Hi there, it's Azeem. I'm bringing you a conversation with a good friend of mine, Michael Liebraich.

It was originally recorded for his podcast cleaning up, but it's too good not to share.

Now, I've known Michael nearly 20 years. I met him just after he had founded a market research firm called New Energy Finance.

He was amongst the first

analysing the emerging clean energy sector and I was lucky enough to join as an investor. Very

lucky because a few years later, Bloomberg acquired the business and Bloomberg NEF became an essential

part of my syllabus in understanding what was happening with the energy transition.

Now Michael has since left that business and he works as an investor, a podcaster and an advisor on

that topic he knows so very, very well, the energy transition. He and I had a fantastic conversation

about what happens when energy becomes a technology,

whether the exponential trends we see in solar and batteries are real,

and how the energy system might meet the demands of artificial intelligence.

Finally, Michael challenged me quite a lot about whether I'm just too optimistic about all of this.

Enjoy the discussion.

Hello, I'm Michael Liebricht and this is Cleaning Up.

In 1961, had you wanted to build one gigaflop of compute capacity,

that would have cost you the equivalent in today's money of

$190 billion. In 2023, that figure was 1.5 cents. Solar power, in 1975, would have cost $130 per

watt to buy a solar panel. By this year, the number is 31 cents.

And batteries are headed the same way. In 1991, to get one kilowatt hour of lithium-ion batteries

would have cost $7,500. Today, you can buy that for less than $50.

My guest today has spent the last decade of his career examining how these sorts of trends work

...