The Future Is Already Here, It’s Just Unevenly Distributed

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Preparing to kick off the Burnaby Board of Trade’s 2026 Clean Energy Summit next month felt like the right moment to take inventory. Burnaby sits inside a province where roughly 98% of electricity is already non emitting, hosts a dense cluster of clean energy companies, and also contains a noticeable concentration of hydrogen for energy startups. That contrast makes it a useful place to lean on William Gibson’s observation that the future is already here, just unevenly distributed. The point is not to argue about what might work in theory, but to walk through what is already working in practice, somewhere in the world, at scale. And yes, I’m a controversial choice for kicking off the event.

A pocket of the future, as I use the phrase, is not a pilot project or a promising lab result. It is a technology or system that is operating commercially, delivering measurable value, and expanding because it makes economic and operational sense. Where these pockets fail to spread, the constraint is usually regulation, planning culture, or institutional inertia rather than physics or chemistry. What follows is a tour through those pockets, grounded in specific places and numbers.

Across all of these examples, a small number of repeatable patterns show up again and again, and they help explain why the future arrives early in some places and late in others. Modular systems such as rooftop solar in Pakistan or electric motorcycles in East Africa spread fastest where institutions are weak, slow, or misaligned, because they do not require permission, coordination, or large upfront commitments from incumbents. Electrification dominates wherever duty cycles are predictable and assets are heavily used, as with railways, buses, ferries, ports, and industrial equipment, because electricity converts to motion or heat far more efficiently than fuel and the operational savings compound quickly.

Storage and grid reinforcement succeed where planning is centralized and long term, as seen with pumped hydro, hybrid energy parks, reconductoring, and continental transmission planning in Europe, because these are system assets that only make sense when someone is responsible for the whole system rather than individual projects.

Heat decarbonizes fastest when utilities are allowed and encouraged to sell thermal comfort and reliability instead of molecules, which shifts attention from preserving gas networks to deploying heat pumps, district heating, and thermal storage and managing an orderly retirement of legacy infrastructure.

Industrial and biological substitutions, from mass timber to agrigenetic nitrogen fixing, often progress quietly but steadily because they reduce emissions without asking end users to change how they live or work, delivering the same services with different inputs. Together, these patterns show that uneven progress is not primarily about technological readiness, but about how well technologies fit the institutional, economic, and operational structures they land in.

One of the clearest examples of a future that did not wait for permission is Pakistan’s behind the meter solar buildout. Over the past several years, Pakistan has imported on the order of 55GW of solar modules, almost all from China, according to trade data summarized by PV Magazine and TransitionZero. The majority of that capacity is installed on rooftops or otherwise behind the meter rather than connected as utility scale projects. Reuters reported in late 2025 that in some distribution company territories, midday rooftop solar output already exceeds grid demand. This is more solar capacity than many OECD countries have built in total, deployed largely outside formal planning processes. The drivers are straightforward. Retail electricity prices are high, outages are common, solar modules are cheap, tariffs are low and payback periods are short. The grid operator has limited ability to stop customers from defecting, and the result is a parallel electricity system growing in plain sight.

A similar pattern appears in transport in parts of Africa, though with two wheels instead of rooftops. Across cities in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Nigeria, electric motorcycles using battery-swapping networks are emerging as the first electric vehicles to reach meaningful scale. Startups in this space report tens of thousands of electric bikes in operation, primarily replacing gasoline motorcycles that dominate urban transport. Some operators are beginning to integrate solar-powered charging and swap stations, though these remain unevenly deployed rather than universal.The economics are again simple. Fuel costs are volatile, maintenance is high, and electric drivetrains are cheaper to operate. Solar charging reduces exposure to grid outages, and swapping avoids long dwell times. This is not a car centric transition. It is a right sized electrification of mobility that matches incomes and infrastructure.

When electrification is applied to infrastructure that governments already treat as strategic, the scale becomes much larger. Heavy rail is the most obvious example. India announced in 2024 that it had electrified roughly 97% of its broad gauge rail network, up from about 40% a decade earlier. This covers more than 65,000 route kilometers and enables both passenger and freight operations to shift away from diesel. Indian Railways reports energy intensity reductions of roughly 40% to 50% on electrified routes. China electrified more than 70% of its rail network years ago, and the majority of freight ton kilometers now move on electric traction. In Europe, only about 60% of route kilometers are electrified, but more than 80% of rail traffic runs on those lines, reflecting prioritization of high demand corridors. In each case, electrification wins because electricity converts to motion far more efficiently than fuel, and because the infrastructure owner can finance long lived assets.

Urban buses show the same logic at the city scale. In Bogotá, Colombia, the public transit system operates around 1,500 battery electric buses, making it one of the largest electric bus fleets outside China. In Santiago, Chile, deployment has gone further, with roughly 2,500 electric buses in service, representing about one third of the city’s total bus fleet and the highest electric bus penetration outside China. These are not demonstrations. They are procurement programs built around centralized depots, predictable duty cycles, and concessional finance. Operating cost savings and air quality improvements are immediate, and cities build operational expertise quickly once the first few hundred buses are deployed.

Maritime electrification often sounds implausible until the scope is narrowed to where it already works. Electric ferries are one of the earliest and most reliable wins. Norway operates more than 80 battery electric or hybrid electric ferries on fixed routes, and the first fully electric car ferry, Ampere, cut energy use by about 60% compared to its diesel predecessor. Denmark operates fully electric ferries such as Ellen on short sea crossings. Fixed routes, predictable schedules, and shore charging make batteries viable, and local air quality benefits matter in fjords and harbors. That trajectory is becoming clearer when looking at the order book. Incat’s 130 m fully electric China Zorrilla for the Buenos Aires–Colonia route carries a roughly 40 MWh battery, Viking Line’s Helios concept for the Helsinki–Tallinn corridor is designed around 85–100 MWh of onboard storage at 195 m length, and multiple very large fully electric car ferries are now on order for Scandinavian routes, signalling that battery electric propulsion is moving decisively from small vessels to flagship ferry classes.

Ports extend this bounded system logic. The Port of Los Angeles has mandated shore power for most container vessels at berth and is electrifying yard tractors and cargo handling equipment. Shanghai has deployed shore power extensively for inland and coastal vessels. Rotterdam is electrifying harbor craft as part of its port decarbonization strategy. The Port of Vancouver has two fully electric tug boats in operation. Ports concentrate energy use and regretting that they can now hear, operate around the clock, and are under pressure from nearby communities to reduce pollution, which makes electrification easier to justify.

The most counterintuitive maritime example sits further inland. On China’s Yangtze River, fully battery electric container ships of roughly 700 TEU are operating commercially. These vessels carry containerized batteries that are swapped in and out with other containers and charged on shore. They run on 1,000 km routes linking multiple inland ports, displacing diesel engines entirely. This does not generalize to transoceanic shipping yet, but it does break the assumption that container shipping and batteries are incompatible.

All of this electrification depends on electricity systems that can deliver power reliably at scale. One response has been the rise of hybrid energy parks. In the Netherlands, projects combining hundreds of megawatts of wind and solar with tens or hundreds of megawatts of batteries are being developed behind shared grid connections. Grid operator TenneT has been explicit that hybridization reduces curtailment, improves utilization of scarce interconnection capacity, and delivers more system value than standalone generation. The team there took me on a tour of a GW scale onshore and offshore wind, solar and battery farm, with the onshore components 5 meters below sea level when I worked with them in the summer last year on a pragmatic decarbonization scenario for 2050 for the country.

Longer duration balancing still leans heavily on pumped hydro. China has 365 GW of pumped hydro in operation, under construction or planned to start construction by 2030, according to figures cited by the International Hydropower Association. That represents a approximately 14 TWh of grid storage, sufficient to power all of British Columbia for three months.  In Europe, countries like Switzerland and Austria use alpine pumped hydro to provide multi day balancing across borders. These assets last for decades, deliver large amounts of energy, and are bankable in ways few other long duration storage technologies are.

Seasonal mismatches between energy supply and demand show up most clearly in heating, and here the Netherlands offers a practical alternative to fuel based solutions. Aquifer thermal energy storage, or ATES, uses groundwater aquifers to store heat and cold between seasons. The Netherlands has roughly 2,500 ATES systems in operation, serving offices, hospitals, universities, and districts. Studies summarized by Deltares and TNO show that these systems can reduce heating and cooling energy demand by 30% to 60% in participating buildings. Summer heat is stored underground for winter use, and winter cold is stored for summer cooling. This is seasonal storage without hydrogen.

As electrification accelerates, grids themselves become a limiting factor, which is where grid enhancing technologies enter. In the United States, dynamic line rating projects have unlocked on the order of 10 to 40% additional capacity on constrained transmission corridors by replacing static worst case assumptions with real time measurements. In Europe, power flow control devices are being deployed on cross border interconnectors to manage congestion. These technologies do not eliminate the need for new transmission, but they buy time and reduce waste while lines are planned and built.

Pakistan is already reinforcing its grid by reconductoring existing transmission lines, a process that replaces older steel cored copper conductors on existing towers with higher-capacity carbon fiber cored annealed aluminum designs that can carry more power without acquiring new rights-of-way. Asian Development Bank project documents show that parts of the 220 kV network have been reconductored, including a 44 km double-circuit corridor upgraded with high-temperature low-sag conductors between New Kotlakhpat, Bund Road, and Sheikhupura, chosen because the line was overloaded and new rights-of-way were constrained, along with additional reconductoring works on other 220 kV corridors measured in the tens of kilometres. Planning documents published through NEPRA and NTDC extend this approach, explicitly identifying reconductoring and the replacement of existing 220 kV lines with twin-bundled or higher-capacity conductors as a core strategy in the Transmission System Expansion Plan to 2034. In a hot climate where thermal limits and conductor sag materially restrict capacity, upgrading conductors within existing corridors allows Pakistan to unlock more power flow faster than building new lines.

Grid stability is also changing character. In the past, frequency and voltage control came as a byproduct of spinning generators. In inverter dominated systems, stability has to be designed. Grid forming inverters do this work. South Australia has deployed grid forming batteries such as Hornsdale that now provide essential system services after coal plant closures. In Texas, large batteries are increasingly specified with grid forming capabilities to support a grid with rising shares of wind and solar. Stability becomes a service delivered by power electronics and controls, not an accident of combustion.

At the continental scale, Europe is treating transmission planning itself as a form of infrastructure. The ENTSO E Ten Year Network Development Plan uses shared scenarios out to 2050 to identify needs and evaluate projects across borders. The European Commission’s Grids Package, released in late 2025, pushes coordinated planning, anticipatory investment, and faster permitting. Offshore wind ambitions in the North Sea region now approach 100GW, paired with discussions of cross border offshore grids rather than isolated radial connections. This is a shift from national patchworks to system architecture.

Heat is where electrification meets regulation most directly. In several countries, the conversation is moving from fuels to services. Heat as a service reframes the problem as delivering warmth and reliability, not selling molecules. This requires re regulating gas utilities so they can own and operate heat pumps, district heating, and thermal storage, and earn regulated returns on those assets. In the Netherlands, utilities such as Eneco and Vattenfall are investing in large heat pumps and district heat networks tied to ATES. In Denmark, more than 60% of households are connected to district heating, increasingly supplied by electric heat pumps rather than gas or coal. In the UK, companies like Cadent and National Grid Gas face declining residential gas demand, and regulators are beginning to confront the need for managed network shrinkage rather than perpetual expansion.

Planned decommissioning of gas distribution networks avoids the death spiral where fewer customers pay for the same pipes. Utrecht, a city in the central Netherlands, has taken a structured approach to phasing out its natural gas distribution network by focusing on neighborhood-by-neighborhood transitions from fossil gas to electric heating and district heating. As part of the Dutch built environment’s broader commitment to take 1.5 million of the country’s roughly 8 million homes off natural gas by 2030 and all homes by 2050, Utrecht’s plans prioritize areas with a high share of social housing and engage residents early in the transition. In the Overvecht-Noord district, city officials and the housing corporation Mitros moved to disconnect around 320 rental homes from gas after a strong majority of residents voted to adopt electric cooking and other low-carbon technologies, saving households roughly €150 to €200 per year in avoided fixed gas costs and reinforcing the case for area-by-area disconnection. This approach reflects a deliberate shift away from maintaining legacy gas infrastructure toward planned, sub-network decommissioning tailored to local building stock, resident preferences and alternative heat options, rather than a unilateral, system-wide cut.

Some decarbonization wins come from changing inputs rather than behavior. Mass timber construction is one example. In Canada, tall mass timber buildings in British Columbia and Ontario demonstrate that factory produced timber components can replace steel and concrete in many applications. Studies cited by the Canadian Wood Council show embodied carbon reductions of 20% to 50% compared to conventional construction, ignoring the embodied atmospheric carbon locked into the wood itself which if counted would make the buildings carbon negative.. Austria has built an export oriented timber manufacturing industry around similar principles. Buildings look and function the same, but emissions fall.

Agriculture offers a biological parallel. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is a major source of emissions and pollution. Agrigenetic nitrogen fixing microbes can reduce that burden without changing crops. Pivot Bio’s impact reporting indicates its products have been used or evaluated on more than 13 million acres, primarily in US corn, with expansion into South America and Europe. The company and independent researchers report partial displacement of synthetic nitrogen, often on the order of 20% to 30%, not full replacement. Fully self fixing staple crops remain a long term research goal, but incremental reductions at this scale already matter.

Across all of these examples, common patterns emerge. Modular systems like rooftop solar and electric motorcycles spread fastest where institutions fail or lag. Electrification dominates where duty cycles are predictable and assets are heavily used. Storage and grids succeed where planning is centralized and long term. Heat decarbonizes fastest when utilities are allowed to sell comfort rather than fuel. Industrial and biological substitutions work because they do not ask users to change behavior.

The future, in this sense, is not missing. It is visible in Pakistan’s rooftops, Norway’s ferries, China’s rivers, the Netherlands’ aquifers, Europe’s grid maps, and Bogotá’s bus depots. The question for places like Metro Vancouver is not whether these futures exist, but which of them will be recognized, copied, and scaled next. This is my current draft list for the keynote. What would you suggest I add to it?