# Energy Transition / Fossils to Electrons

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Category: Future
Slides: 13
Updated: 2026-05-17T20:55:59.076Z
Tags: catalog, future, energy, transition

## Summary

The defining infrastructure project of the century. Cheap solar, cheap batteries, an electrified everything — and a deployment problem the size of every grid on earth. Key sections include: ENERGY TRANSITION Fossils to electrons; Eighty percent of human energy is still combustion.; The economics already won.; The strategy is one word: electrons.; When the wind stops, what then?; Stationary storage went from niche to commodity.; The 100-hour problem is still open.; Useful, but not for everything.; The dispatchable clean baseload.; We will need to suck CO₂ out of the sky..

## Slide Outline

1. ENERGY TRANSITION Fossils to electrons
2. Eighty percent of human energy is still combustion.
3. The economics already won.
4. The strategy is one word: electrons.
5. When the wind stops, what then?
6. Stationary storage went from niche to commodity.
7. The 100-hour problem is still open.
8. Useful, but not for everything.
9. The dispatchable clean baseload.
10. We will need to suck CO₂ out of the sky.
11. A new map of energy power.
12. of the technology to decarbonize is commercially available today.
13. The fastest infrastructure rebuild in history. Not fast enough.

## Slide Transcript

### Slide 1: ENERGY TRANSITION

 Fossils to electrons

- Catalog · Energy · 2026 brief
- The defining infrastructure project of the century. Cheap solar, cheap batteries, an electrified everything — and a deployment problem the size of every grid on earth.
- Scope13 slides · global
- FrameTech ready, deployment lagging
- Horizon2026 — 2050
- MoodRealistic optimism

### Slide 2: Eighty percent of human energy is still combustion.

- 02 · The setup
- Despite a decade of headlines, fossil fuels — coal, oil, gas — supply roughly four-fifths of primary energy globally. The transition is real, but it is a multi-decade rebuild of every grid, every car fleet, every furnace.
- Global primary energy mix · 2024 est.
- Fossil share of primary energy
- ~79%
- Coal, oil, and gas. Down from 87% in 2000 — a real but glacial shift.
- Annual clean energy investment
- $2.0T
- Now nearly 2× annual fossil capex. The capital flywheel has flipped.
- Years of buildout ahead
- 25–30
- Even on aggressive deployment, full primary-energy decarbonization is a multi-decade project.

### Slide 3: The economics already won.

- 03 · The cost curves
- Solar modules, wind turbines, lithium-ion cells: each on a learning curve that has crushed cost faster than almost any forecast. The transition's hardest argument has dissolved.
- Cost decline · 2014 = 100
- Utility solar LCOE since 2010
- −90%
- Now the cheapest source of bulk electricity ever priced.
- Onshore wind LCOE since 2010
- −70%
- Bigger turbines, bigger rotors, capacity factors above 50% in best sites.
- Lithium-ion pack price since 2010
- −90%
- From ~$1,200/kWh to under $115. The single biggest enabler of EVs and grid storage.

### Slide 4: The strategy is one word: electrons.

- 04 · Electrify everything
- Replace every combustion engine with a motor, every furnace with a heat pump, every flame with resistive or inductive heat. Electrification roughly triples energy efficiency for the same end-use service.
- Vehicles
- EV drivetrain efficiency vs. internal combustion. Tank-to-wheel — and global EV share is now ~22% of new car sales.
- Heat (homes)
- 3–4×
- Heat pump COP vs. resistive heating. Even cold-climate models now outperform gas furnaces.
- Industry
- ~30%
- Of industrial heat is below 200°C — already in reach of electric or heat pump tech today.
- Trucks & rail
- 2030s
- Battery-electric and catenary trucks crossing TCO breakeven this decade.
- The flow

### Slide 5: When the wind stops, what then?

- 05 · The grid problem
- The grid was built for steady, dispatchable thermal plants. Solar peaks at noon. Wind is intermittent. Demand peaks at evening. Bridging this gap — flexibility — is the central engineering challenge.
- Daily generation vs. demand · illustrative
- Five flexibility levers
- Storage — batteries, pumped hydro, thermal
- Transmission — long-haul HVDC connecting weather zones
- Demand response — shift loads (EV charging, industrial)
- Dispatchable clean — nuclear, hydro, geothermal
- Overbuild & curtail — cheaper than storage at the margin
- Permitting time · US transmission line
- 10+ yrs
- The grid problem is half engineering, half paperwork. Lines, not panels, are the bottleneck.

### Slide 6: Stationary storage went from niche to commodity.

- 06 · Battery storage
- Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry — cheap, safe, abundant — is now the workhorse of grid-scale storage. Deployment is doubling every two years.
- Global grid battery capacity · 2024
- ~180 GW
- From under 5 GW in 2018. The fastest-scaling new asset class on the grid.
- LFP cell pack price · 2024
- $95/kWh
- Below the $100 threshold once considered the EV inflection. Storage TCO scales accordingly.
- Typical duration deployed today
- 2 — 4 hr
- Right-sized for the evening solar gap. The economics work; longer duration is a different game.
- 2030 forecast capacity
- ~1.5 TW
- 8× growth in 6 years. China is ~50% of installs; Texas is the single largest market by state.
- SOURCES · BNEF, IEA, EMBER · LFP = LITHIUM IRON PHOSPHATE

### Slide 7: The 100-hour problem is still open.

- 07 · Long-duration storage
- Lithium handles hours. But weeks of low wind, or seasonal mismatches, demand storage that lithium can't economically supply. A research frontier with several promising chemistries — none yet at commodity scale.
- Iron-air
- Form Energy's bet. Uses oxidation/reduction of iron — abundant, cheap, low energy density. Theoretical cost ~$20/kWh, 100-hour discharge. pilot
- 100hr
- Pumped hydro
- Old, proven, ~95% of world storage today. Geographically limited, slow to permit. Closed-loop projects expanding. mature
- ~80%
- Round-trip efficiency
- Thermal & flow
- Molten salts, hot rocks, vanadium flow batteries. Modular, scalable, but immature economics. The wild-card category. research
- 10+ yrs
- To scale

### Slide 8: Useful, but not for everything.

- 08 · Hydrogen
- Hydrogen is the Swiss Army knife people are tempted to use as a hammer. The honest case is narrow: industry, aviation, shipping, fertilizer. Not cars. Not home heat.
- Where hydrogen wins
- Steel — DRI process replacing coking coal
- Ammonia / fertilizer — already 70 Mt H₂/yr, today fossil-derived
- Refineries — substituting grey H₂ with green
- Long-haul aviation — via synthetic fuels (e-kerosene)
- Shipping — ammonia or methanol bunker fuel
- Where hydrogen loses
- Passenger cars — 3× round-trip energy loss vs. battery EV
- Home heating — heat pumps win on cost and efficiency
- Grid balancing < 12 hr — batteries cheaper
- Light trucks — battery TCO crossing over
- Green H₂ cost target · 2030
- $2/kg
- Today's cost (electrolysis)
- $5–7
- Global H₂ demand · 2024
- ~95 Mt
- Of which is "green"
- <1%

### Slide 9: The dispatchable clean baseload.

- 09 · Nuclear
- Existing reactors run, life-extended, deliver carbon-free electrons 90%+ of the time. New construction is hard. SMRs are the bet. Fusion is the long shot.
- Existing fleet
- ~440 reactors globally provide ~9% of electricity. Average capacity factor: 92%. License extensions to 80 years are now routine in the US.
- 2,500
- TWh/yr · clean baseload
- SMRs (next 10 yrs)
- Small modular reactors: 50–300 MW, factory-built, designed for rapid siting near data centers and industrial loads. NuScale, X-Energy, Kairos, BWX leading.
- ~2030
- First commercial deployments
- Fusion (long term)
- NIF achieved net energy gain (Q>1) in 2022. Commonwealth, Helion, TAE racing toward demonstration plants. Realistic commercial timeline: 2040s+.
- 2040+
- Commercial earliest case

### Slide 10: We will need to suck CO₂ out of the sky.

- 10 · Carbon removal
- Even on a near-perfect transition, residual emissions from agriculture, aviation and cement remain. Net-zero pathways assume gigatonnes per year of CO₂ removal by mid-century. Today: thousands of tonnes. The gap is six orders of magnitude.
- Direct air capture cost · today
- $600/t
- Down from $1,200 a decade ago. Climeworks, Heirloom, 1PointFive scaling first plants.
- Required by 2050 (IPCC pathways)
- 5–10 Gt
- Per year. Today's removal capacity: ~0.01 Mt. A factor-of-1,000,000 industry to build.
- Target cost
- $100/t
- The threshold for affordable, scaled removal. Plausible by 2035 with learning curves.
- The CDR portfolio
- DAC — direct air capture, geologic storage. Pure but energy hungry.
- BECCS — bioenergy + CCS. Land use trade-offs.
- Enhanced weathering — crushed silicate rock on fields.
- Ocean alkalinity — speculative, gigatonne potential.
- Forests / soils — cheap, real, but reversible.
- Mineralization — CO₂ + basalt → stable carbonates (Iceland's CarbFix).

### Slide 11: A new map of energy power.

- 11 · Geopolitics
- Oil reshaped the 20th century. Lithium, copper, nickel, rare earths and silicon-wafer fabs will reshape the 21st. Every transition mineral has a single dominant processor — usually China.
- Refined lithium
- ~65%
- China's share of global processing. Australia digs it; China refines it.
- Cobalt mining
- ~70%
- DRC origin. ~80% of refining → China.
- Polysilicon for PV
- ~80%
- Of world production in China, mostly Xinjiang.
- Rare earth refining
- ~85%
- Magnets for wind turbines and EV motors. Effectively a single-source supply chain.
- Friend-shoring response
- The US Inflation Reduction Act, EU Critical Raw Materials Act, Japan's KSM strategy, Australia's "Future Made" all push the same playbook: subsidize domestic processing, partner with allies, decouple selectively from China.
- The honest constraint
- Decoupling is expensive and slow. Mines take 10–15 years from discovery to production. Refining requires capital, environmental permitting, and a workforce that has migrated overseas. The mineral race may define the 2030s.

### Slide 12: of the technology to decarbonize is commercially available today.

- 12 · Honest assessment
- 99%
- The hard part isn't invention. It's permitting, transmission, supply chains, workforce, and political will. The transition is now an execution problem.
- What's working
- Solar + storage on commodity learning curves
- EVs hitting price parity in major markets
- $2T/yr clean energy capex flywheel
- China driving manufacturing scale
- What's stuck
- Transmission permitting (10+ yr cycles)
- Industrial heat > 500°C
- Aviation, heavy shipping fuels
- Long-duration storage economics
- Carbon removal at scale
- What it needs
- Permitting reform — fast
- Long-distance HVDC networks
- Mineral supply diversification
- Skilled trades workforce 5×
- Carbon prices that bite

### Slide 13: The fastest infrastructure rebuild in history. Not fast enough.

- 13 · Closing & references
- We have the tools. The cost curves cooperate. The remaining work is political, logistical, and physical — every grid, every fleet, every furnace, in 25 years.
- ▶ YouTube · search
- Energy Transition — Explained
- Big-picture explainers on the global shift from combustion to electrification.
- youtube.com/results?search_query=energy+transition+explained
- ▶ YouTube · search
- Lithium Battery Grid Storage
- Deep dives on stationary storage, LFP chemistry, and grid-scale deployment.
- youtube.com/results?search_query=lithium+battery+grid+storage
- FurtherIEA · World Energy Outlook
- DataEmber, BNEF, IRENA
- BooksSmil · Griffith · Helm
- Slides13 of 13 · end


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