Shidan Gouran unpacks energy myths and explores emerging solutions like the Electric Stack 

The single biggest lie in the energy world is that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. It’s a great little soundbite, and it used to be true. But something happened in 2024 that completely blew that argument out of the water. 

In some parts of the world, solar energy started producing power every single hour of every single day. Think about that; we crossed a line, a huge, invisible line – and everyone’s still talking about baseload power. 

This entire debate is built on a lie. It’s not about baseload anymore. That’s a 20th-century concept. It’s like arguing about whether your new mainframe computer is powerful enough, but the rest of the world has already moved on to the cloud. 

The myth of ‘baseload’ 

For decades, the grid was a simple, brutalist thing. You had these giant power plants – coal, gas, nuclear – that you’d fire up and just have them run 24/7. That’s baseload. It made sense when everything was centralized and demand was predictable. It was a one-to-one problem: you need power, you turn on a massive machine.

However, that’s not the world we live in anymore. The grid is now a dynamic, crazy, decentralized network. EVs are charging overnight, data centers are spiking at 3pm, and people’s rooftops are sending power back to the grid. The idea of a single, continuous source of power is totally obsolete. 

This is where the critics miss the entire point. I’m talking about the pundits who still think in this old framework. They’ll tell you, “Solar’s useless at night! Storage is too expensive!” But that argument is not only wrong, it’s fundamentally broken and based on a false premise. 

What matters today is firm capacity, which is the ability to keep supply and demand balanced at all times. You don’t need a single, giant, plant to do that. You can have a whole portfolio of resources: solar backed by batteries, wind balancing seasonal changes, a mosaic of technologies each filling in a different piece of the puzzle. The think tank, Ember, put out data showing that in places like Spain and California, solar plus storage already covers every hour of the day for long stretches. This isn’t theoretical, it’s reality. 

Betting against the learning curve 

The biggest pushback is always about batteries. The skeptics say, “Yeah, they work, but they’re too expensive to scale!” 

Here’s the thing. Every single person who has ever bet against the learning curve of disruptive technology has lost. Solar panel costs fell by 90 percent in just two decades, and battery prices have plummeted from over $1,200 per kilowatt-hour in 2010 to under $150 today – the trajectory is straight down. 

They’re making a classic mistake, looking at yesterday’s cost to solve a problem that is being fixed by tomorrow’s tech. They’re painting a cartoonish picture – this idea that you’d need enough lithium storage to power a whole state for a month. That’s not the real-world problem. The real problem is covering a few hours of darkness, and batteries are already doing that at scale. 

This is where you need to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. 

The rise of the Electric Stack 

Futurist Peter Leyden and the “Not Boring” team have a brilliant framing for this. They call it the Electric Stack, and it’s an analogy that perfectly explains what’s happening. 

This isn’t just about another power source. It’s a complete revolution, the same kind of disruption we saw in computing with the mainframe era, PC revolution, and now cloud computing. For instance, the mainframe era was centralized, brute-force baseload power, the PC revolution was the first wave of renewables (cheap and decentralized but with limitations), and cloud computing is where we’re at now, the Electric Stack. 

In this new stack, solar panels are the new silicon chips – cheap, standardized, and deployed anywhere. Batteries are the memory banks – getting denser and cheaper every single year. And digital control systems, this new grid management software powered by AI, that’s the operating system knitting it all together. 

Just like nobody worries if their phone can stream Netflix at 2am, we are moving toward a world where nobody will worry if the grid can keep the lights on in December. The old system is a mainframe, and the new one is the cloud. You can either resist it, or you can embrace it. 

Why this matters for everyone 

One last point, because this is a big one. This isn’t just a renewables play. At the end of the day, we absolutely need more power generation, and that includes natural gas and nuclear, especially next-generation SMRs. The future grid is a multi-layered system, not a single one-size-fits-all solution. 

So, here’s the thing. We need to stop calling these plants “baseload”, because they’re not. They are crucial components of the Electric Stack, just like solar and wind. The whole genius of this new system is in the orchestration enabled by a software intelligence layer. It’s about how these generators: the nuclear plants, the gas peakers, and the SMRs, all interact seamlessly with solar, batteries, and VPPs. 

Think of it like an AI virtual machine, where software is running the show, managing all of these different hardware components in real-time. This machine can ramp up or dial down a fleet of home batteries, a natural gas plant, or a solar farm in seconds to meet demand. The grid becomes this intelligent, responsive organism. This is the new architecture, and those who get it will be the ones that win. 

The future of power 

The path forward is clear. Solar shattered its forecasts, batteries are following the same path, and smart software is tying it all together. The question is not whether 24/7 clean electricity is possible, as we already have the proof, but the real question is, how fast can we build it, and are you ready for it? 

This is why Bluesphere has shifted its entire focus. We’re currently developing a fleet of 40 highly distributed power storage plants, combining to create a 200-megawatt virtual power plant in the greater New York metro area. We’re not just talking about the grid’s virtual machine, we’re funding startups that are writing the code for it.  

Shidan Gouran 

Shidan Gouran is a technology entrepreneur and venture capitalist known for having founded successful companies in the communications technology and consumer electronics industries. He is the co-founder and chairman of Bluesphere, a venture studio forging the future of energy by incubating and developing cutting-edge energy solutions, with a primary focus on battery storage and virtual power plants.