Starting the New Year with new energy

Posted: December 08, 2025

As the year draws to a close, we’re reflecting on how industry has evolved over the past year and what we expect the next year has in store for Our Industrial Life. 

The big story this year was how the global energy transition reached a tipping point. In just the first five months of this year, China installed 198GW of solar capacity and 46GW of wind—about the same as the total energy capacity of France or South Korea. In November, China also announced plans to use renewable energy to produce green hydrogen, ammonia, methanol, and biofuel—extending its clean energy efforts beyond the power sector.

As industries throughout the world continue taking advantage of such growth in renewable energy sources, we expect to see a lot more industrial electrification, as well as a turn to alternative energy sources, like hydrogen and biofuels.

We’ll be staying on top of how these changes are affecting industries across the board, as well as how power and energy companies are adapting their strategies to generate, store and distribute power so that the grid—and the industries it supports—continues humming along. 

Energy generation: renewables, nuclear and alternative fuels 

This year’s tipping point for renewable energy hasn’t been so much a replacement of oil and gas, but a decisive “yes, and” approach. While Britain’s last coal-fired plant closed just over a year ago, fossil fuels still make up about 80% of global energy production. But both conventional onshore oil fields and the offshore drilling that makes up an increasing share of new production is facing declining yields.   

Nuclear power (across the globe, from the UK to China), geothermal and other renewables are becoming an increasingly large part of the global energy mix. In 2024, renewables accounted for 80% of the growth in global electricity generation.  

In many cases, new energy sources are taking advantage of skills, equipment and expertise from the oil and gas industries. Horizontal drilling techniques originally developed for fracking are opening up new opportunities for geothermal power. 

Drilling companies are increasingly prospecting not just for oil and gas, but for what promise to be large, underground repositories of hydrogen. This past year, we’ve seen hydrogen used as a fuel for everything from beer and whisky production, to shipping, ground transport and iron production. 

Power distribution: undergrounding, reconductoring and data 

This switch to new fuels requires figuring out how best to distribute them. Oil and gas pipelines are being retrofitted to transport hydrogen. And natural gas distributors are using their skills to install heat-pump-based district heating and cooling systems.

The main distribution challenge falls to power utilities as industry continues to electrify. We expect the next year to see a continued buildout and updating of the physical grid infrastructure, with projects like undergrounding and reconductoring. 

But much of the power grid update will be a buildout of data infrastructure. Distributed energy resources (DERs) are going to become even more common, requiring distributors to grow and manage virtual power plants (VPPs), plan for climate and weather disruptions and step up cyber protection. Power markets will have to become more sophisticated and gather more data to balance bigger loads and bigger risks.

In the next year, we’ll be checking in with experts, such as former Chief Executive of National Grid, Steve Holliday, and AVEVA Power & Utilities Principal, Ann Moore, to get their takes on how industry can tackle these challenges head-on. 

Energy storage: batteries, geothermal and thermal energy

A big part of solving power distribution challenges will be new innovations in energy storage. Beyond new battery chemistries, this year we’ve seen the development of nuclear batteries, the transformation of retired oil wells into geothermal batteries and cold underground thermal energy storage. 

In the coming year, we’ll be looking to see what other new energy storage innovations are on the horizon and what their pros and cons are for different applications. 

Supply chains: re-shoring, transformers and uranium 

Energy won’t be the only thing industry needs to figure out how to distribute in the next year. Geopolitical and economic changes promise to continue the reshuffling of supply chains that has become a near constant over the past five years. This year, we saw how even power and energy producers are at the mercy of a power transformer bottleneck and the precarious uranium supply chain. 

This past year saw over half of manufacturers in the U.S. and Europe—making everything from pharmaceuticals to cars and computing—report that they were investing in re-shoring or near-shoring their operations. As supply chains continue to reconfigure, it will be absolutely essential for every industry to have a big-picture view of how it fits into our connected industrial ecosystem. 

Our Industrial Life will be on the case in the coming year, bringing you stories on how different industries are interacting with each other, evolving and staying on top of the exciting new challenges that come with an infusion of new energy.