Energy Grid
This spring, a single waterway held the world’s energy markets hostage. With the war against Iran choking off the Strait of Hormuz, the route for roughly a fifth of the world’s oil, Brent crude spent months lurching toward and past $100 a barrel. A tentative deal to reopen the strait has since pulled prices back toward $80, but they remain up around 40% on the year, and shipowners are still not convinced it is safe to send tankers through.
It is the kind of shock that has dictated the fortunes of nations for half a century, and exactly the kind the technology now reshaping electricity is built to make irrelevant. While the market fixates on where oil settles, a quieter milestone passed almost unremarked: in 2025, renewables generated 34% of the world’s electricity and overtook coal for the first time in a century. That crossover is usually filed under climate progress, but the more revealing story is not about emissions at all. It is about cost. The move to an electrified world is not a policy aspiration that governments might choose to pursue. It is a techno-economic gradient that runs in one direction, and solar photovoltaics is the clearest proof of where it leads.
Why solar keeps getting cheaper
The mechanism is a learning curve. For every doubling of cumulative deployment, solar costs have fallen by roughly 20%, a pattern that has held for five decades. This is Wright’s Law, the observation that the price of a technology drops a consistent amount each time output doubles, and solar follows it with unusual fidelity. The asymmetry is what makes the shift feel inevitable: manufactured technologies grow cheaper the more we build, while commodities grow more expensive the deeper we dig for them. The obvious objection is that the curve must eventually meet a wall of scarce inputs. It doesn’t: 95% of the market runs on silicon, an abundant material with no input expected to constrain deployment, and high recycling rates already point toward a circular supply chain.
The forecasters keep getting it wrong
The pattern is so persistent that the professional forecasters cannot keep pace with it. A 2025 academic analysis of the IEA’s World Energy Outlook found that the agency has, across every one of its scenarios, severely underestimated the growth of solar and wind while overestimating fossil fuels and nuclear, and the energy analyst Auke Hoekstra has tracked the same gap in successive forecasts back to 2002. Researchers at LUT University put the scale of it bluntly: the peak annual installation rate in the IEA’s most ambitious 2022 net-zero scenario, not projected to arrive until 2040, had been all but matched in the real world by 2024. Overtaken repeatedly in the same direction, the gap is no longer noise but signal. The clearest proof is in the places least primed for it. Solar in Hungary rose from 4% of electricity generation in 2019 to 25% in 2024, with Poland, a coal heartland, raising solar generation by nearly 2,000% over those same five years.
Storage is not a separate bet
Cheap, intermittent generation does not merely permit storage; it creates the demand for it. The IEA states the entailment plainly: growing shares of variable renewables increase the utility of storage. The scale is already exponential, with installed grid storage climbing from about 1 GW in 2013 to more than 85 GW a decade later. What turns technical possibility into commercial certainty is price: the benchmark cost of a four-hour battery project fell 27% year-on-year to $78/MWh in 2025, a record low. The forward view is steeper still, with installed storage projected to rise ninefold by 2030 under stated policies and, in Britain, contracted battery capacity set to reach 16 GW by 2027, up from 3.9 GW today.
One supply chain, two markets
Storage and electric vehicles are not two stories but one, sharing a single supply chain on a single learning curve. Lithium-ion manufacturing capacity more than tripled in four years to 2.5 TWh in 2023, a build-out driven by surging electric vehicle sales, and the same cells feed stationary storage. Each source of demand drives the other’s scale, and scale drives down cost for both.
Electric cars, the second curve
This is why electric vehicles belong in any argument about inevitability, even though they sit on the demand side. They are the second proof that this is a pattern rather than a one-off. Norway closed 2025 with 96% of new car sales fully electric, an S-curve run to completion. The global trajectory traces the same shape as detailed by the IEA: nearly one in five new cars electric in 2023, rising to roughly one in two by 2030 and two-thirds by 2050 in the central scenario. Two independent curves, one in generation and one in transport, are far harder to dismiss than either alone, because they imply a shared underlying law.
The honest limits
Honesty about the limits is what earns the word inevitable. Seasonality is not yet solved: a four-hour battery moves midday solar into the evening, not summer sun into winter. And a quarter to a third of energy demand, in aviation, shipping, steel and cement, still resists direct electrification. The defensible claim is therefore narrower than total energy. It is that electricity and light transport are on an irreversible course, and that the harder sectors are problems of scaling a technology already winning on price, not walls across the road. The direction is plain even in the incumbent’s own figures, with oil and gas demand set to peak before 2030. The next chokepoint will close, and prices will spike again; what is changing is that the alternative is no longer a promise but a price, and the price keeps falling. The blue dawn is not a forecast to be debated. It is already a third of the way done, and gathering pace.
