Planning for energy independence requires a software upgrade

By Matt Gray and Fiona Howarth

With the Israel-USA-Iran war, oil prices are soaring and governments are rushing to firm up alternative energy sources. Global investment in the power sector reached $1.5 trillion in 2025, according to the International Energy Agency, and had already been forecast to rise sharply every year this decade. Electricity grids are being asked to do something they were not designed to do: integrate rapid growth in variable low-cost renewable generation, while managing a new class of bidirectional distributed devices such as electric vehicles, batteries and rooftop solar.

Every dollar of this spending will ultimately land on consumer energy bills or government balance sheets. The decisions being made now – about where to build, what to connect, and how to sequence it all – will shape energy affordability, security, and accessibility, for decades to come. Yet the software tools being used to make those decisions would not look out of place in the previous century.

The cost of that lag is delayed clean energy, higher bills, and missed climate targets.

Meeting electricity demand at the lowest cost in the 21st Century is one of the hardest analytical problems in public policy. It requires policymakers and planners to run "what if" scenarios at an unprecedented scale and speed. What if that offshore wind farm is delayed? What if rooftop solar adoption in any given region doubles? What if gas prices remain structurally low or high? What if a major industrial customer closes or arrives?

The consequences of getting these answers wrong are enormous. Overbuild, and consumers and taxpayers pay for infrastructure that sits dormant. Underbuild, and risk having unreliable and inconsistent power for homes and businesses. Or, the investors and jobs move to other, more forward-thinking countries.

The policymakers and planners tasked with navigating these trade-offs are not failing for lack of effort. They are often failing for lack of tools. The evidence is stark: the IEA estimates around three terawatts of clean capacity are currently stuck in grid connection queues worldwide, awaiting approval. While a significant share consists of so-called “ghost projects” that will never be built, the scale is still staggering. Three terawatts is equivalent to more than nine thousand coal plants: a volume exceeding the entire installed coal-fired power fleet operating on earth today. Clean energy is ready to connect, but policy and planning systems are struggling to absorb it.

Part of the problem is structural. Electricity planning has historically relied on tools developed by pre-cloud-era companies, built on closed data and proprietary models. Their black-box nature makes scenario analysis slow, expensive and exclusionary. Studies take months or years to complete instead of days or weeks. Switching between tools often requires specialist and expensive expertise to implement.

This limits participation, slows alignment, and erodes public trust in decisions that are as much political as technical. In emerging markets and developing economies where the need for new electricity infrastructure is most acute, and where the energy transition will largely be won or lost, these tools and the expertise they demand are often unaffordable.

This need not be permanent. Advances in open modelling, cloud computing and AI have made it technically feasible and economically viable to build a new generation of planning tools: ones that are transparent, interoperable, and accessible to policymakers and planners in Lagos as readily as in London. These tools are improving every day. What is needed now is the institutional will to embed them in policy and planning processes, and the investment to make them genuinely fit for real-world use. Take Pakistan. Open modelling shows that batteries are the country's antidote to volatile fossil fuel prices: investing $500m in batteries plus renewables could save up to $2.87bn in LNG operating costs by 2030. That is the kind of insight planners need in days, not years, and it is exactly the kind of analysis that closed, expensive tools have kept out of reach in the markets that need it most.

You can think of it like the shift to open banking. When the UK mandated in 2017 that its nine largest banks open their data to third parties via standardised APIs, the financial establishment was sceptical. What followed was a wave of fintech innovation that has since reached over 13 million users: budgeting tools, faster credit access, cheaper payments. The gains were not just technological. They came from a policy decision to treat financial data as a shared infrastructure rather than a proprietary asset. That decision lowered barriers, increased competition, and ultimately benefited consumers.

The electricity planning system needs the same shift in philosophy. Proprietary models and closed data concentrate power, limit scrutiny, and make it harder for all stakeholders to participate and align. Governments have been quick to set clean energy targets, but they have been much slower to reform the planning and permitting processes that determine whether those targets can be met. Software is obviously not the whole answer: land rights, tariff structures, and interregional co-ordination all matter too. But you cannot fix what you cannot model, and you cannot model at the speed and scale the energy transition demands using old tools designed for a slower, simpler world.

The trillion-dollar electricity buildout is coming regardless. The question is whether the decisions underpinning it will be made by the public who are paying for it. That requires treating planning infrastructure as seriously as physical infrastructure and shifting to open, accessible tools. And it requires doing so now – before another terawatt of clean capacity joins the queue.

Matt Gray is founder and CEO of TransitionZero. Fiona Howarth is founder of Octopus EV and chair of TransitionZero.

This op-ed coincides with the appointment of Fiona Howarth as Chair of the TransitionZero Board of Trustees. Read the full announcement here.