The Future is Electric: Trends and Implications for the World

Clean electricity technologies are becoming cheaper, more efficient and faster to deploy, fundamentally reshaping the economics of energy. Electrification can eliminate a large share of emissions but cannot eliminate them all.

Hard-to-electrify sectors, regional differences, market and financing constraints and geopolitics will continue to determine the pace and distribution of change. Adair Turner, Co-Chair of the Energy Transitions Commission, considers three central questions in this paper:

1. Why clean electrification is accelerating and will continue to do so, driven by falling technology costs, growing availability and fundamental efficiency advantages.
2. What are the implications for the global energy transition, exploring how far electrification alone can get the world on warming targets and why deliberate action in hard-to-electrify sectors is still required, unfolding differently across regions.
3. What this transformation means for fossil fuel demand, as its historical comparative advantage shift in a changing global economy.