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During a 41 year career as a journalist, for our Editor Phil Parry spotting trends has always been paramount, and this is highlighted by new evidence today of an explosive growth in key areas.
I live by the motto: ‘KEEP AN EYE OUT’!
It is vital to be aware of what is going on in the world around you.
Two areas where this is true today is the unbelievable growth in: 1. Artificial Intelligence (AI), and 2. Renewables, especially Solar Energy (SE), with the latest figures underlining this.
Take the first one.
The market for AI grew beyond $184 billion in 2024 (and we’re not at the end yet!), a considerable jump of nearly $50 billion compared with 2023.
This staggering growth is expected to continue too.
Financial experts predict that the market will race past $826 billion in 2030.
Almost every day you see adverts for new uses for AI, with it likely to completely change the worlds of finance, business, healthcare, education, and more.
New technologies have often aided developers; the internet, for instance, ended the time-consuming task of answering questions using textbooks, and generative AI looks like a bigger leap forward still.
One reason why it can be especially useful for people developing new businesses today is the availability of data.
Online forums, such as Stackoverflow, hold enormous archives of questions asked and answered by coders. The answers are often rated, which helps AI models learn what is helpful and what is not.
Much the same is expected of SE.
Buying and installing solar panels is currently the largest single category of investment in electricity generation, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
It expects $500 billion to be spent this year, not far short of the sum being put into upstream oil and gas. Installed capacity is doubling every three years.
The National Energy System Operator (NESO), a public body that oversees the energy systems, said that clean, domestic sources should provide 95 per cent of the UK’s electricity over a typical year by the end of the decade.
It is possible at the moment to shift around 2.5GW of demand at peak times in the UK and with the right policies, NESO thinks that demand flexibility could increase five-fold by 2030.
According to the International Solar Energy Society (ISES), solar power is on track to generate more electricity than all the world’s nuclear power plants in 2026, than its wind turbines in 2027, than its dams in 2028, its gas-fired power plants in 2030 and its coal-fired ones in 2032.
In an IEA scenario which provides net-zero carbon-dioxide emissions by the middle of the century, solar energy becomes humankind’s largest source of primary energy (not just electricity), by the 2040s. You see solar panels everywhere now.
So things are changing extremely fast.
You need to keep an eye out!
The memories of Phil’s decades long award-winning career in journalism (when spotting trends was central) as he was gripped by the incurable neurological condition, Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Tomorrow – why critics of struggling Cardiff Airport (CA) have condemned a fanfare of publicity about a link up with a cargo company which flies to China, when the country has a controversial human rights record, and one of its regions is the centre of mass rape and torture allegations.
