A robust strategy for the energy transition can be stated plainly: electrify everything you can, as fast as you can, and then deal with what cannot yet be electrified. The key point is that “everything you can” is not static. It expands over time as technologies mature, costs fall, and systems adapt.
This framing is often criticized as oversimplified, but it accurately reflects the reality of how major technological transitions unfold.
This article focuses deliberately on the energy transition. Electrifying end uses is a powerful and necessary strategy for transforming the energy system, but it is not, on its own, a complete response to climate change. Other dimensions of the transition, such as land use, agriculture, and industrial processes unrelated to energy, are outside the scope of this discussion.
(LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/electrify-everything-you-can-deal-rest-benoit-marcoux-qzmwe/)
Three reasons to move first on electrification
The case for prioritizing electrification rests on three simple and robust arguments.
First, electrified end uses are fundamentally more efficient than their fossil-based counterparts. This is not a marginal gain. Heat pumps deliver two to four units of useful heat for each unit of electricity consumed. Electric vehicles convert most of the energy they draw into motion, while internal combustion engines waste the majority as heat.
Even when electricity is generated from fossil fuels, this efficiency advantage often holds. Using natural gas to generate electricity and then running a heat pump can still deliver more useful heat than burning the same gas directly in a typical furnace. This is why electrification can reduce emissions before the power system is fully decarbonized.
Because of this efficiency gap, electrification often reduces emissions even when electricity generation is not fully clean. Waiting for a perfectly decarbonized power system before electrifying end uses is therefore a category error. It confuses system optimization with sequencing.
Second, electrifying end uses locks in the transition.
Once a building is heated with a heat pump, or a fleet is electrified, the direction of travel is set. Future improvements in generation automatically translate into lower emissions. The opposite is not true. Even a very efficient gas boiler or combustion engine remains a fossil asset for its entire lifetime.
This lock-in effect matters because infrastructure lifetimes are long. Delaying electrification today in order to wait for cleaner power tomorrow guarantees higher cumulative emissions over decades.
Third, delaying electrification where it is already viable is not a neutral choice.
Arguments to wait until everything is solved, until grids are perfectly clean, or until alternatives for every sector are available consistently serve one interest: extending the life of fossil-based assets. This pattern is not accidental. It is a deliberate strategy that has been used by incumbent industries to slow down transitions that threaten their business models.
Hard-to-abate sectors are real and deserve serious work. These include activities such as long-haul aviation, cement and steel manufacturing, and certain chemical processes, where direct electrification remains difficult today. But using them as a justification to postpone electrification in buildings, transport, and light industry is a distortion of the problem. It substitutes delay for progress and protects incumbents at the expense of long-term system performance.
A dynamic, not a static, strategy
The energy transition is not a single optimization problem solved once. It is a dynamic process. What is difficult today becomes routine tomorrow. Technologies that are marginal now become mainstream through deployment, learning, and scale.
The correct strategic posture is therefore not to rank sectors once and for all, but to push electrification aggressively wherever it already makes sense, while continuously expanding that frontier. Grid reinforcement, storage, transmission upgrades, and smarter system management must proceed in parallel with electrification, not ahead of it, and certainly not as a precondition.
Electrify everything you can. Then deal with the rest. And keep revisiting what “everything you can” actually means.
What about electricity prices?
A common concern is that increased electrification will raise electricity demand and therefore electricity prices, at least in the short term during periods of rapid investment. This looks only at one side of the ledger.
Electrification reduces or eliminates spending on gasoline, diesel, fuel oil, and natural gas. Even when electricity bills increase temporarily, total energy costs for households and firms often fall. What matters economically is the cost of energy services such as heat, mobility, and industrial output, not the unit price of electricity viewed in isolation.
Finally, electricity prices are shaped as much by institutions as by technology. Many markets and regulatory regimes were designed for fuel-based, thermal systems, with high marginal costs. As renewables, storage, and flexible demand grow, these frameworks increasingly misrepresent underlying costs. When prices rise, it is often a sign of institutional lag, not a failure of electrification.
Seen this way, electrification is not a cost risk. It is a way to reduce long-term exposure to volatile fossil fuel global markets and to shift energy systems toward costs that can be planned, regulated, and stabilized locally.
The strategic takeaway
Electrification is not about sequencing technologies in the abstract. It is about making irreversible, no-regret, choices that improve efficiency, reduce exposure to volatile fuel markets, and force the system to evolve.
Electrify everything you can now, because it works, because it locks in progress, and because delay is rarely innocent. Then deal with what remains, knowing that the definition of “what remains” will keep shrinking.
This is not ideology. It is how large technical systems actually change.
A recent and familiar example illustrates this clearly. The iPhone did not wait for mobile networks to be ready. It reshaped end-use demand first, locking in data-intensive behaviour; it exposed system bottlenecks immediately, forcing cellular operators to confront congestion and coverage gaps; and it shifted investment incentives decisively toward digital networks. At the same time, the massive scale of data demand drove a sustained decline in the unit cost of transmitting data, as investment, learning, and densification outpaced traffic growth. 3G, then 4G, and eventually today’s mobile data infrastructure were pulled forward by devices, not pushed by pre-emptive network optimisation or regulatory dictates.
Electrification follows the same pattern: deploy what already works, make demand irreversible, reveal system constraints, and force the rest of the system to adapt.
