Inside the Energy Transition: A Conversation with a Leading Energy Market Research Strategist
Introduction
The global energy and power sector is in the midst of a transformation of historic proportions. The accelerating shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, the rise of energy storage, the digitalization of grid infrastructure, and the growing complexity of energy policy across jurisdictions are creating both enormous opportunity and daunting analytical challenges for market researchers working in this space. We sat down with Dr. Miriam Osei-Bonsu, a fictional but representative composite of leading energy market research strategists, to discuss how research methodologies must evolve to keep pace with the energy transition.
Dr. Osei-Bonsu has spent over 15 years conducting market research and strategic analysis across the power generation, grid infrastructure, and clean energy technology sectors. She has advised energy utilities, independent power producers, private equity funds, and government energy agencies across Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia.
Q: The energy sector is changing at an extraordinary pace. How has that changed the kind of research questions your clients are asking?
Dr. Osei-Bonsu: It has changed them fundamentally. Five years ago, the majority of research briefs I received were about incremental questions — how to optimise an existing coal or gas fleet, where to site a new combined-cycle plant, how to price a power purchase agreement. Today, the questions are genuinely disruptive in nature. Clients are asking: when will solar-plus-storage reach grid parity in our market? How will distributed energy resources change the role of the transmission grid? What is the addressable market for green hydrogen in industrial decarbonisation? These are not questions that existing market models answer well, because we are forecasting transitions that have no precise historical precedent.
The global renewable energy market was valued at approximately $1.1 trillion in 2023 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 17.2% through 2030, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and BloombergNEF. But those headline numbers mask enormous heterogeneity across technologies, geographies, and value chain positions. A solar module manufacturer in China faces a completely different competitive dynamic than a utility-scale solar developer in Texas or a rooftop solar installer in Germany. Research that treats renewable energy as a monolithic market will mislead rather than inform.
"The energy transition is not one market. It is dozens of overlapping markets, each with distinct demand drivers, competitive structures, and risk profiles. Researchers who understand that complexity will command a significant premium." — Dr. Miriam Osei-Bonsu
Q: What methodological challenges are most specific to energy sector research?
Dr. Osei-Bonsu: There are several that I encounter constantly. The first is the long asset life cycle problem. Energy infrastructure assets — power plants, transmission lines, substations — operate for 20 to 40 years. This means that research informing investment decisions needs to take credible views on market conditions two or three decades into the future, which is an almost impossible methodological challenge. We end up working with scenario planning frameworks rather than point forecasts, following approaches developed by organisations like the Rocky Mountain Institute and the International Energy Agency in their World Energy Outlook publications. Communicating the inherent uncertainty in those scenarios to clients who want definitive numbers is one of the most important — and most difficult — parts of the job.
The second challenge is data fragmentation. The energy sector is one of the most extensively regulated industries in the world, which means data is collected by hundreds of different regulatory bodies — FERC and EIA in the US, ENTSO-E and ACER in Europe, the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission in India — each with different reporting standards, time lags, and levels of granularity. Building comprehensive market intelligence requires integrating across all of these sources, which is a major data engineering challenge before you even get to analysis. Platforms like S&P Global Commodity Insights, Wood Mackenzie, and Enerdata have built significant businesses around solving exactly this data aggregation problem.
The third is what I call the policy discontinuity risk. Energy markets are profoundly shaped by government policy — feed-in tariffs, renewable portfolio standards, carbon pricing mechanisms, grid connection rules. Policy can shift dramatically with changes in government, as we saw with Inflation Reduction Act incentives becoming a focal point of political debate in the US, or with the varying pace of nuclear energy policy reversals across Europe after the energy crisis of 2022. Researchers need to incorporate political economy analysis into their work, which is a competency that most traditional market research firms do not possess internally.
Q: How are you using new technologies — AI, machine learning, satellite data — in your energy research practice?
Dr. Osei-Bonsu: We are using them extensively, and the applications are genuinely transformative. Satellite-based solar irradiance and wind resource mapping has completely changed how we assess renewable energy potential in markets where ground-based measurement data is sparse — which describes most of Sub-Saharan Africa, much of South and Southeast Asia, and significant parts of Latin America. Companies like Solargis and 3TIER by Vaisala provide high-resolution resource data that enables much more granular site suitability analysis than was possible even five years ago.
Machine learning is being applied to electricity demand forecasting with impressive results. Traditional econometric models struggle to capture the non-linear interactions between temperature, economic activity, and electricity consumption that determine peak demand — the most commercially critical variable for power market participants. ML models trained on granular smart meter data can capture these patterns much more accurately. We are also using natural language processing tools to systematically analyse regulatory filings, policy consultation documents, and energy company investor presentations at a scale that would be impossible manually. This allows us to identify emerging regulatory trends and investment themes much earlier than traditional research approaches would permit.
Q: What advice would you give to a market researcher entering the energy sector for the first time?
Dr. Osei-Bonsu: Three pieces of advice. First, learn the physics. You do not need to be an electrical engineer, but you need to understand the basics of how power systems work — generation, transmission, distribution, storage, demand response. Without that foundation, you will not be able to assess the credibility of the assumptions embedded in the market models you are working with, and clients will quickly lose confidence in your analysis.
Second, build regulatory literacy as a core competency. Read the IEA, IRENA, and relevant national energy regulatory authority publications systematically. Follow the UNFCCC process. Understand what NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) mean for energy investment pipelines in different markets. The energy transition is fundamentally a policy-driven phenomenon, and researchers who cannot navigate the regulatory landscape will always be operating with incomplete information.
Third, invest in scenario planning methodology. The Shell Scenario Planning approach, the IEA's Stated Policies / Announced Pledges / Net Zero scenario framework, and the approaches developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are all important reference points. Learn how to construct internally consistent scenarios, how to identify signposts that indicate which scenario is unfolding, and how to communicate scenario-based analysis to clients in a way that is useful for decision-making rather than paralyzing.
Q: Where do you see the biggest research opportunity in energy markets over the next five years?
Dr. Osei-Bonsu: Without hesitation — energy storage and flexibility markets. Battery storage, pumped hydro, demand response, vehicle-to-grid, green hydrogen — the question of how the grid balances variable renewable generation is the defining technical and commercial challenge of the energy transition, and the market intelligence available to investors and developers in this space remains surprisingly thin. The global battery energy storage system market alone is projected to grow from approximately $10 billion in 2023 to over $45 billion by 2030, per Wood Mackenzie. That growth trajectory, combined with rapidly evolving technology costs, business model innovation, and complex regulatory treatment across jurisdictions, creates an extraordinary research opportunity for analysts willing to develop deep expertise in grid flexibility markets. That is where I am focusing the majority of my practice development right now.
Closing Thoughts
Dr. Osei-Bonsu's insights reflect a broader truth about energy sector market research: it rewards specialists who combine analytical rigour with genuine domain expertise. As the energy transition accelerates, the demand for high-quality, decision-grade intelligence will only intensify — creating significant opportunity for researchers willing to invest in building the technical, regulatory, and methodological capabilities this complex and consequential industry demands.