Growth Measurements
No. 16 | June 16, 2025
More weeks of very noisy news have me thinking not just on the acutely situational present, but also on the slightly longer timeline. Back to the post-Covid-19 awakenings in technology, or to 2019, or to the start of the century.
Extrapolating from the present day into the near future is highly dependent upon how we measure the present day. One way is to measure growth, and then consider how today’s growth becomes tomorrow’s expectation (or alternately, how the future might defy today’s obvious or baseline expectation). Then, time matters: Do we measure it intra-day, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually? In a smoothed way (trailing 12 months) or in a discrete way (every interval mapped in its raw form)? Two monthly mappings coming to mind first. But after the mapping, of course, are the questions we ask based on what we have mapped.
The first monthly series is not even two years old. I have watched Waymo’s paid riderless data (with a particular focus on California) since it first reported figures to the California Public Utilities Commission in August of 2023. That month, Waymo did 12,000 rides. In March of this year, it did 706,000 rides. We can see the gap up in that final month, which is largely attributable to expanding service territory in Silicon Valley. There are many questions about growth:
Is expanding service (a larger physical TAM) the main driver of growth?
Is expanding utilization (more rides per vehicle) the main driver of growth?
How fast that that first expansion go, given regulatory and hardware constraints?
How far can that second expansion go, given fleet O&M, charging, etc?
And related: a deep look at Waymo’s pricing compared to Uber and Lyft (more expensive) and customer preference (still preferred regardless of the higher price).
Next, and a few years further back, is a chart of global power generation as a share of total generation, courtesy of Ember’s updated electricity data explorer. No smoothing here, which shows us solar’s expected seasonality as northern hemisphere installed solar generates proportionally the most in the spring, as days lengthen and total demand is lower than during the summer months. One observation: Shoulder generation (in late summer) of any given year is generally a higher share of global electricity demand than the peak generation (spring) of the year prior. Is that a trend that can, or will, continue? And if not, what interventions would be needed to change it?
And a yearly series, from a talk I delivered in Kristiansand, Norway earlier this month: European gas imports. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian gas pipeline imports plummeted, while other pipeline imports stayed stable. Liquefied natural gas imports, meanwhile, soared. There’s a notable system flexibility at work here, but also a systemic question - what new liabilities does an LNG-focused import regime mean for the continent, and what new vulnerabilities does it create?
And a map, not a time series. Halcyon now has a gas power plant tracker and last week, a project approved in Ohio provided an opportunity to look closely into a frustratingly vague announcement. Power sector veterans will know what it is like to unpack the nesting doll of names and structures behind something called Plato South, part of Project Socrates, developed by Will-Power OH LLC, selling to Sidecat LLC. But there is more than just the names: there’s technology, and timelines, and estimated carbon emissions too.
Read on here for more. And see the map below: there are dozens more assets like this under development right now, all deserving clarity rather than opacity.
Evening reading
My past weekend’s reading, for your week ahead.
Probable Futures’ 2025 Progress Report. Wonderfully written, as is anything with Spencer Glendon’s pen behind it.
“Building societal climate literacy and encouraging new mindsets are ambitious goals that resist precise measurement.” linkThe IEA’s latest World Energy Investment report, which projects $3.3 trillion of investment this year, up 2% in real terms. link
How to Redraw A City, by Anya Martin.
“Japan faced some of the world’s toughest planning problems. It solved them by letting homeowners replan whole neighborhoods privately by supermajority vote.” linkHarry Benham on The Seagull.
“(as of May 2025) that iconic vehicle now undercuts not just its rivals such as- The gasoline Toyota Yaris ($15,000),
- or its challenger Chinese EV the Wuling Bingo ($9,000)
but also a mid-spec 16 inch MacBook Pro (Space Black) laptop computer, with 4TB of storage and some screen enhancements ($7,850). link
Zeke Hausfather’s explainer on how human-caused aerosols ‘mask’ global warming, for Carbon Brief. link
Albert Wenger’s (Union Square Ventures) thoughtful and long-running (since 2008) series, Continuations. link
Meditations on many things, including a Star Trek Vision for energy.
Questions or comments?
You can reach me here.
