The Thermodynamics of Prosperity
The International Energy Agency's (IEA) Electricity 2026 report, released in February 2026, recognises of a profound shift in human civilization, the arrival of the “Age of Electricity”. Forecasting a 3.6% annual growth in global demand through 2030 and an emissions plateau approaching 13.9 gigatons, the Agency outlines a future constrained by the inertia of legacy infrastructure and linear policy extrapolation. While valuable as a baseline the IEA's outlook misses the binding constraint of the energy transition. The bottleneck is not generation capacity, but the management of entropy within the cyber-physical network of the grid.
Electricity is the highest quality vector for energy delivery we have yet devised; it is pure work potential, capable of moving information at the speed of light or driving motors with near-perfect efficiency. However, the infrastructure we use to deliver this energy, the alternating current (AC) grid, was designed for a different era. It emerged in a world of centralized, high-inertia generation of coal, hydro, and nuclear, as well as predictable, linear loads. They provided not just electricity but stability. Their massive spinning turbines functioned as anchors, smoothing out fluctuations and keeping the system in equilibrium. Consumers behaved predictably as well. Homes used simple resistive loads. Factories used motors that drew current in smooth, sinusoidal patterns. The grid’s job was to deliver bulk power; the physics of stability took care of itself.
Technology is ever improving, and we now have inverter-based generation of solar and wind on the supply side, and non-linear, chaotic loads, like EV chargers, heat pumps, and AI data centres on the demand side. These devices have a power demand looks more like a series of impulses than a steady flow. That injects disorder into the grid, manifesting as voltage instability, harmonic distortion, and phase imbalance.
This build-up of entropy is the true limiting factor for the global energy transition. It is the invisible force driving higher costs in parts of Europe, the UK, and beyond. It is limiting how much clean energy we can use, even as we install more of it. And it is quietly reshaping the economics of the energy transition. We contend that addressing this issue provides an opportunity to optimise the grid, releasing untapped potential that would otherwise be lost as waste.
The IEA projects global electricity demand will grow 3.6 percent annually through 2030. These forecasts are methodical, disciplined, and built on historical regression. They are also too low. They assume continuity, but we are entering a decade defined by overlapping S‑curves: EV adoption; heat pump deployment; industrial electrification; and AI.
Artificial intelligence is a new kind of load: computational, thermodynamic, and open‑ended. Training advanced models requires gigawatt‑hours of energy. Running them at scale requires even more. As AI becomes woven into every sector, demand for compute doesn’t track GDP; it tracks utility, which has no upper bound.
We face a similar dynamic in transport. An EV is not merely a vehicle with a different fuel. It is a grid‑connected node that can charge, discharge, interact, and disrupt. Treating it as just another household appliance underestimates both the challenge and the opportunity.
These forces are not linear. They are exponential. And the gap between the IEA’s careful arithmetic and the physics of real demand is widening.
According to the IEA, global power‑sector emissions will plateau through 2030 despite record growth in renewables. That should be alarming. With clean energy now the cheapest source of new power in most regions, emissions ought to be falling rapidly.
The reason for this is curtailment. We routinely generate more clean power than the grid can absorb without destabilising. When solar or wind output surges, operators must cut back production to protect system stability. At the same time, they keep fossil turbines idling at minimum load, not for the electricity they provide, but for the inertia. We are burning gas for stability, not energy. That is the clearest possible signal that the architecture of the grid is now the limiting factor in decarbonisation.
Across the world, renewable developers are facing the same obstacle: the queue for grid connection. More than 2,500 GW of solar, wind, and storage projects are waiting for permission to connect, a substantial amount of green energy.
The conventional diagnosis is that we need dramatically more transmission, which we do. But the deeper issue is that most queued projects are rejected not because the wires would overload, but because the stability margins of the system would be violated, a control constraint.
The IEA recommends over $600 billion a year in new grid investment. But if that investment goes primarily into copper and steel, we will still face the same fundamental limit: the inability of the grid to maintain order as variable, inverter‑based generation dominates.
At ENODA, we approach the grid not merely as economists or civil engineers, but as thermodynamicists. The fundamental problem of the modern grid is entropy, the tendency of the system toward disorder. If entropy is the gradual unravelling of order, syntropy is the deliberate creation of it.
In the legacy grid, syntropy was a by‑product. Massive rotating machines delivered inertia simply by existing. But as the system transitions to lighter, inverter‑based resources, the grid loses this built‑in stabilising force.
Our solution is not to slow the transition, but to change how we manage the physics of the grid.
Syntropy means using advanced power electronics to shape voltage and current in real time; cancel harmonic noise at the source; balance phases dynamically across networks; isolate local disturbances before they propagate; and create a stable, predictable waveform even under highly variable conditions. It also means acknowledging that not all kilowatt‑hours are equal. A clean, well‑formed, low‑entropy kilowatt‑hour has more system value than a noisy, unstable one. Markets today do not price this difference. A syntropic framework would. ENODA technologies provide this.
The Enoda PRIME® Exchanger is a first-of-kind, power flow control device. Using advanced Silicon Carbide (SiC) power electronics stacks dynamically modulates the electromagnetic flux of the system, the Prime Exchanger sits at network nodes (substations) and actively shapes the AC signal in real time, with dynamic voltage regulation; harmonic cancellation; and phase balancing.
Enoda ENSEMBLE™ is the decentralized software platform that coordinates the fleet of Prime Exchangers. Ensemble uses Nodal Asset Management to locate intelligence at the edge. Each Prime Exchanger operates autonomously to maintain local stability in a reflex action while communicating with its neighbours to optimize regional flow, a cognitive action. This architecture operates like swarm intelligence that is resilient to the failure of any single node.
These tools don’t replace transmission; they amplify it. They don’t compete with renewables; they unlock them. They don’t slow the transition; they allow it to accelerate safely. They don’t wait for stability to happen, they manufacture it.
The IEA’s outlook is not wrong; it is simply using the lens of the past to interpret the future. It sees a world defined by constraints and tries to optimise within them. But if we manage the physics differently, the constraints themselves change. Demand does not need to be capped, and clean energy does not need to be curtailed.
We can create a system that reduces entropy, accelerates electrification, lowers costs, and expands human capability. A grid that supports not just the Age of Electricity, but a new phase of civilisation built on Sustainable Prosperity for Every One.
