Energy underpins growth, and the open question is how weather-dependent renewables create durable value when their output is free at the margin but arrives on the weather’s schedule. The model is four coupled feedback loops: the cannibalization trap, the flexibility exit, the demand fork over who fills the glut, and the deindustrialization spiral. These pages carry the diagrams and the evidence behind them.
The unifying claim is that cannibalization is a general-equilibrium property: any near-zero-marginal-cost or arbitrage resource competes away the price signal that justifies it as it scales. Each loop is balancing, and each resource builds until marginal value falls to marginal cost.
The whole model as prose rather than as a picture. Sixteen quantities and the twenty links between them, each with its sign and the reason for it, followed by a complete link inventory. Written to be read on its own, checked against the sources, and disagreed with in specific places.
v5 of the model. A price gate set by tax, tariff and the carbon price on gas, and beside it a connection gate that rations by permit rather than by cost. Sweden supplies the case: SE1 spent 65.6% of 2026 below the electric-boiler breakeven, and a fertiliser plant there was still refused the capacity it asked for.
Finland against Sweden. Comparable district-heating infrastructure, opposite outcomes. Sweden’s 1.24 GW of electric boilers sits largely idle at 43.9 öre/kWh while Finland’s ~2 GW delivered 2,580 GWh in 2025 at €0.63/MWh.
Installed cost per kWh at a four-hour duty against a hundred-hour duty. At four hours the field sits within a factor of 2.4; at a hundred hours the spread is a factor of 22 and lithium-ion falls from second-cheapest to dearest. The interactive bilingual version.
CAISO and the NEM through mid-2026. CAISO falls 103 → 80 → 51 → ~38 USD/kW-year with January 2026 pacing toward 21. The NEM is shown at its own resolution, because the published figures do not aggregate to a calendar year.
A verification pass on five numbers the model carried unchecked: German energy-intensive output, PJM capacity prices, Ireland’s 23%, the Brookings jobs-per-site figure and the Finnish boiler series. All five survive; three need amending.
Every external source cited across these pages, with its headline, publisher and date, and a line on what each one supports. Tagged primary, reported or paywall, and grouped by the part of the argument it carries.
Charts are built from IEA, PNNL, BloombergNEF, Ember, Destatis, Modo Energy, Energiateollisuus, Energiföretagen and Energy-Charts. Sources are cited on each page. Zone-level price statistics are computed from the same Energy-Charts day-ahead data behind Elpris EU+Norge.