Electrotech Reinvents the Energy Transition

Source: Elisa Wood | · DECENTRALIZED GRID MAGAZINE · | September 21, 2025

Electrification has always been a confusing term, especially to the energy layperson, who wonders why it’s trumpeted as something new when electricity is already ubiquitous. Hadn’t we electrified most buildings in the US by the 1940s?

Today, the word “electrification” describes a subset of that effort, largely the electrification of transportation and heating.

Last week, research firm Ember surfaced a new term, electrotech, to better describe our energy transition. Electrotech encompasses electrification but embraces even more. It’s not anything new, but a rethinking of how to describe the change underway to the electric system.

“Electricity is now the engine of change,” Ember says, in a detailed slide deck that explains electrotech as the nexus of three energy trends. These are:

• Solar/wind dominate supply

• Electricity finds more uses, powering electric vehicles, heat pumps and AI

• Batteries and digitalization connect supply and demand

Viewing these three trends as a single driver, electrotech creates a better way to quantify the economics of the energy transition.

For example, electrotech turns out to be three times more efficient than fossil fuels, which waste two-thirds of primary energy inputs. (See our podcast on energy productivity with energy economist Skip Laitner.) This loss costs the economy more than $5 trillion annually, Ember says, noting that harnessing power from the sun offers access to 100 times more energy than fossil fuels.