# Megatrends One Year Later – #6: Electrification Revolution – What I Predicted, and What’s Actually Happening
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“The global power grid is being rewired. You can either argue about the old outlets or help connect the new ones.” - Futurist Jim Carroll One year ago, in July 2025, I published Megatrend #6: Electrification Revolution as part of my 30 Megatrends series. Here's a bit of what I wrote: The massive shift from carbon combustion to electric power is transforming transportation, infrastructure, and energy supply chains. This is not a gradual transition but rather a fundamental rewiring of how power flows through our economy. Some folks have made it a culture war but that will have little impact in the long run – or will cost certain regions dearly as the future marches on. And the funny thing is, despite that, the rest of the world marches on. The global shift to an electrified energy system is no longer a question of if but how fast – the transition has surpassed a critical tipping point. It’s being driven by three powerful, self-reinforcing forces: superior economics, accelerating technological innovation, and entrenched market momentum. So is it still going forward? Oh ya! — but the headline of the last year isn’t really about cars. Batteries are the story underneath the story. The global average pack price fell to $108/kWh in 2025 and is on pace for roughly $105/kWh in 2026 — and in China, where most of this is actually being built, packs are already down to $84/kWh, comfortably past the $100 tipping point I flagged in the original post. Solar and wind had their biggest year yet: roughly 511 gigawatts of new solar and close to 160 gigawatts of new wind went in worldwide in 2025 — and for the first time in a century, renewables overtook coal in the global electricity mix. That’s not a future-tense sentence anymore. The grid is catching up too. AI-driven grid management is now its own fast-growing category — the AI-powered smart grid market is tracking toward $7.5 billion in 2026, growing at roughly 14% a year, as utilities lean on it to juggle EVs, data centers, and distributed renewables all landing on the same wires at once. EVs are still part of it, and still growing — 8.2 million on US roads by April 2026, 23.3 million in global passenger sales, EV charging investment up 21% year over year. But EVs are one piece of a $2.2 trillion clean-energy investment year, not the whole story. Batteries, solar, wind, and the AI now running the grid did as much of the rewiring as the cars did. Verdict: Underway, and broader than the EV headlines suggest. The culture war noise was always about cars. The actual rewiring — batteries, renewables, and the AI running the grid underneath it — never slowed down.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/08/megatrends-one-year-later-6-electrification-revolution/