten billion and never got anything for it. So nuclear's time has passed, and SMRs aren't going to save the day, for the simple reason that solar and batteries have come on the scene and keep dropping in price.
KUMAR: It becomes economically hard to ignore the price comparisons. Look at what happened in Texas, where they flipped within a year from power outages to a surplus. You tell that story better than I do.
GLENN: The way to handle these rapid transitions is to not pick winners and losers. You have technology-neutral competitive procurement, where the best technology wins, whatever it is. We don't care, as long as it works. Texas is the poster child for that. They brought it in in the late nineties. Back then there was a lot of coal, but gas was coming on strong, so gas was the winner for the next ten years or so. Then wind came on the scene. It was cheaper, so wind took the stage for the next ten years. Then solar, which was more expensive than wind, but with this Wright's Law doubling, it's now cheaper than wind, so solar's cleaning up. And now batteries, for when the sun doesn't come up. Texas is growing at a very rapid rate and needs a lot of electricity. The grid has doubled in something like five years, which is astonishing. They're growing in population, and a lot of data centers go to Texas because of the competitive procurement and good wholesale rates. They're also isolated. They like their independence down in Texas. The connections to other parts of the grid are small, so when they're short of electricity, they can't easily pull it in from other states like the rest of the country can.
KUMAR: I was just going to get to the shortfall part. Go ahead.
GLENN: They've always been a little short of electricity. In 2023, they had eleven demand-related grid shortfalls. But solar is growing like crazy, so it flipped overnight, from short in 2023 with eleven shortfall events, to 2024 with solar coming on strong: zero. And it gets better. The peak period for electricity consumption in Texas is sunny afternoons, when everybody cranks up their air conditioners, and that's exactly when solar generates the most. So not only did demand hit a record high on sunny afternoons, solar generation hit a record high, more than the demand. Now, on sunny afternoons, Texas has so much solar that the wholesale price goes negative.
KUMAR: Free energy. They're paying you to use it.
GLENN: Exactly. And when the battery operators hear that, they go, wait, you'll pay me to charge my battery? Let me back the truck up. So they charge at a negative rate, take that negative-priced solar electricity, and spread it out through the day. When the sun goes down, memo to the energy secretary, the batteries kick in. They take those negative prices and spread them through the day, through the week, and with iron-air, through the year. The gas, coal and nuclear companies simply can't compete. They're being squeezed. In fact, for the first time, in June of 2025, again from Ember, total worldwide electricity demand increased by two point eight percent, and that demand was met one hundred nine percent by renewables, for the first time in a growing market. Renewables met all of demand and then some. Worldwide electricity generation from fossils shrank in a growing market. This is the beginning of the end.
KUMAR: Glenn, we're getting to the fifty-minute mark, and I love this, but we should probably pause here and tie it up. Maybe you can come back with more specifics on where the trends are going. Regardless of where you stand on climate change, or whether you tune that news out, the facts are the facts. The world is moving toward renewables, and this podcast is really about disruption. We're living in a time of energy disruption. So what's one thing a listener should do after this episode?
GLENN: Tell their elected representative that we want competitive procurement now. Technology-neutral. It's not a left or right thing. I just want free energy, and I want it now. Free energy per kilowatt after install. Competitive procurement, let the best win, and a proper audit so there's no cheating. We want cheap, reliable electricity now. If your electricity prices are going up, you're not getting it.
KUMAR: What would you say to a leader in a company living through disruption they're not seeing?
GLENN: Look at your energy costs and make sure they're going down. If energy is a small portion of your business, don't worry about it. But if you're an aluminum smelter, you want to get on renewables, and you want them fast.
KUMAR: I want a take that's not about energy, but about exponential change more broadly. What should leaders and companies be thinking about? Change is all around us, and the change cycle keeps getting shorter. With AI, it's going to compress even more. What's on your mind in that space?
GLENN: I'll try to keep this brief. Once energy costs go to zero, and we've already seen that in Texas, so this isn't theoretical, it changes everything. You have free fuel for electric vehicles and free fuel for heat pumps. The majority of oil use from those sectors goes away. And once energy prices start dropping, things you never even thought of become economically viable. Large-scale water desalination. Running your data center as a giant battery, because energy is cheap, you can turn it off and on and use it to store power. If high-cost grids don't do what Texas is doing, there's going to be a giant sucking sound as all the data centers move to Texas. This is going to spread like wildfire.
KUMAR: I think you're still on the energy angle. This has implications for any leader in any industry thinking about the next five years. If you're in the middle of five-year planning, what should you be thinking about, and what lens should you use to look at change from an exponential perspective?
GLENN: I'm leading to that. Food costs have gone up, because there's a lot of transportation in food. Once we take the transportation cost out of food, food costs come down. Prices have been going up, but thanks to energy coming down in price, costs are going to go down.
KUMAR: We're not seeing that in the economy yet, though, because of the shocks from Hormuz and so on.
GLENN: Hormuz is going to accelerate all of this. Right now Hormuz is driving prices up, but once we start doing this, it'll drive prices down. This is going to create an enormous economic boost. People are worried about AI, and I'm actually a bit concerned about AI too. I know where it's going in two years, but in five years I'm not so sure, and that makes me a little nervous. But we're going to have free energy for AI, and AI providing all kinds of insights. There's going to be a major trend toward reduced prices. That's the future, and companies need to be thinking that costs are going to go down. Just as Hormuz rippled prices through the economy and drove inflation up, once solar, renewables and batteries get more of a foothold, in just three years, with another doubling, what we saw with Hormuz goes the other way and drives prices down everywhere.
KUMAR: I'm also concerned about the energy lobbies. Maybe they're seeing these exponential curves, and that's why they're putting on pressure.
GLENN: Too late. That ship has sailed. Even with the tariffs, in Texas solar and batteries are still cheapest. You can't stop it. And the administration has actually helped by raising fossil fuel prices.
KUMAR: I love that we're ending on a message of abundance, rather than the alternative of just riding this thing out. This administration, if nothing else, has accelerated the move to renewables in a way nothing else could have.
GLENN: Yep. And reduced emissions, which will help the climate, although there's a lot of bad stuff coming. We can put our foot on the scale in terms of emissions and breathe better air. Everybody likes clean air and cheaper energy.
KUMAR: Absolutely. Well, this has been fascinating. Another great conversation, Glenn. There's more we can go into, and we'll go deeper on some of this another time, but this was great. I'm eager to air it soon. Thanks again for coming on, and for sharing your viewpoint, all of it backed by a lot of facts and research you've done. We'll attach some of the sources behind the data so people watching can see this is based on facts anyone can research. And Glenn, thank you for turning me on to all of this eight or ten months ago. When I started doing the research myself, I thought, oh my God, this guy's onto something.
GLENN: And remember where you were before. You didn't believe me. My condition for coming on your show was that you had to do the research. I'll talk about it as long as you do the research. And you didn't believe it. I don't mean that as a criticism. It's just really hard to see from the outside.
KUMAR: It is hard. I think that's the point of all this. It's hard to live in a time of disruption, of exponential change, and actually see it, because humans aren't conditioned to look for exponential patterns. We're conditioned to linear ones. We plan that way, we act that way, we predict that way. Our brains are wired for linear patterns, and they have to be, because that's what we see ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of the time.
GLENN: In five years, we'll look back and say it was obvious. But right now we're in the thick of it. It's not obvious, unless you really start digging, like you have done.
KUMAR: And because of our conversations, I've written a few articles on climate. We'll post links to those in the show notes. And yes, I do need the research, so I'll get with you on that before we air this. All right. Thanks again.
GLENN: All right. Thank you.
KUMAR: Bye, everyone.
