Energy exec tells IT Brew how tech is driving innovation and usage

Ask David Wilson, CEO of energy modeling company Energy Exemplar, what he thinks about the state of his industry, and you’ll get a measured answer.

“All these different organizations around the world and governments are looking into the future,” Wilson said.

Australian by birth, Wilson stays abreast of trends in the energy markets, especially how they relate to the tech industry. As one of the largest economic sectors on the planet, projected to account for 17% of global GDP by 2028, tech is driving energy consumption and straining services, and companies are rushing to keep up.

IT Brew had a chance to sit down with Wilson and ask him about his views on where energy is at today, and where it’s going.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The last time we talked, we were discussing energy connectivity challenges in the US. As somebody from Australia, somebody who’s worked in a lot of different countries around the world, is that a challenge globally?

The nice bit about all the energy challenges that we face today is that there’s no major technological gap. We’ve solved everything that we need to do, the current transition, to connect all these different types of pieces. It’s how do you do it optimally.

We know how to build power lines. We’ve got some amazing new technologies coming online with large-scale batteries and other forms of storage. All those tools are in place, then how do you apply them?

What would you say are the main challenges?

Then there’s the legacy infrastructure. What’s already been built? Are there transmission lines in place and other things? Solving the puzzle of, how can we use those geographic features, those legacy infrastructure pieces to solve the future problem—let’s say, in this case, putting data centers in or other large loads, or scaling up a city. How do you do that at the lowest cost, while meeting all the other criteria that that everyone wants, such as reliability and emissions?

These challenges are unique in some ways to each country or region within those countries, but they’re also very similar. It’s the same physics all around the world. The electricity works the same way. So, it’s taking those tools and applying them to those local environments.

Looking ahead, where do you see the industry heading?

I’m a wild optimist at heart, and so I’m very excited about the technical innovations that have happened over the last years and decades, and how they will apply going forward. The ability for very large scale renewables, potentially modern nuclear as well—though we’re yet to see really any scale deployment of that—storage technologies, electrification of industry. And usages, such as your domestic applications, everything from your cooking through to your transportation and your vehicle.

All of these things are in place now and just getting cheaper and better. I think that there’ll be a pretty dramatic shift to electrification in most applications around the world, just based on the economics and better experience that that presents.

Is this already happening or is that still a hypothetical?

We’re already seeing that play out, but you’ll see that accelerate even further in the coming years. We’ve got some examples around the world of people running very high renewable grids. Australia is certainly part of that, parts of Europe, and they’ve shown that this can be done very successfully. People have developed all the systems and tooling to do that.

We got the report out today for why the Spanish blackout happened, and it was actually a failure of the thermal or the old generating assets that caused that, not all the renewables. So, we’ve found ways to navigate into this future. There’s still work to be done, but I’m very excited that we can solve all of those challenges.