Major changes from 2024-2030: Brace for the impending upheaval, according to disruption guru Tony Seba

VISIONARY: Author, clean energy visionary and Stanford University researcher Tony Seba, is known for his bold predictions. He has extensively researched mega trends unfolding in key economic and production sectors, especially food, energy, transportation, information and materials. Here, he unveils his audacious predictions and shares profound insights into disruptive forces shaping the future. Know his key insights for the next six years, from 2024 to 2030, and beyond:

CHEAPEST ELECTRICITY: Solar power will be cheapest source of electricity. In the last 10 years, solar has come down in price by over 90 per cent, and it’s nowhere near the bottom. Seba argues that solar, wind and batteries (SWB), together, will take over from fossil fuel and hydrogen as the future of power generation, and off-grid living. Seba has been proven right numerous times. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported solar is now the cheapest electricity in history.

FOOD, TRANSPORT, ENERGY WILL BE 10X CHEAPER: Food, energy and transport systems will be far cheaper–up to 10 times cheaper–than the industrial age technologies, said Seba, who is the author of several books, including “Rethinking Transportation, Rethinking Humanity, Solar Trillions, Clean Disruption”. He cites how “precision fermentation” (PF) uses genetically modified microorganisms to produce specific proteins, milk, enzymes, food and other compounds. This is accomplished by inserting genes into the microorganisms' DNA to allow them to produce the desired product.

SECOND DOMESTICATION OF PLANTS AND ANIMALS: “We’re making with micro-organisms what we used to make with macro-organisms,” he said, citing how PF is much more efficient than livestock and animals in producing everything food, with 100 times efficiency in terms of land use. “These five foundational sectors – food, energy, transport, information technology and materials–are all being disrupted at the same time. It’s happening in the 2020s and 30s. And it’s happening for economic reasons,” said Seba. “The world system is going to enter a big dis-equilibrium.”

RIPPLE EFFECTS: “Phase change disruptions are happening in every sector everywhere all at once. And when that happens, the ripple effects to humanity are gonna be huge,” he said at an event marking the 20th TAQA 20th anniversary in October. In all his books, Seba outlines how the disruption of energy and transportation started in Silicon Valley will make oil, nuclear, gas, coal, electric utilities and conventional cars obsolete by 2030.

BATTERY REVOLUTION: In the first two weeks of December 2023, there were more battery deals announced than any other two weeks in human history. Lithium, a key battery component, is more abundant than initially thought, though restrictive mining policies in many jurisdictions have created artificial “supply chain” chokepoints. The Wright battery is claimed to be a high-energy density pack with up to 1,000 Wh/kg power.

RAW MATERIAL TRENDS: The IEA stated that in 2022, battery raw materials–lithium, cobalt, and copper, reached their highest levels in the 2010s, impacting the cost of new battery packs. This rise, persisting for three years, is attributed to supply chain disruptions. Now, governments are investing in local raw material supply chains, and lithium-ion battery manufacturers are forming alliances with mining companies. Expectations point towards a decline in battery prices in the second half of the current decade compared to 2022.

NEW RAW MATERIAL SOURCES: A new lithium source, known as Thacker Pass volcano-sedimentary deposit, is the largest known sedimentary lithium resource in the US. The site is estimated to contain recoverable lithium worth $3.9 billion, producing enough batteries for about a million electric vehicles a year. But in the US, mining permits are notoriously difficult to get. Nickel, another key battery material, is the 24th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, the 5th most-abundant element regarding weight after iron, oxygen, magnesium and silicon. A lithium mine in Chile.

CLEAN ENERGY DOMINANCE: Seba predicts a rapid transition to clean energy sources, particularly solar and wind, leading to the dominance of renewable energy in the global power market. IEA 2023 data bears this out.

SOLAR PANEL PRICES WILL CONTINUE TO DROP: Led by new solar power, the world added renewable energy at a remarkable pace in 2023 – more than 440 GW of renewable energy added 2023. That is more than the entire installed power capacity of Germany and Spain combined. The Dezhou Dingzhuang floating solar farm in China.

"GRID PARITY" FOR SOLAR: He suggests that solar energy will reach “grid parity”– i.e. the cost of solar power will be equal to or less than the cost of electricity from the grid. In 2023, additional renewable capacity in China dwarfed those of all other countries, between 180GW and 230 GW, depending on how out of the projects turn out. One of the growing portfolio of solar farms built by Manila-based ACEN.r farm

BREAKNECK SPEED: Meanwhile, China, Europe, and the US, each set solar installation records for a single year, according to Abu Dhabi-based Irena. Solar is now the cheapest form of electricity in a majority of countries. Solar panel prices fell a whopping 40 per cent to 50 per cent in Europe between December 2022 and November 2023 and are now at record loss. A view of the Mohammed Bin Rashid Solar Park outside Dubai, the largest single-site solar park in the world, with a planned capacity of 5GW by 2030

TRANSPORT DISRUPTION: EV costs are going downward, as sales go up, climbing 43.66 per cent globally in 2023. China’s BYD ramped up EV production significantly last year—at 3.02 million vehicles (of which 1.4 million were hybrids)—nearly doubling the previous year’s number. Tesla produced 1.84 million vehicles from its “gigafactories”, with the Model Y dominating vehicle sales globally.

GROWTH STORY: On January 5, 2024 the US Department of Energy (DoE) reported that Americans purchased 1.4 million EVs in 2023, up 50% from 2022. It’s the first time that many EVs have ever been sold in the country in a single year. Plug-in vehicles are all the rage in China, too, hitting 37 per cent of the market in September alone. The EV market expanded from $384.65 billion in 2022 to $500.48 billion in 2023, and will rocket to $1,579.10 billion in 2030, according to Fortune Business Insights.

RISE OF AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES: Along with the drop in EV costs and rise in sales–US EV sales surged by 50 per cent in Q3 2023, exceeding 300,000. Chinese EV makers like BYD, Nio, Li Motors, Geely, XPeng and others are meanwhile expanding globally. Demand remains high, with price-cut EVs leading the market, says Scott Case, CEO of Recurrent, a data company. A fleet of self-driving buses in China made by King Long.

DECLINE IN CAR OWNERSHIP: Given the numbers, Seba sees the rise of autonomous vehicles and a shift towards shared mobility services, leading to a decline in individual car ownership. He also predicts that electric vehicles will achieve cost parity with traditional internal combustion engine vehicles, making EVs more affordable and accelerating their adoption.

COST PARITY OF EVs: A recent study by the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) forecasts that EVs may achieve cost parity with petroll vehicles in Europe by 2024 and in the US by 2026. The report, affirming Seba’s prediction, anticipates that declining battery prices will make EVs as economical as petrol cars in all markets by 2030. Kia's EV5 on display during the compmany's EV Day in South Korea.

MOORE’S LAW, WRIGHT’S LAW: Prices of green tech are still relatively high. With robotics, AI, and enhanced computing power, manufacturing costs are expected to go down per unit. Computing power has experienced an exponential rise, a trend in place since the early 1960s. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors on a microchip was doubling approximately every two years. But Wright's Law, also known as the “learning curve effect”, is also at work. Named after Theodore Paul Wright, an aircraft engineer, Wright's Law suggests that for every cumulative doubling of units produced, costs tend to decrease at a constant rate.

TECH ADOPTION FOLLOWS S-CURVE PATTERN: Seba has unleashed some very bullish, even scary, things to think about. His predictions—based on historical data seen in the adoption of cars (from horse carriages), VHS, microwave, phone, computers, the internet over the last 100 or so years — have any general proven to be remarkably correct. In 2014, Seba predicted that battery cost would drop from $500 per kilowatt hour (kWh) to $100 per kWh by 2023, and it proved incredibly accurate. In fact, ramped up battery manufacturing worldwide brought the cost of batteries down to just below US$100. Seba then predicts new ICE car sales will drop by 75 per cent by 2030. We already see that happening. The acceleration of EV adoption is rocketing up in an “S-curve” pattern, and is about to go really fast.

BOLD PREDICTIONS: Due to his bold predictions, Tony Seba, a renowned author with several books under his belt, has been tagged as a hopeless romantic or too much of an optimist. However, economics and current tech trends suggest his predictions are not way off the mark. Since 2010, Seba’s predictions so far haven’t changed, and the convergence of new developments that form a "virtuous cycle" of changes have proven him right.