Entering the age of Bettrification (2025–2035)
(This essay is the conceptual backbone of the static reference page: The Disruption Decade (2025–2035) — the timeline framework for what I describe here as the new age of energy.)
The old energy world is not fading politely. It is being forced to choose: bettrify — or die.
This isn’t a trend cycle.
It’s a phase change.
A shift from fuel‑driven scarcity to electricity‑driven optimisation.
It is also what I describe elsewhere as Bettrification — the point where electrification, batteries, software, and intelligence combine to make systems not just cleaner, but structurally better.
And by 2025, it became clear that we had officially entered the new age of Bettrification.
What this image means for Bettrification
This visual captures the core misunderstanding holding the energy debate back.
Too many critics still judge EVs and batteries as if it were 2010 — early chemistries, short lifespans, immature supply chains. Bettrification isn’t about first‑generation tech. It’s what happens after cost curves collapse and durability explodes.
Batteries stop being consumables
Modern LFP batteries are designed for 1–2 million kilometres. That flips the economics:
• The battery outlives the vehicle • Lifecycle costs fall dramatically • Battery‑replacement fear disappears
In bettrified systems, longevity replaces disposability.
Efficiency becomes structural
ICE wastes most energy as heat. Electric drivetrains convert roughly 70–90% into motion.
That isn’t an upgrade — it’s a physics‑level rewrite. When efficiency compounds like this, optimisation replaces extraction and costs fall permanently.
Maintenance collapses, software takes over
Fewer moving parts means fewer failures, less servicing, less downtime. Once electrified, systems become software‑defined, upgradeable, and automatable.
Range stops being the right question
ICE is optimised around scarce refuelling. EVs are optimised around daily convenience because energy is everywhere.
Bettrification doesn’t try to mimic the old system — it makes its constraints irrelevant.
This scales beyond cars
The same dynamics apply to grids, storage, trucks, ships, industry, robotics, and automation.
Judging Bettrification using early EVs is like judging today’s internet by dial‑up.
When I first started using the term The Disruption Decade back in 2019, I was describing the period 2020–2030. At the time, the direction of travel looked unusually aligned:
- EV adoption was accelerating faster than most models predicted
- The lithium bull run was underway
- Battery costs were falling rapidly
- Solar and wind were already the cheapest new-build energy in most markets
- Tesla was scaling at a pace legacy automakers could not match
- Policy tailwinds — culminating in the Biden-era IRA — aligned capital, industry, and intent
There was friction, of course. But there was also something rare: broad global consensus on the direction of the transition.
My 2020 framework assumed resistance.
There was friction, of course. But there was also something rare: broad global consensus on the direction of the transition. My 2020 framework assumed resistance. What is worth clarifying here is scope. This essay is not about EV projections in isolation. EV adoption is a downstream indicator — a visible output of a broader systems shift driven by the scaling of solar, wind, and battery storage under collapsing cost curves, manufacturing scale (especially in China), and software-driven optimisation of infrastructure. Vehicles sit on top of that stack. When generation becomes cheap, storage abundant, and grids flexible, electrified transport follows almost mechanically.
The revisions discussed later reflect timing effects caused by political and incumbent resistance — not a change in the underlying system logic. What it did not fully anticipate was the scale of coordinated, geopolitical pushback — not just against EVs, but against the entire stack: solar, wind, storage, grids, and electrification itself. The slowdown wasn’t technological. It was political and incumbent-driven, aimed at buying time against collapsing cost curves.
What changed
The early 2020s didn’t just bring acceleration — they brought backlash.
Russia, a major petro-state, launched a prolonged war against Ukraine. That war injected extreme volatility into global energy markets and became a stress test for the entire transition narrative. It wasn’t only a military conflict; it was an economic and informational one, with fossil-aligned interests actively undermining renewables and clean energy. More recently, that resistance was echoed politically. Trump’s return in 2024 provided cover for governments and regions that were not ready — or not willing — to confront their domestic incumbents:
- Fossil fuel industries dependent on rent extraction
- Legacy automakers structurally a decade behind industry leaders
- Supply chains locked into internal combustion
- Political systems reliant on fossil-linked capital
This wasn’t a reversal of the transition.
It was a delay mechanism. A wounded system buying time.
In hindsight, that coordinated pushback likely extended incumbent lifelines by three to five years. Not enough to change the destination — but enough to shift the calendar.
Reframing the timeline
With distance, the structure becomes clearer.
2015–2025: The Foundational Decade
This was the decade that quietly set the conditions for a bettrified world — one where energy, mobility, and industry begin to behave more like software than fuel pipelines.
This was the decade where the physical, economic, and technological groundwork was laid:
- Solar, wind, batteries, and EVs crossed irreversible cost thresholds
- Battery manufacturing scaled into the terawatt-hour era
- Software entered physical infrastructure
- Supply chains consolidated around electrification
- Adoption crossed early-majority inflection points, even as politics lagged
This was not the takeover phase.
It was the build-out phase.
2025–2035: The Disruption Decade
This is the decade where outcomes stop being theoretical.
(For the underlying data, charts, and empirical breakdown behind this inflection, see my earlier analysis: Disruption Decimating the Old World.)
By 2025 — despite political headwinds and coordinated resistance — the evidence became impossible to ignore:
- EV sales accelerated sharply
- Grid-scale and residential battery storage deployment surged
- AI deployment exploded across industry and households
- Robotics moved from labs into real-world industrial and domestic use
- Solar and wind continued to set deployment records
In concrete terms, global EV sales crossed into the high‑teens share of new vehicle sales, while battery energy storage capacity was adding in a single year what once took most of a decade to build — trends documented in detail in Disruption Decimating the Old World. These are not pilot signals — they are system‑level shifts.
The revised transition is best understood visually. The chart below shows how early resistance flattens adoption in the 2020s, only to steepen the curve dramatically once economic and system thresholds are crossed. What looks like delay is, in reality, compression — with ICE collapsing rapidly once BEVs and storage reach escape velocity.
The debate phase ended.
The system crossed the point where denial no longer slowed reality.
The Texas test
Few places illustrate this better than Texas.
Texas is the live-fire test of the energy transition. The chart below shows ERCOT repeatedly setting new maximum solar generation records — not in spite of politics, but because economics makes the outcome unavoidable. When solar becomes the cheapest marginal power source, ideology loses relevance.
A conservative stronghold.
A centre of fossil fuel power.
A political home of renewable and EV scepticism.
And yet:
- Solar deployment continues to break records
- Battery storage is scaling at grid-relevant levels
- Renewables increasingly set wholesale power prices
- Economics overwhelms ideology
Texas is where FUD goes to die — not because minds changed, but because math won.
The deeper pattern
This is the mechanical heart of Bettrification — where physical systems cross the threshold from scarcity management to optimisation and abundance.
Resistance did not stop the transition.
It compressed it.
Delays forced technologies to mature further, costs to fall more steeply, and systems to converge more tightly. What was once expected to unfold sequentially is now stacking into a single moment:
Cost curves × Adoption curves × Intelligence curves
All crossing at once.
The tiger was already mortally wounded.
The thrashing only delayed when people noticed.
The battery demand shock
On the upside, the acceleration in renewables — led overwhelmingly by solar — is now driving an unprecedented global rollout of battery energy storage.
Record-setting solar and wind deployment is flooding grids with low-cost daytime generation. To avoid curtailment and retain that energy, systems everywhere are racing to add storage. What began as grid support has become a structural requirement.
This shift is now visible across two independent but tightly coupled signals.
First: solar deployment has entered a scale regime that forces storage to follow. China alone installed more than twice as much solar capacity in the first half of 2025 as the rest of the world combined. This is not incremental growth — it is system-level build-out. Once generation expands this quickly, batteries are no longer optional. They are the mechanism that converts excess energy into usable infrastructure.
Third: battery manufacturing has crossed the endurance threshold. In 2025, global lithium-ion battery production surpassed 2.3 TWh. This is not oversupply — it is the system preloading what comes next. Roughly 65% of cells were LFP, around one-fifth were ESS, and 86% were manufactured in China. That combination confirms the transition has moved from adoption to endurance.
LFP dominance is not about excitement. It is about fundamentals: cost, safety, cycle life, and scalability. LFP uses less lithium per kWh, but unlocks vastly more total kWh demand. Lower intensity multiplied by exploding volume still drives sustained lithium demand — just structurally rather than explosively.
Claims of “overproduction” in LFP and ESS cells miss the point. Overbuild is how transitions enforce themselves: prices fall, demand ignites, and infrastructure locks in. This is the same pattern seen in solar modules, wind turbines, and EV battery packs.
Battery demand is no longer being driven primarily by EVs alone, but by the need to stabilise and monetise renewable energy at scale. That demand is now placing sustained strain on our ability to mine, refine, and process critical materials — led by lithium, supported by sodium-ion, recycling, and chemistry diversification.
This is the moat of our energy future. 2.3 TWh of batteries in 2025 isn’t oversupply — it’s the system preloading the future. LFP dominance, surging BESS deployment, and China’s manufacturing gravity confirm the shift from adoption to endurance is already locked in.
This is the hidden accelerant of the Disruption Decade: storage moving from optional to essential.
Revising the adoption curve
After five years, it also became clear that some of my early adoption targets needed revisiting.
Back in 2020, I projected that by 2030:
- New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) would reach ~95% of global new car sales
- Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) would account for ~90%
Those projections assumed a largely unimpeded transition. What followed instead was a coordinated period of delay — geopolitical conflict, political cover for incumbents, and deliberate slowing by regions unwilling to confront fossil fuel and legacy automotive interests.
The destination never changed. The path did.
Re-running the adoption models using current trend data and observed resistance produces a more conservative — but more robust — outcome:
The projections above are not rhetorical. They are derived from a blended disruption model that combines observed sales data, adoption inflection points, and declining ICE elasticity under rising EV and storage penetration. The table below shows the underlying dataset and forward projection used to generate the adoption curves.
The chart shows the outcome. The table shows the mechanics.
- By 2030: ~60% NEV penetration, ~46% BEV penetration of new car sales
- By 2035: ~97% NEV penetration, ~88% BEV penetration
By the mid‑2030s, internal combustion does not vanish overnight — but it effectively stops mattering. Residual ICE sales become statistical noise, confined to edge cases rather than mainstream markets.
What disruption means by 2035
By 2035, “disruption” is no longer abstract.
For households, it means lower and more stable cost-of-living pressure as energy, transport, and heating decouple from fuel volatility. For businesses, it means cheaper power, higher resilience, and software-driven efficiency replacing fragile, linear supply chains. For nations, it means energy security shifts from extraction and geopolitics to infrastructure, storage, and intelligence.
Disruption, in practice, means fewer economic shocks — and faster compounding gains.
Why the term still fits
The Disruption Decade is the when.
Bettrification is the how.
The Disruption Decade didn’t disappear.
It sharpened.
2025–2035 is the period where the transition stops being debated and starts being lived — quietly, economically, and irreversibly.
Energy becomes abundant.
Infrastructure becomes software.
Batteries become foundational.
And civilisation begins to rewire itself — not by ideology, but by inevitability. This is the dividing line between the old world and the bettrified one.
For legacy systems, the choice is no longer philosophical.
Delay is not neutrality. It is a choice — and the system prices it in.
It is bettrify — or die.
A note on the obvious objections
Grid stability, critical minerals, and infrastructure scale are often raised as reasons this transition must slow.
They are real constraints — but they are engineering problems, not stopping points.
Storage, demand response, and software coordination solve variability. Battery chemistries diversify material inputs. Recycling, substitution, and scale reduce pressure faster than demand grows. These constraints do not block the curve — they shape it.
That is why the transition bends, but does not break.
