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Electrification Revolution

More of the economy is being reorganized around electricity, storage, renewable generation and software-managed power.

megatrendsmegatrend-06
Publish Date2026-09-18
Updated Date2026-09-18
Horizonnow
TimeframeNow through 2035
Confidencehigh

The bottom line

More of the economy is being reorganized around electricity, storage, renewable generation and software-managed power.

Why it matters

Electrification reaches far beyond electric vehicles. It changes buildings, industrial systems, grid investment, storage economics and the relationship between energy supply and demand.

From the foresight archive

Jim Carroll first published this as Megatrend #6 on 2025-07-02. He revisited it one year later on 2026-08-12, using the retrospective to test the original call against what had happened since.

In that retrospective, Carroll’s own shorthand assessment was: 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.

This page treats the 2025 article as the original foresight call and the 2026 article as the first evidence checkpoint. Later signals and scorecards can be attached without rewriting the historical record.

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Related ideas, trends and context

IndustriesEnergy & UtilitiesThe grid is shifting from centralized delivery toward a distributed, storage-rich, software-defined energy platform.IndustriesAutomotive & TransportationThe vehicle is becoming a computer, a battery, a data platform and an increasingly autonomous node inside a larger mobility system.IndustriesConstruction & Real EstateThe built environment is becoming intelligent: designed in software, built with increasing automation and operated as a connected, energy-aware system.IndustriesManufacturing & IndustrialManufacturing is becoming an intelligent, adaptive system in which software, robotics, materials science and data increasingly define physical production.DomainsEnergy & EnvironmentElectrification, storage, renewables, grid reinvention and technologies reshaping the economics of energy and climate response.DomainsCities & InfrastructureSmart infrastructure, urban reinvention, resilient systems and the technology reshaping how places are built and operated.TrendsEnergy DecentralizationPower systems are shifting from a model dominated by centralized generation toward networks of distributed generation, storage and flexible demand.TrendsClimate-Positive TechnologiesA growing set of technologies aims not only to reduce environmental impact but to remove, store or avoid emissions through new infrastructure and materials.TrendsUrban ReimaginationCities are evolving from collections of separate infrastructure systems toward more connected, adaptive and data-informed urban ecosystems.