The New Energy Order | Throwing Over the Energy Chessboard

FROM THE DESK OF STEVEN FELDMAN

OPEN POSITION

A note from Steven — what is Open Position?

I'm Steven Feldman — happiest in an unfancy corner office, running businesses and guarding my privacy. Lord knows nobody thought the world needed another macro voice, but with a rare combination of hubris and executive privilege, here we are.

I called it Open Position, and I mean that in both senses. Every market participant carries one. But the more interesting kind is where someone is exposed in their thinking — what they stand for, what they're solving for. Not just in a portfolio. In everything.

This newsletter is mine. Each edition I'll share where I'm exposed — on gold, on real assets, on the macro environment, on the questions a portfolio cannot fully answer. The goal is for it to feel less like a memo and more like a conversation across a dinner table.

Today's question: The energy transition was supposed to take decades. What happens to your portfolio when it happens in five? 

I don’t know as much about energy than precious metals, not even close. But I have been in and around them both professionally and personally. As a child I sat in the car with my father on a gas station line, as an infrastructure investor I owned power plants and renewables, as a personal investor I have owned pipelines and frackers, as a consumer I have considered (but not pulled the trigger on) an electric car. But even the most experience energy investor or executive would be hard pressed to digest a single day’s worht of articles in last Tuesday’s Financial Times.

What was clear to me in these three articles was one unmistakable conclusion. The energy chessboard hasn't just been jostled. It’s been thrown over, the players have walked out of the room, and started a different game in another room. And most investors are likely still studying the old board without realizing they are in the wrong room.

Let me tell you what I read, and why I think the next decade of energy economics is going to look nothing like the last one.

THE SPARK

History Is Rhyming — Loudly

A piece written by Fidelity’s Chief Investment Officer of Equities opens with a pointed observation: the Iran conflict has done what years of climate policy couldn't - it has forced energy security back to the top of every government's agenda. The analogy she draws is to the 1970s oil crisis.

The 1970s shock wasn't just an inflation event. It was a decades-long reshaping of industrial policy, national strategy, and geopolitical alignment. Denmark became a global wind leader. France built its nuclear fleet. Japan reimagined manufacturing around energy efficiency. Toyota's fuel-efficient cars changed what American consumers bought. The shock forced a half-century of consequences.

|  Policy choices in response to the crises of the 1970s shaped the next half
|  century. The same may prove true again. 

 

We're at that inflection point again - except the timeline is dramatically compressed and the technological tools are incomparably more powerful.

Here's an example. France and the Nordic countries, where fossil fuels account for less than 5 percent of electricity generation, are looking at 2027 power prices around €47–57 per megawatt hour. Germany and Italy, where fossil fuels still contribute 39–50 percent of the electricity mix, face projected 2027 costs of €97–107/MWh. That's not a small gap. That's a 2:1 cost disadvantage. For energy-intensive industry, that's not a headwind - it's a wall.

The strategic implication is stark: the countries that invested early in domestic, low-carbon generation have transformed energy from a vulnerability into an advantage. Those that didn't are paying the price - in their bills, in their industrial competitiveness, and in their geopolitical exposure.

The the problem is ultimately one of control. With imported fossil fuels, neither the physical flow nor the price is set domestically. Domestic generation doesn't eliminate risk — it shifts it into manageable areas: infrastructure, regulation, capital. That's a trade every serious government should want to make.

THE STRUCTURAL REALITY

The Transition Wasn't Waiting for Permission

Here's what the hand-wringing about green energy being "just a sideshow" misses: the transition didn't pause while we debated it.

According to new analysis from energy think-tank Ember, global clean power output grew faster than electricity demand last year. Not kept pace - grew faster. That means, for the first time, renewables aren't just adding to supply. They're beginning to displace fossil fuels in absolute terms. Fossil fuel power output fell in 2024 - the first annual decline since the pandemic year of 2020.

Renewables generated more electricity than coal globally in 2025 - described by Ember as "for the first time in the modern power system." Roughly 647 gigawatts of solar were added last year, alongside a record 165GW of wind. To translate that into human scale: enough new capacity to power the equivalent of 200 million average Western homes - in a single year.

| The momentum of low-carbon electricity is a structural reality, not a policy
| artifact. The war is accelerating it, not reversing it.

 

China's role here is both central and underappreciated. China's exports of solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles reached $21.9 billion in March 2026 alone - 70 percent higher than the same month a year prior. Over the trailing twelve months, those three categories totaled $200 billion in exports, or roughly 6 percent of all Chinese exports.

China has essentially industrialized the green energy transition and is now exporting it at scale to the rest of the world. The decisions it made years ago on renewables are what partially insulated it from this oil shock. That same manufacturing infrastructure now underpins the lowest-cost manufacturing sector in the world - and the most aggressive clean-energy supply chain on the planet.

The Iran war is causing some countries to lean on coal in the short term as a gas substitute. But energy industry sources and analysts expect the conflict to accelerate wind and solar rollout as countries race to insulate themselves from future shocks. The short-term pain is clarifying the long-term logic.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL RUPTURE

The Battery Barrier Just Fell

And then there's the third article. The one that, in some ways, changes everything.

CATL - China's battery giant, which together with BYD controls more than half of the global EV battery market - announced it has developed a battery capable of driving 1,500 kilometers on a single charge. For reference, that is the road distance from London to Barcelona. Their previous record was 1,000 kilometers.

But range was only half the announcement. CATL also unveiled an upgrade to its fast-charge Shenxing battery that can charge from 10 percent to 98 percent in six and a half minutes. Not hours. Not 30 minutes. Six and a half minutes - faster than many people spend at a gas station.

This matters enormously, because the two objections that have stubbornly prevented EV mass adoption in many markets - range anxiety and charge time - have now been effectively answered. Not theoretically. In a product that will be manufactured at scale.

| When the two objections that prevented EV mass adoption are answered
| simultaneously, you don't have a better product. You have a different market.

CATL's billionaire founder put it plainly: the boundaries of electrochemistry are still far from being reached, and the possibilities of materials science are still far from being exhausted. He wasn't being modest. He was issuing a warning to competitors.

But here is the dimension that I think deserves its own moment of attention, because most coverage buried it. CATL says it is on track to begin mass-producing sodium-ion batteries this year - a chemistry that requires no lithium, no cobalt, and no nickel. The company that controls the largest share of the global battery market is actively engineering itself off the very critical minerals that have defined the battery economy for the past two decades.

The implications ramify in multiple directions. For the commodity markets, it means the lithium price cycle - already volatile - faces a structural question mark about long-term demand. For supply chain security, it means China may be building a battery technology that sidesteps the mineral dependencies that other nations have tried to exploit as a competitive counterweight. And for the broader energy transition, it means the cost floor for batteries could fall further and faster than most models currently assume.

The company has also spent years securing its own upstream supply chain in lithium and nickel. Vertically integrated going in - and now engineering the exit. That is not the behavior of a company playing defense.

THE SYNTHESIS

What Three Articles on a Tuesday Morning Tell Us

So let me try to put these pieces together, because I don't think any one article captures what all three are saying collectively.

We are watching three simultaneous forces converge: a geopolitical shock that has reactivated energy security as a national priority; a structural shift in electricity generation where renewables have crossed the threshold from addition to displacement; and a technological breakthrough that removes the final consumer barriers to EV adoption. Any one of these would be significant. Together, they represent a compression of the energy transition from a decades-long process into something that could reshape the landscape in five to ten years.

The 1970s analogy is instructive but imperfect. The 1970s shock played out over decades. The current forces are moving simultaneously and at vastly higher speed — driven by technologies that have already been built, supply chains that already exist, and capital that is already deployed. The world isn't deciding whether to change. The change is in progress.

For investors, I'd offer this framework:

First, don't confuse short-term energy price volatility with long-term energy economics. The Iran war is causing gas price spikes that are dominating today's headlines. But the structural story - the one that matters for a ten-year portfolio - is that the cost curve for renewables continues to fall, and countries that fail to invest in domestic generation will pay for it in competitiveness and vulnerability.

Second, understand what China's green export machine means for the petrodollar system. Less global oil consumption means less dollar recycling. The petroyuan thesis I've been developing - the slow but structural shift away from dollar-denominated energy trade - gets accelerated, not slowed, by a faster energy transition. This is another domino in the chain.

Third, think carefully about which physical scarcity assets benefit from this new world. Copper is the central nervous system of the electrified economy - every solar panel, every EV, every grid upgrade runs on it. And while the headlines focus on solar and wind, there is a quieter but powerful renaissance underway in nuclear energy that deserves equal attention. Governments across Europe, Asia, and North America that once retreated from nuclear are recommitting — because the math of a net-zero grid eventually forces the question of what provides reliable, dispatchable, zero-carbon baseload power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. The answer is nuclear.

Add to that the extraordinary power demands of the AI buildout - data centers running around the clock, at scale, in locations where grid reliability is non-negotiable - and uranium's long-term demand profile looks structurally different than it did a decade ago. Agricultural land and water infrastructure round out the physical world that software cannot replicate.

And gold? Gold wins in energy chaos, just as it wins in fiscal chaos. Energy price volatility is inflationary. Inflationary environments benefit hard assets. Geopolitical instability, supply disruptions, currency uncertainty - these are all conditions under which gold has historically performed its most important function: preserving purchasing power when paper promises are under pressure.

| The transition wasn't waiting for permission. It was happening on its own timeline.
| The war just handed it a megaphone.

Ember's managing director described low-carbon electricity's momentum as a "structural reality." I think that phrasing deserves weight. We are past the debate about whether this happens. We are in the debate about how fast, who leads, and who gets left behind.

My assessment: the countries and companies that recognized the strategic importance of energy independence early - and invested accordingly - are about to pull away from those that didn't. The gap in power costs between France and Germany, between the Nordics and Italy, is not a temporary anomaly. It is a preview of the competitive landscape of the next decade.

The same principle applies at the portfolio level. The investors who are positioned in the assets that benefit from this new energy order - physical scarcity assets, hard money, the infrastructure of the electrified economy - will look back on this period the way thoughtful investors looked back on the 1970s. Not as a crisis endured, but as a pivot point recognized.

WHAT WE'RE DOING ABOUT IT

Why We Tilted Wealthion Toward Real Assets — and Built SCP

I've spent the better part of this newsletter making an analytical case. But analysis without action is just commentary. So let me tell you what we've done in response to exactly the dynamics I've been describing.

At Wealthion, we have made a deliberate and meaningful tilt toward real assets — critical metals and minerals, monetary metals, energy infrastructure and the physical building blocks of the transition economy. This wasn't a reactive call. It was the product of years of conviction-building around the thesis that the next decade belongs to assets grounded in physical scarcity, not financial engineering.

The energy landscape I've described in this piece is precisely why that tilt exists. When the cost of electricity diverges 2:1 between nations based on their generation choices. When a battery company is engineering itself off the lithium supply chain while simultaneously extending range to 1,500 kilometers. When renewable output is growing faster than global electricity demand for the first time in history. When nuclear is being recommitted to by governments that spent a decade walking away from it. These are not themes. These are structural shifts - and they have direct implications for which assets will compound over the next decade and which will not.

To bring institutional-quality exposure to this thesis for our clients, we partnered with a team we have deep respect for: the former Sprott brokerage group, whose decades of experience in natural resources, critical minerals, and hard assets is exactly the kind of specialized expertise this moment demands. Together, we created SCP Real Assets.

SCP is not a generalist allocation. It is a focused, high-conviction vehicle built around the specific assets that sit at the intersection of the energy transition, the commodity supercycle, and the physical infrastructure demands of the digital economy. Copper. Uranium. Energy infrastructure. The critical minerals that neither wind turbines nor EV batteries nor AI data centers can be built without.

The chessboard has been thrown over. We think we know what the new game looks like. SCP Real Assets is how we intend to play it.

Steven Feldman is the co-founder & CEO of GBI. This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.