Hi everyone,

Welcome back to Friday discussions, hosted on our new platform, Ghost. While the quality of the discussion will remain high, there are a few minor changes.

The first is that to comment you need to ensure you have signed in to Exponential View on Ghost. Just click on the headline of this message to log-in.

Secondly, you need to ensure you have set a username. Please ensure you set this username to something to your real name.  To do this view this video.  

Sorry for these additional steps!

Now over to our discussion.  Nat Bullard of BloombergNEF points out that the levelized cost of electricity from new solar and wind is now LOWER than the running costs of existing coal- and gas-fired power plants.

This is massive. Our discussion questions today:

• What are the implications of this milestone on the decarbonisation of the grid?

• How will this impact geopolitics, specifically the major fossil exporters (like Russia for gas)? As I discuss in my book, solar insolation is much more equitably geographically distributed than fossil fuels, what does this mean for countries who have been oil importers and regional balance of power?

• What types of new startup opportunities does this create? (Virtual powerplants, battery and storage research, load optimisation, etc?) Which are the most interesting firms you have seen in these sectors?

Have a great discussion – and glad we are back to these.

Azeem