The Energy Exchange - How Do We Power Our Energy Hungry World?

[The World is entering the age of electricity]

Sophie Chevalier
This moment is very different from anything that we've seen before.

Elisabeth Cremona
There's been a lot of hype about what the AI sector means for the power sector.

Simon Flowers
It's the biggest energy theme in the 21^st century.

[The Energy exchange]
[How do we power our energy hungry world?]

Sophie Chevalier
For the next decade, the global power demand is expected to grow by 35 to 40%, far outpacing the growth of primary energy sources.

Elisabeth Cremona
If we look at 2025, the world added about 850 terawatt hours of new demand, and this is equivalent to Brazil's total power demand every single year.

Simon Flowers
If we say the 19^th century was about the arrival of coal, the 20^th century was about oil and then natural gas coming through, and electricity has been trickling along through those times, But I think it's going to dominate in the 21^st century.

Elisabeth Cremona
We have simply rising incomes around the world, and this means there's a much bigger demand for appliances for cooling as well, and this is generating new demand.

Simon Flowers
There's also the Global South or the developing world, which needs more energy to bring people out of poverty to be fundamental to their economic growth.

Sophie Chevalier
This growth is mainly driven by electrification of transport, industry and buildings, which after power generation are the largest CO₂ emitters. So we can say that electrification is the backbone of decarbonization.

What's new in electricity consumptions about the growth of artificial intelligence is the speed and the scale of the change.

Simon Flowers
The whole value chain is ill prepared for this. What we're going to see is the demand for data centers coming through much more quickly than supply.

Sophie Chevalier
Data centers consume a lot of power and increasingly secure their supply for long term contracts. That's exactly what Total energies are done with Google, with more than 30 terawatt hours of renewable electricity contracted in Ohio, in Texas and in Malaysia to supply their digital infrastructure for 15 years or more. What we propose is not only selling electricity, it's really combining land, poor access, renewable and flexibility into one single consistent solution for data centers.

Simon Flowers
The extent to which the build out is happening is a massive surprise and that is nowhere better seen than in the USA. And it's going to grow fourfold over the next 5 plus years. It's really a juggernaut that's going to take off.

Elisabeth Cremona
The speed at which grids are being built is completely out of sync with the new demand we're seeing. Power lines that can transport electricity over a long distance take 10 to 12 years to be built in Europe, whereas a data centre can come online in about two to three years.

Sophie Chevalier 
Grids were designed around base load, stable and dispatchable generation, supplying variable but yet predictable and demand. But now with renewables, production is becoming increasingly variable and decentralized, and it brings complexity because you need at any point in time to balance supply and demand.

Simon Flowers
We need far better technology to manage the grid to make sure that we don't have blackouts like we had in Iberia, which put the whole system down.

Sophie Chevalier
So the lesson is simple, the energy mix is changing and we need to adapt both the grid but also the system operations accordingly. Electricity is a key pillar for energy security. It allows countries to diversify their energy mix and to reduce their dependence on imported commodities.

Simon Flowers
By developing our own energy system. Now that points you very quickly to renewables, nuclear and building out your grid system.

Elisabeth Cremona
Clean power actually expanded at such a rate that it not only kept up with new power demand, but actually exceeded it. Solar alone met about 75% of all the new demand we saw.

Sophie Chevalier
That's why flexibility is key to the system operations. You need flexible assets, nice gas, power plants, and batteries to make sure that the system will be balanced.

Elisabeth Cremona
Batteries play this dual role of enabling us to use renewables better, but also allowing us to make better use of the grid, which is a really critical part of the puzzle.

Sophie Chevalier
TotalEnergies's objective is to meet that fast growing demand with more reliable, sustainable and affordable power. So by 2030, we aimed to produce between 100 to 120 terawatt hours of electricity per year through our integrated power model, combining renewable generation, flexibility, storage and digital optimizations to deliver tailored solutions to our customers.

Elisabeth Cremona
Over time, fossil fuels will plateau and start to go down, both as electricity takes up a bigger portion of the economic demand and starts to also replace existing demand.

Simon Flowers
It's going to be dominant, we think, but it's not going to be the only provider of energy. And it it will fit into a very complex connected energy system, It'll be much more diverse and should help to have more secure supply around the world.

Sophie Chevalier
In the end, success comes down to one simple test. Does the system deliver low carbon, reliable power at scale and at a cost people can afford?