We are on the cusp of the most radical transformation in energy in a century. Exponentially improving technologies such as solar, electric vehicles, and autonomous (self-driving) cars are turning the industrial-era energy industry on its head and making the gasoline vehicle obsolete. Tony Seba’s talk will focus on market disruptions caused by exponential technology improvement, business model innovation, and disruptive product design enabled by this convergence.

 

Just like the PC, the Internet, and the cell phone disrupted the old paradigm of information, computing and telecommunications, a new architecture of energy is transforming the century-old centralized, resource-based, utility-centric energy model with a distributed, mobile, knowledge-based, and user-centric model. Homes, buildings, and cars are no longer passive energy consumers but adaptive learning systems with the ability to generate, store, manage, and transmit power intelligently. The implications are far-reaching: conventional energy sources (oil, nuclear, natural gas, and coal), the internal combustion engine, and the utility business models are on the cusp of disruption. Assets will be stranded and conventional energy portfolios will meltdown. This is not in the future. This is now.