Less developed markets are pointing the way – Pakistan has cut most domestic power consumption over to solar and batteries in about two years. This is analogous to the growth of cell phones in developing countries that never ran copper phone lines to every house.

In 2025, headlines scream that datacenters are pushing prices up and consuming all the power. I think datacenters are exposing the rot in a moribund power generation and delivery industry which has proven unable to meet demand in recent years. But it is a moot point.

"Datacenters will be net power sources for their communities"

I pre-register my belief here that electricity governance markets will bifurcate. On one side, we’ll see those that embrace a steady cadence of pricing reforms, allowing effective competition between many private operators of generation, storage and transmission assets, pushing prices down. On the other side, increasing prices for consumers will drive increasingly desperate governance measures that allow far less competitive storage operators to extract vast rents from the difference between real world power conditions and the conditions approximated by some legal framework.

Essentially a giant hair dryer blows hot air into a large pile of sand during the summer months with abundant cheap power. In winter, the fan switches direction, extracting heat. The storage medium can be made almost any size and is self-insulating. You can think of it as artificial geothermal power storage – in fact it has several strengths that geothermal lacks, like the ability to cheaply build and renew stored power.