Tony Seba and RethinkX: how technological disruption works, and how to read the forecasts
A profile of Tony Seba and the RethinkX energy reports. The core idea, how the argument changed from 2020 to 2025, and how we separate what is observed from what is forecast.
Part of the Future & Foresight collection.
Tony Seba is one of the best-known voices arguing that solar, wind and batteries will transform energy faster than most official forecasts allow. He co-authored the RethinkX energy reports that this section examines. His central idea is useful and widely discussed. Many of his specific dated forecasts are still open, and some depend on assumptions that readers should know about before relying on them.
This profile explains the idea, introduces the three reports we reviewed, and sets out how we judge them. It is not an endorsement, and it is not a dismissal. The detailed tests are in Predictions vs Reality: RethinkX's energy forecasts, and the energy argument is explained in The future of energy: from scarcity to abundance?.
Who he is
RethinkX describes Tony Seba as an author, educator, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and co-founder of RethinkX, a think tank that publishes technology disruption reports. In the biography printed in its reports, RethinkX says he teaches at Stanford Continuing Studies, holds a Stanford MBA and an MIT degree in computer science, and wrote the books Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation, Solar Trillions and Winners Take All (RethinkX, Rethinking Energy 2020–2030, author biography; RethinkX, Understanding Stellar Energy, 2025, author biography). We have repeated this from the reports as RethinkX's own description. We have not independently checked these credentials.
The core idea
The reports argue that a technology can disrupt an industry when several technologies improve together on steady cost curves, and that the change can then arrive faster than people expect. The 2020 report describes solar, wind and lithium-ion batteries (it calls them SWB) as such a convergence, whose costs and capabilities have been improving on "consistent and predictable trajectories" (RethinkX, 2020, p. 7). Two features of the argument are worth understanding.
- Cost curves. Costs fall as production grows, so cheaper technology can drive more adoption, which drives costs down further.
- The S-curve. Adoption of a new technology tends to start slowly, speed up, then level off. It is a pattern seen in many technologies. It is a useful way of thinking, not a timetable: where on the curve a technology is, and how steep it gets, has to be measured, not assumed. See the illustrative S-curve on the Future & Foresight page. It is not real data.
Its sharpest claim is that the change is not a like-for-like swap of power stations. The 2020 report argues that, if enough solar and wind is built to cover difficult periods, the system produces surplus electricity at certain times, which it calls "super power", and that this surplus is cheap enough to open up new uses. This is the part of the argument we find most interesting, and it is explained in the energy feature.
Three reports, three different questions
The three reports are separate documents, not editions of one report. They ask different questions and should not be merged into one "Seba prediction".
| Report | Main question | Important boundary |
|---|---|---|
| Rethinking Energy 2020–2030 (Dorr and Seba, October 2020) | Could solar, wind and batteries meet existing electricity demand by 2030? | Three US regional case studies and two years of hourly data; networks excluded. The detailed analysis calls itself an "illustrative limit scenario", not a forecast. |
| The Great Stranding (Dorr and Seba, February 2021) | Could falling use of conventional power stations undermine their finances? | Its "corrected" costs assume future declines in utilisation. They are model results, not observed costs. |
| Understanding Stellar Energy (Dorr, Arbib and Seba, May 2025) | Could a much larger clean-energy system supply far more energy per person? | Keeps existing hydro and nuclear, excludes networks, land, aviation and shipping fuels, and uses US cost benchmarks worldwide. |
Sources: RethinkX reports as above; page references and limits are from our editorial evidence assessment of 7 November 2026 (R20 pp. 7–13, 24–29, 59; R21 pp. 14–18, 20; R25 pp. 63–67).
A point of fairness: the 2035 and 2045 dates in the 2025 report should not automatically be read as a postponed 2030 claim. The first concerns whether existing electricity demand can be supplied, and the second concerns much larger energy services. The scope changed as well as the dates. But fairness runs both ways. Next to its "limit scenario" wording, the 2020 report also makes categorical statements, for example, on the same page (p. 7), that "disruption is now inevitable" and that by 2030 these technologies "will offer the cheapest electricity option for most" of the world. Those are predictions and are tested as such.
How we read a forecast
We use four labels throughout this section.
- Observed: a measurement or estimate of something that has happened, with its date. It can still contain errors.
- Forecast: a statement about what will happen by a stated date.
- Scenario: a model of what could happen under stated assumptions. It is not a prediction unless the authors say it is.
- Unresolved: the deadline has not arrived or the evidence cannot settle the claim.
A competing forecast from the IEA, AEMO or CSIRO is a comparator, not a disproof. And RethinkX's own retrospective claims that it has been right are not treated as independent verification.
What this means for Australia
Australia is not a case study in any of the three reports we reviewed. The 2025 report's published regional case studies do not include an Australian national or National Electricity Market case. So the reports cannot tell us what a dependable, affordable Australian system will cost. That question is addressed by Australian modelling from AEMO and CSIRO, discussed in the energy feature, which supports a renewable-led system but with networks, storage and backup, not a SWB-only design.
About this profile
This page was written from the three RethinkX reports, which we read directly, and from an editorial evidence assessment dated 7 November 2026 that cross-checks them against independent data. The assessment is not a replication of RethinkX's models, and we have not rerun them. Circular Abundance is independent of RethinkX. This is an early version, published so that it can be corrected and improved.