I came across an astonishing long read / report on Friday that I’ve linked below, and if you have any interest in the energy transition, or moving on from fossil fuels, I really recommend you spend the the time to read through it and play around with visualisation in each section.
Here’s the link:
The Electrotech Revolution – Harnessing the Sun – How batteries turn variable solar into firm power
A few key takeaways
- the falls in the cost of solar first, and now batteries are incredibly disruptive to a fossil fuel default assumed for building new energy around the world, but particularly in developing nations close to the equator than Europe.
- these technologies don’t need to be 100% reliable to be an improvement on what the grids in those countries are like, and they after often likely to be cheaper
- the costs are astonishing: Four in five people can get 80%-uptime power for under $100/MWh; for half of humanity it is under $80.
The entire web-first report artefact is extremely impressive – this is subject matter I’m somewhat familiar with, mainly thanks for to following work by Ember, and but also work by Tom Brown carrying out similar analysis with open source modelling software. But even so, as I scrolled through it, and played around with each visualisation, I kept thinking “Wow”, as I got a better intuition of what each viz was intended to convey.
I’m now really curious about how much it cost to create – I work in a non-profit where fairly recently, we launched this report – the State of the Fossil-Free Internet 2026.
That report represented tens of thousands of euros of time across a team of designers, developers, writers, project managers, and we have plans to create a new one next year, so understanding how things like this are made, now how well they work as tools for advocacy is something very front of mind for me.
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