# The Trends Scorecard: Energy & Utilities – What I Predicted, and What Actually Happened
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"The future of energy was never about a bigger smokestack or more coal. It was always about the panel on your roof and the battery in your garage." — Futurist Jim Carroll This is part of my Trends Scorecard series, where I dig back through everything I have said about the future of an industry over the years and grade my own predictions honestly against the reality we are living in right now. This time the industry is Energy & Utilities. I have been keynoting energy conferences since before "smart grid" was a buzzword, so there is a lot to score. Here's the scorecard. The setup: I have been calling the death of the old grid for almost two decades Energy is the industry I keep coming back to, because it is the industry where the future arrives in slow motion and then all at once. For years I stood on stages in front of utility CEOs and oil executives and told them the same uncomfortable thing: the centralized, carbon-based, one-way model you have run for a hundred years is ending, and the future belongs to a distributed, intelligent, two-way grid that you do not yet control. Some of them rolled their eyes. A lot of them are living it now. Back in 2015, in an interview for GE Reports, I framed the whole risk in one image that the music industry already knew too well. The quickly shifting energy landscape means utilities and other industry players must be careful not to be "MP3'd" like the music industry. Could the energy generation and distribution industry find itself in the same position as music companies did in the past -- stuck defending an older and entrenched business model, rather than embracing new ideas, concepts and methodologies? And it's not like I'm a stranger to this industry. I had Claude dig through my blog and pull together a list of the energy and utility groups I've spoken to over the years. It's quite the roster! Electric Utilities & Power Generation — Exelon Nuclear, The Energy Authority, Indiana Municipal Power Authority Electric Cooperatives & Regional — NRECA (2 events), Rocky Mountain Electrical League Oil, Gas & Petrochemicals — Noble Energy, CF Industries Energy Tech, Metering & Smart Grid — Itron, Siemens Energy, Schneider Electric, GE Lighting, Lennox, SAP Utilities Energy Services, Data & Summits — DTN Energy, Accenture Global Energy Summit, SURGE Accelerator Engineering, Mining & Adjacent — Black & Veatch (2 events), National Mining Association, American Residential Services, CCI Wireless, FM Global Major Utilities (roster reference) — OPG, PG&E, Hydro One, TransCanada, EPRI And those are only the ones I've blogged about — there have been plenty more. So how did those calls hold up? Let's take a look. Prediction #1 — "Smart appliances will schedule themselves around the grid" (2012) — Hit Way back in 2012, keynoting Accenture's International Utilities and Energy Conference and Enercom in Toronto, I argued that the boring stuff in your house was about to get an IQ, and that it would start talking to the grid on its own. Here is what I told that room. These are appliances which are linked to the intelligence in the smart-grid, and which will automatically schedule themselves to run when rates are lowest, according to a defined set of consumer preferences. The grade: Hit. Time-of-use rates, smart thermostats, and grid-aware appliances are now mainstream. Your Nest and ecobee thermostats pre-cool your home before peak pricing, EV chargers wait for cheap overnight rates, and the Matter standard exists specifically so devices and home energy management systems can coordinate this automatically. The "iPhone-weaned" generation I described did exactly what I said it would when it started buying houses. Prediction #2 — "Utilities risk getting MP3'd" (2015) — Hit This was the prediction that made a few utility CEOs squirm. I kept asking them one question: could you be MP3'd? Could you end up like the record labels, defending an old business model while the world moved on? I said it plainly in that GE Reports interview. That's why I have challenged utility CEOs to ask the question, "Could they be MP3'd?" Could the energy generation and distribution industry find itself in the same position as music companies did in the past -- stuck defending an older and entrenched business model, rather than embracing new ideas, concepts and methodologies. The grade: Hit. The whole language of the industry has shifted to "Energy-as-a-Service," prosumers, and the "un-utility." Meanwhile rooftop solar, home batteries, and community microgrids have peeled customers and kilowatt-hours away from incumbents exactly the way streaming peeled listeners away from labels. The "personal energy infrastructure management" era I described in that same interview is the lived reality of millions of homes now. Prediction #3 — "The dumb one-way grid becomes a two-way intelligent grid" (2016) — Hit In an article I wrote for GE Reports in early 2016, right after the Paris climate accord, I made the architectural call. The grid we inherited was dumb and one-directional, and it was about to get a brain and a reverse gear. Most of the grid today is pretty dumb -- it's built for one-way transmission, from big energy production facilities out to homes and industries. But there is a tremendous amount of investment in creating a two-way, intelligent and interactive grid. This changes everything, allowing us to more easily accommodate and utilize the energy production occurring in a more distributed world. The grade: Hit. Smart meters, IoT sensors, and AI-driven analytics are now standard in grid modernization. Power and data flow in both directions, distributed energy resources feed back into the system, and "load balancing in real time" is a job the grid does today. I also said in that piece that Moore's Law was coming to renewables, and that the cost of solar would behave like the cost of computing. It did. Prediction #4 — "Vehicle-to-grid storage and electrified roads" (2019) — Hit (mostly) At the end of 2019, in my "20 Trends into 2030" piece, I wrote a retrospective from the imagined vantage point of the future and described what the energy industry would look like once the transformation played out. This is the paragraph that maps almost the entire modern energy thesis in one breath. We've moved from a world of centralized energy production based on big facilities generating from carbon and nuclear, to a massively distributed architecture based on the input of millions of small, local renewable energy resources. We've gone from essentially dumb, one-way grids to highly intelligent two-way smart grids that feature accelerated load balancing. The architecture of the grid itself has changed - for example, most cars and trucks have now become a part of the energy grid through vehicle-to-grid battery connectivity, storing energy during off peak hours and feeding it back into the grid later on. Most utilities have also found themselves operating in the highway and road-building industry, as electrified roads and charging infrastructure appeared everywhere to support a world that involves a majority of electric-battery vehicles. The grade: Hit on the big structure, with one piece still maturing. The distributed renewable architecture, the intelligent two-way grid, and the renewable cost collapse are all here. Vehicle-to-grid is real and graduating from pilot to product, the 2024 Sunrun, BGE and Ford program in Baltimore was America's first residential V2G distributed power plant using the F-150 Lightning. Charging infrastructure did appear "everywhere." The one piece running behind my language is "electrified roads," dynamic in-road charging, which exists only as scattered demonstration projects rather than the everyday infrastructure my retrospective implied. Right thesis, one detail still ahead of the curve. Prediction #5 — "Peak Carbon: solar costs collapse and oil's reign ends" (2022) — Hit In my "23 Trends for 2023" series, trend #13 was Peak Carbon, and I did not hedge. I said the economic momentum had already shifted permanently, driven by the relentless collapse in the cost of solar and the acceleration of battery science. The cost of solar energy generation continues to collapse at a staggering pace. Most new cars and trucks will be electric within ten years. Batteries are becoming the heart of our energy grid, vehicles and so much more. Most new investments in energy - 90%+ - will go into renewables, batteries, and the grid instead of oil and carbon. The grade: Hit on direction and economics. In 2023, 81% of all new renewable capacity added worldwide generated electricity more cheaply than the cheapest fossil fuel option, solar is now the cheapest source of new power in most markets, and the overwhelming majority of new energy investment is flowing to renewables, batteries, and the grid, exactly as I said. I will hold the line on the larger claim, the economic case for carbon as the primary energy input for the rest of the century is finished. (I will flag the timing on one sub-claim below.) Prediction #6 — "Prosumers, home energy ecosystems, and second-life batteries" (2023) — Hit In my 2023 piece "The BIG Future: Connected Energy," I laid out the granular version: homes and businesses become little grids of their own, sell their surplus back, and even old EV batteries get a second life. I even gave it a slogan. And a key component is that any excess energy within this grid will be fed back out into the large utility grid to provide it with additional power, transitioning it from a one-way to a two-way systems. This grid connectivity also provides the opportunity for local community microgrids - you've got a grid, I've got a grid - let's connect our grids. The grade: Hit. The "prosumer" is now the industry's own word for the active participant who both produces and consumes energy. Home energy management systems do exactly what I described, managing rooftop solar, storage, and sale-back. And the second-life battery industry I pointed to is real, companies like Evyon in Norway have deployed nearly 1,000 second-life battery modules across projects in six countries, turning retired EV batteries into grid storage. The community microgrid in Feldheim, Germany even built its own independent grid and now sells 99% of its wind power back to the national one. "You've got a grid, I've got a grid" turned out to be a business plan. The one I missed Inside that 2022 Peak Carbon post, I made a specific, dateable claim: "Most new cars and trucks will be electric within ten years." That clock runs to 2032, so it is not over yet, but I will be honest about the trajectory: I was too optimistic on timing. EV adoption has been genuinely strong, but it is happening at very different speeds in different countries.Policy whiplash and the "culture wars" have slowed things down considerably in several large markets, and "most new vehicles" globally by 2032 now looks like a stretch rather than a layup. The direction is dead right, the destination is inevitable, but the pace is messier and more political than my clean ten-year line implied. As I have said elsewhere, the road to inevitability is inevitably messy. I would rather own that than pretend the timeline was perfect. What the scorecard tells us about what's next Here is the method behind all of this, because it is the real lesson. I did not predict any single product. I predicted the structure, centralized to distributed, dumb to intelligent, one-way to two-way, carbon to electrons, consumer to prosumer, and then I let the cost curves and the science do the rest. That is why these calls aged well. The places I got the timing wrong, like electrified roads and the EV tipping point, were never wrong about whether, only about when. In energy, the trend always wins in the end, because there will always be sunshine, and science keeps showing up to work. So where does energy go from here? That's a separate conversation, and a longer one than a scorecard can hold. I've mapped it out sector by sector in my current series, The Way Forward — the trends, the barriers, and the playbook for acting on them. If these receipts convinced you the method works, that's where you'll find where it's pointing next. Next up in the Trends Scorecard series: Automotive & Transportation, where I get to grade myself on self-driving cars, the death of the internal combustion engine, and a few calls that are going to be a lot more fun to defend. Stay tuned.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/06/the-trends-scorecard-energy-utilities-what-i-predicted-and-what-actually-happened/