# Grayhat Blog: The world in 2036 > Everyone’s betting on AI. I think cheap, abundant energy is the real force reshaping the next decade… and I’ve got the receipts. ## Page - [The world in 2036](https://grayhat-company-blog.grayhatstudio.workers.dev/blog/the-world-in-2036) - [Root LLM Context](https://grayhat-company-blog.grayhatstudio.workers.dev/blog/llms.txt) - [Post Full LLM Context](https://grayhat-company-blog.grayhatstudio.workers.dev/blog/the-world-in-2036/llms-full.txt) - [Post API](https://grayhat-company-blog.grayhatstudio.workers.dev/blog/api/public/v1/posts/the-world-in-2036) - [Sitemap](https://grayhat-company-blog.grayhatstudio.workers.dev/blog/sitemap.xml) ## Post Metadata - Slug: `the-world-in-2036` - Published: 2026-07-31T13:09:21.000+05:00 - Updated: 2026-07-31T13:13:07.000+05:00 - Reading time: 13 min - Tags: AI, Infrastructure, Tech, Renewable Energy, Vertical Farming, Electric Vehicles, Climate Change, Futuristic - Authors: Ramiz Sami - Visibility: public ## Post Content **This piece was originally published on Medium, and is posted here as a collaboration.Let me ask you a question. When you imagine the world in 2036, what do you see? Do you see AI assistants doing most of our work? Robots walking around our homes? Many of you probably believe that the biggest transformation of the next decade will come from artificial intelligence. You could be right, or it could just be a bubble. But frankly, I believe the real transformation will come from something else. It is not AI. It is the thing that will power AI, along with almost everything else around us. **Electricity.** More specifically, cheap, clean and abundant electricity. Many might not realise this, but we are now entering a new age of energy abundance like never before. It happened because humanity got serious, properly serious, about harnessing renewable resources. And in doing that, we slowly made renewables cheaper than they have ever been. And cheaper than all other forms of power generation in human history. *Rooftop Solar Panels in Dera Ismail Khan, a small city in PakistanNow, I can already hear you. “But Ramiz, the sun doesn’t always shine. The wind doesn’t always blow. Renewables are unreliable.” You’re right. But wind and sun usually complement each other. So the solution is to use both of them. And there’s a second wave coming right behind this one: Battery Storage. Costs are already falling. And they’re about to fall a lot further, thanks to better battery tech and newer, cheaper, more reliable chemistries such as sodium-ion batteries. Right now, anywhere on this planet, generating power is the cheapest via solar and/or wind. This chart shows how the prices of solar and wind generation have dropped since 2009. *Power generation cost as mentioned in the latest report by LazardThe data says solar prices bottomed out in 2021 and have crept up slightly since. But let me tell you what actually happened to me. I installed my first solar panels in July 2024. I added more in April 2025. In that window of less than a year, the price of solar panels in Pakistan dropped by a third. A third. In under a year. And it doesn’t stop there. In that same stretch, the price of a 5kWh Lithium Iron Phosphate battery halved. Halved. I believe over the next five to ten years, we’re going to watch batteries do exactly what solar panels did through the 2010s: collapse in price, and this time it won’t just be households and grids pulling that price down. It’ll be EVs too. I’m telling you all of this through the lens of solar because I live in Pakistan, where the sun doesn’t just shine; it punishes you. And electricity prices here are brutal. So switching to solar wasn’t some green awakening for me. It was survival math. I’m one of millions of Pakistanis who made the same call, for the same two reasons: cost, and a Grid you simply cannot rely on. Don’t believe me? Pull up Google Maps. Pick almost any settlement in this country, zoom in, and you’ll find rooftops dark with solar panels, street after street. The first satellite image in this story shows a comparatively small Pakistani city. Dera Ismail Khan is only the country’s **46th-largest city**, according to the population estimates from 2023. Yet even there, in a town most of the world has never heard about and probably never will, the rooftops are already changing. Now let me bring you closer. Down to street level. This is my own city, Islamabad, on an ordinary afternoon. I took these photos myself, fifteen minutes drive from my home. Trees, houses, mountains in the haze, and if you look past the branches, rooftop after rooftop quietly glinting with panels. This isn’t a special neighbourhood. This is just what Islamabad looks like now. *A typical Islamabad neighborhood showing the proliferation of rooftop solar*A typical house in islamabad with solar panels covering its rooftop## What changed in my own house Let me take you inside. Two years ago, I put panels on my roof. Here’s what happened next. One air conditioner became three. The water heater that used to burn gas got an electric heating filament to complement it. The gas stoves were joined by three electric ones. And I want to be honest with you; I didn’t do any of this because I woke up one day worried about the planet. I do care about clean tech, don’t get me wrong. But the real reason was simpler than that; it made economic sense to stop burning things to do the same jobs electricity could now do for free. **And then the war in Iran started.** I could no longer rely entirely on oil for my daily commute, and having abundant and effectively free electricity during the daytime made an electric vehicle a sensible choice. Now, before you imagine me driving around Islamabad in some expensive luxury EV, let me show you what I actually bought. *me and my wife, riding double, on a small electric scooter which happens to be our first electric vehicleIt’s just a scooter, because that’s what I could afford with the cash I had at the time. But since I got it, I keep reaching for it, more and more. It’s swallowed up commutes I used to do in my car, or on my petrol bike. Today, it handles more than half of my commuting. And once the upfront cost of the scooter and the panels is paid off? It costs nothing to run. Nothing. ## The war, and the country that quietly filled the gap Now here’s where it gets much bigger than my rooftop. When Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz, the world braced for an oil shock. And it came. But someone else softened the blow, and almost nobody is talking about it. China, the world’s largest oil importer, was able to cut its oil imports by 5 million barrels a day. Let that sink in. That’s more than 40% of China’s total oil imports. That’s bigger than the entire oil release from the US national reserves and all of its allies, combined. How? A lot of people will tell you China simply drained its own strategic reserves. Maybe. The data isn’t public. But I believe most of it came from somewhere else entirely: from the enormous strides China has made in renewable energy. In May 2025, China reached a point where it was installing approximately three gigawatts of solar panels every day. Every day. That is roughly equivalent to bringing a large coal-fired power plant online every eight hours. Pause there for a second. Imagine constructing a large power station. Now imagine doing the equivalent of that three times every day for a whole month, but using solar panels. China still has “excess capacity” in all of clean energy tech from solar panels and wind turbines to batteries and electric vehicles. And that’s where our solar panels also came from. Since the Iran war started, more countries, especially in Southeast Asia, have started importing Chinese clean energy tech, and China’s exports of solar panels have more than doubled. After all, it is “excess capacity” until the world needs it. ## Energy security in appliance form The best part about solar panels and wind turbines is that they are essentially appliances. You purchase them. You install them. And they begin producing energy. Once installed, another country cannot stop your sunlight. It cannot block your wind. It cannot cut off your electricity by choking a narrow waterway such as the Strait of Hormuz or Bab al-Mandeb. This is one reason Pakistan was able to manage the oil and gas crisis better than much of the rest of South Asia. And it was partially made possible by a brilliant piece of government policy: Net Metering. A policy that let people sell their extra daytime electricity back to the grid, and then buy it back at night using those very same credits, thus removing the need to install expensive batteries and lowering the barrier to entry. But here’s the twist nobody saw coming. The policy worked too well. One of my friends, who works in the government sector on power policy in Pakistan, put it to me: **In the last three years, allowing more net metering connections was like force-feeding somebody who was already full.Now the grid can’t handle it. There’s too much excess electricity flooding in during the day, so much that entire power plants have to shut down, and then the exact opposite problem shows up at night — too much stress on a grid that suddenly has nothing left to give. So the policy has shifted to something called “Net Billing”. Fancy term. Simple idea: drastically cut the rate at which solar consumers sell electricity back, and raise the rate at which they buy it. The real goal underneath all of that? Push people to install batteries, so they stop dumping so much power into the grid during the day, and stop starving it at night. ## Where do we stand So who’s actually moving? Right now, there is no economy on this planet increasing its carbon emissions, except one: The United States. And you can thank American climate politics for that. Even the oil-rich Gulf Arab countries aren’t doing it anymore. The rest of the world, especially Asia… 60% of humanity, let that number sit with you… is racing toward this new age of energy abundance. Europe is making real progress too, but it’s tangled in trade disputes with China, and its red tape is keeping it from its true potential. Strip that away, and Europe would be the fastest-adapting region on Earth. Meanwhile, across Pakistan and most of Asia, putting solar on your roof has become as casual as buying a fridge. You call a guy. He shows up the next day to survey your roof. The day after that, he’s bolting panels to your roof. ## Where this leaves us, you and me? So here’s what I’ve learned from living all of this, first-hand, on my own roof, in my own city. If I’ve learned anything, it’s this: once energy stops being scarce, everything that was ever bottlenecked by it starts to move. That’s where I believe we’re going to see the next decade’s biggest job growth, and job loss. Let me walk you through where. ### Desalination, on a massive scale: Right now, only the rich Gulf Arab states really lean on desalination, because it’s expensive, and they don’t have another way to get the water that they need. And why is it expensive? One word: electricity. Take that cost away, or shrink it, and within a few decades, coastal regions all over the world are going to start depending on desalination. Not because it’s trendy, but because it will simply make economic sense. ### Electric Vehicles: This one’s a no-brainer. I don’t even need to convince you. We’re going to see a lot more EVs on the road, because they’re already cheaper to run than their combustion-engine cousins, and they’re only going to get cheaper to own as battery costs keep sliding. ### ICE to EV kits: But here’s a question you might be sitting with right now: what happens to the millions, if not billions, of cars already on the road, the ones burning petrol and diesel today? Do we just scrap them all? No. I don’t think we do. I believe some creative entrepreneurs, or the old automakers themselves, are going to start selling kits that convert popular ICE cars into EVs. And here’s the thing: building an EV isn’t as complicated as people assume. Swap the engine for an electric motor. Replace the fuel tank with batteries. That’s most of the job done. It’s already happening. Companies like Retro Electric are taking old classic cars and giving them a second life with an electric motor, a battery pack, a controller, and that old car drives again, except now it’s silent. But I believe this is going to stop being a niche hobby for classic car lovers. I think it’s going to happen at scale, with everyday, common car models like your old Toyotas and Hondas and Suzukis, and I think it’s going to happen a lot more in developing countries, where a new EV is a luxury, but a conversion kit for the car you already own is just a better economic decision. ### Freight movement on land: Here’s one most people aren’t talking about yet: a return to the old ways. Ships carrying most of the world’s goods? That’s actually a fairly recent chapter in human history. For most of it, more trade moved over land than over sea. And I believe we’re about to watch the old Silk Route-like corridors across Eurasia come back to life. I’ve got two reasons for saying that. One: water is getting insecure. It used to be that only the United States had the kind of navy that could monopolise a waterway blockade. Not anymore. Cheap kamikaze drones mean even a ragtag militia like Yemen’s Houthis, for instance, can pull off what used to take a superpower. Don’t even get me started on a country like Iran. Two: the most mature electric vehicle on this planet isn’t a Tesla. It’s a train. Trains already haul enormous amounts of freight, cheaply. As electricity gets more abundant, they get even more affordable to run, and they don’t even need giant battery packs, because the power line is always right there waiting for them. Add in the fact that freight trains are simply faster than ships, and land starts looking very attractive again. ### Reduction in overall freight transport: Nearly 40% of all global maritime shipping tonnage is dedicated to transporting fossil fuels (oil, coal, and gas). In a world where fossil fuels won’t be comparatively economically viable, a major portion of this 40% shipping tonnage will disappear (or perhaps be replaced by more clean-tech freight?). ### Vertical farming: Until now, humanity has thrown two things at the problem of growing food: land, and water. Lots of both. I believe that era is ending, and colossal vertical farms are going to be the reason why. *Photo by Petr on UnsplashPicture it. Floor after floor of plants stacked indoors, glowing under coloured light, roots fed by water instead of soil. Vertical farming already produces significantly higher crop yields per square foot than open fields. It uses up to 95% less water through hydroponics. It doesn’t care what the weather is doing outside. And because it’s grown in a controlled environment, it barely needs pesticides, and you can build it right inside a city, which slashes the emissions and the costs it takes to get food from farm to plate. So if it’s this good, why isn’t it everywhere already? One word again: electricity. Vertical farms are hungry for it. And as I’ve told you throughout this entire story, that hunger is exactly what cheap, clean, abundant electricity is about to satisfy. ### Mining the sea water and deep earth: Right now, mining companies only target “high-grade” ore because processing vast amounts of rock to extract a tiny amount of useful material costs too much in diesel and electricity. With an abundance of electricity, we could mine ultra-low-grade ores or even extract trace elements (like uranium, lithium, and gold) directly from seawater. Another thing that will change would be more processing of energy-intensive materials (for example, magnesium), which won’t be so expensive anymore and would find more uses in different industries. ### Cleaner data centers: You’ve probably heard the headlines by now: data centres draining freshwater dry. It’s true. They use freshwater to cool themselves down. But here’s what those headlines leave out: water isn’t the only way to cool a data centre. It’s just the cheapest, easiest way to do it today. As the public pushback grows, and as electricity gets cheaper, I expect data centres to shift toward more sophisticated, energy-hungry cooling methods that don’t use a lot of water. That’s a big enough topic on its own, one I plan to write about properly soon. Consider this your preview. ### Off-grid households and industries Solar panels and batteries are the components that enable true independence from the electric grid. There are already success stories of remote villages and places that never had electricity finally getting it, thanks to these two things. So I foresee a time when many households and industries won’t be connected to the grid at all, and will sustain themselves on their own, cheaply. This would be more pronounced in developing countries like mine, where grid electricity is very expensive and unreliable. In fact, some industries might go even further. As my friend Saad Bazaz suggests, there would be industries generating their own renewable electricity, with self-hosted software and on-premise 3D printing using their own raw materials, creating new kinds of infrastructure for themselves and for the market. This would be the topic of a future story that we hope to co-author. ### Recycling solar panels Another question a friend of mine put in front of me: what’s going to happen to all these solar panels once they complete their lifespan? We don’t have many processes for this right now. But in the future, I foresee a time when new recycling industries will step up to recycle things like solar panels, and many other materials that currently aren’t recycled. They’ll probably be able to do that because of energy abundance. So that’s the tour. Just you and me, from my rooftop in Islamabad, to a scooter ride with my wife on a quiet mountain road, through a war that quietly rerouted oil flows on the other side of the planet, and out into deserts turning into farms, oceans getting a little quieter, and cars that refuse to die. Everyone keeps telling you 2036 belongs to AI. I think it belongs to the electron. **I am* *Ramiz Sami. I climb mountains, lift heavy weights, build* *WebGIS solutions* *and recently, I have also started to* *print custom maps* *on things like wood, metal, mugs and travel mugs.