Written Research
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Roadmap to net zero: 2025 and beyond?
This 19-page report explores the world’s progress towards net zero, amidst the harsh economic reality of 2025+. Which decarbonization technologies are still progressing, which are scaling back, and why? What if the current trajectory is ultimately seen to be enough?
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Energy storage: to infinity and beyond?
Lithium ion batteries are now so deeply entrenched that we doubt any new electrochemistry can supplant them. This 23-page report asks where are the opportunities now in batteries? Could any futuristic batteries with quasi-infinite capacity, such as quantum batteries, power inter-seasonal storage or long-distance aviation?
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AI data centers: bit count?
How many data centers will there be? How big will the biggest AI data centers be? Where should they be located? And do recent announcements connote upside or downside risks? This 15-page report forecasts the build-out of AI data centers, using bottom-up data, statistical distributions and economic modeling.
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Industrial heat: can heat pumps compete?
Could industrial heat pumps accelerate, especially due to excess renewables, thereby stoking load growth, and displacing natural gas? This 14-page report finds the economics are more challenging than expected. Heat pumps fare best in specific contexts. Load growth mainly hinges on AI.
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Power markets: classical economics?
This 15-page report outlines how wholesale power markets work, which helps to understand four emerging controversies. Wholesale power prices are governed by classic microeconomics: day-ahead markets clear at the intersection of downward sloping demand curves and upward sloping supply curves.
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Autonomous-ready sensors: the LiDAR debate?
The sensors used for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and increasingly for autonomous vehicles, offer useful lessons for AI, robotics and mining. Hence this 17-page report revisits the debate between LiDAR vs cameras, radar and ultrasound. Hardware must compete on cost and performance. But who benefits from deflation?
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Can solar provide round-the-clock power for data-centers?
This 15-page report models the costs of powering AI data centers, and other round-the-clock loads, using only solar and batteries, plus a “penalty” of 100-600 c/kWh for unmet demand. In some locations, solar+batteries will out-compete gas in the future? But an ocean of excess power gets thrown out?
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AI training energy: breaking the power laws?
An argument for runaway energy use by AI is that performance follows a power law: incrementally better performance requires exponentially more model parameters, training data and compute. But this 13-page note finds evidence for greater efficiency gains, and considers whether AI scaling laws are set to slow down, meaning less energy consumption?
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What if the US had never ramped shale?
If the US had not ramped 12Mbpd of shale oil and 90bcfd of shale gas, over the past 10-15 years, we estimate US CPI would have run +0.7% pa higher, due to expansionist monetary policy, and other environmental policies. Hence this 13-page report explores whether the end of shale deflation now points to higher US…
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Rare Earth magnets: building attraction?
Will Rare Earth magnets shift from being commoditized and mostly Chinese-made, to a higher-value market, sustaining a moat for leading Western companies? Especially as demand inflects in the AI era? Our answers in this 14-page report are based on a site visit to Europe’s first large-scale Rare Earth magnet plant, and subsequent economic modeling.
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