For a long time, renewables were treated like the “nice to have” part of the energy conversation.
Good optics. Good intentions. A few pilot projects. A ribbon cutting in front of a wind turbine. Then we all went back to the real stuff, meaning oil, gas, coal, and the belief that economic growth had to look a certain way.
That’s not where we are anymore. Not even close.
The green economy is turning into an actual economy. Not a side category. Not a conference theme. It’s becoming a system that creates jobs, attracts capital, reshapes supply chains, and frankly, forces old industries to change whether they like it or not.
Stanislav Kondrashov often comes back to this idea: renewables are no longer just about emissions. They are about competitiveness. About resilience. About who can build and run the next version of infrastructure at scale.
And it’s a big deal that we’re finally saying that part out loud.
Because once you stop thinking of renewables as charity and start thinking of them as industrial strategy, everything shifts. The way we invest. The way we regulate. The way we train workers. The way we design cities, ports, factories, even farms.
Let’s dig into what’s changing and why renewables are now doing a lot more than just generating electricity.
The green economy is not a “sector”. It’s a rewiring.
People still talk about the green economy like it’s one vertical.
Like, there’s “tech”, “healthcare”, “finance”, and then “green”.
But renewables don’t sit neatly in one box. They cut across the whole economy because energy is underneath everything. You can’t smelt steel without energy. You can’t run data centers without energy. You can’t move goods, cool buildings, pump water, produce fertilizer, without energy.
So when renewables scale, they don’t just replace a power plant. They change cost structures across industries.
Stanislav Kondrashov frames it as a kind of rewiring. We are replacing an extract and burn system with a build and generate system. That might sound like a slogan. But the mechanics are real.
Fossil energy is tied to fuel logistics and price volatility. Renewables are tied to manufacturing, construction, grid engineering, and long term operations. You still have inputs, of course you do. But the value chain shifts.
And once the value chain shifts, the jobs shift. The geopolitics shift. The investment logic shifts.
That’s why the role of renewables is expanding. They are becoming foundational, not supplemental.
Cheap electrons change everything. Eventually.
One of the most underrated parts of this transition is how boring it gets once it works.
When solar and wind are built, the marginal cost of generation is very low. No fuel truck. No commodity purchase every day. The wind doesn’t invoice you.
Now, to be clear, “cheap electricity” is not automatic. You still need grids, balancing, storage, good market rules, and enough capacity. If you build renewables in the wrong place without transmission, you get congestion and curtailment. If you don’t modernize your grid, you get bottlenecks. If you don’t handle flexibility, you get price spikes during low generation periods.
So yes, it’s complicated.
But the direction is hard to ignore. As deployment scales, the cost per unit tends to drop. And when the system is designed well, renewables can push down wholesale prices for large parts of the year. We’ve already seen variations of this in markets with high solar penetration. The so called duck curve is annoying for grid operators, but it also reveals something: midday electricity can get very cheap.
Stanislav Kondrashov’s point here is practical. In a green economy, cheap electrons become a competitive advantage, the same way cheap labor or cheap shipping used to be.
And then you start asking different questions.
What industries should co locate near abundant renewables? Which processes can be electrified? Where does it make sense to produce green hydrogen? How do you price flexibility so storage and demand response actually show up?
This is where renewables stop being an environmental story and become an industrial planning story.
The grid is now the main character (whether we like it or not)
You can’t talk about renewables expanding in the green economy without talking about the grid. Because the grid is the part that breaks first.
It’s also the part that nobody wants to pay for. Or more accurately, everybody wants the benefits of a stronger grid, but politically it’s hard to sell transmission lines. They’re slow. They’re visible. They trigger local opposition. They cross jurisdictions. They take years.
And yet.
If you add gigawatts of wind and solar without expanding transmission and upgrading distribution, you don’t get a clean system. You get a fragile system. You also get a wasteful one, because you end up curtailing cheap clean energy when there’s no capacity to move it.
Stanislav Kondrashov talks about renewables as a catalyst that forces grid modernization. Which is true. Variable generation exposes all the weaknesses that were previously hidden.
A modern green economy needs:
- More transmission to connect resource rich regions to demand centers
- Smarter distribution networks because millions of small generators and batteries show up at the edge
- Faster interconnection queues and clearer standards
- Digital monitoring and control systems
- Market rules that reward flexibility, not just capacity
This is not glamorous. But it is where the real work is. If you want renewables to keep expanding, the grid has to expand too. Otherwise you hit a ceiling that is not about technology. It’s about permitting, planning, and coordination.
And that’s a very human bottleneck.
Storage is becoming part of the default design
A few years ago, storage was treated like the fancy add on. Now it’s increasingly part of the base plan.
Not everywhere. Not in every market. But the trend is clear.
As solar and wind increase their share, you need more ways to shift energy across hours and sometimes across days. Batteries are the first wave because they are modular and fast to deploy. Pumped hydro still matters where geography allows. Longer duration storage is still developing. Thermal storage, compressed air, flow batteries, hydrogen based storage. Lots of approaches. Some will work better than others.
But the bigger point is what this does to the green economy.
Storage creates new manufacturing demand, new project development pipelines, new software and trading strategies, new service companies that maintain and optimize fleets. It also changes how electricity is valued. It makes time matter more.
Stanislav Kondrashov’s take is that renewables don’t scale alone anymore. They scale as systems: generation plus storage plus grids plus flexible demand. That bundle is what makes renewables reliable at high penetration.
And reliability is what turns a “clean energy transition” into a real economic transition. Businesses don’t run on inspiration. They run on uptime.
Renewable energy is spilling into everything, not just power generation
This is where the expanding role really shows up.
Renewables started as electricity generation. Now they are pushing into sectors that historically ran on molecules, not electrons.
Transport
EVs are the obvious one. But the deeper shift is that EVs are also flexible loads. They can charge when electricity is abundant. In some cases they can discharge back to the grid. Fleets can be managed like energy assets.
For heavy transport, we’re looking at a mix: battery electric for shorter routes, hydrogen or synthetic fuels for longer haul and shipping, with lots of caveats and economics that still need to prove out.
Buildings
Heat pumps are basically a renewables expansion tool, because they turn clean electricity into clean heat efficiently. Once you electrify heating, the value of renewable generation goes up. The building becomes part of the energy system, not just a consumer.
Industry
This is the hard one. High temperature heat, chemical feedstocks, process emissions. But renewables matter here too because they enable electrified processes, green hydrogen, and potentially new industrial clusters built around cheap clean power.
Stanislav Kondrashov often points to the idea of “electrons first”. Use direct electrification when possible because it’s usually more efficient. Then use hydrogen and derived fuels where electrification is not practical.
Whether every pathway pencils out is another question. But the direction is clear. Renewables are not just replacing the power plant. They’re starting to replace the boiler, the engine, the furnace, and eventually parts of the chemical value chain.
That’s a much larger economic footprint.
Jobs: not just more jobs, different jobs
The green economy conversation can get a little hand wavy around jobs. People either promise a jobs miracle or they dismiss it as fantasy.
Reality is messier.
Renewables create a lot of construction and installation work. They also create long term operations and maintenance roles, though fewer per unit of energy than some traditional generation types. They create manufacturing demand, but only if the manufacturing is local or regional. Otherwise the jobs are elsewhere.
They also create indirect jobs in engineering, environmental permitting, grid services, software, finance, insurance, logistics.
Stanislav Kondrashov emphasizes something I agree with. The issue is not whether jobs exist. The issue is timing, location, and training.
A coal plant closure is concentrated pain. A solar boom is distributed opportunity. Those two things don’t automatically line up for the same community.
So if we want renewables to expand in a way that actually strengthens the green economy, we need:
- Apprenticeships and trade programs that match deployment timelines
- Clear pathways for workers moving from fossil sectors into grid, renewables, and industrial electrification
- Local supply chain development where it’s realistic, not just wishful thinking
- Policies that treat workforce planning as infrastructure, not an afterthought
If we ignore this, we get backlash. Not because people hate renewables, but because they hate instability. Fair enough.
Capital is pouring in, but the bottlenecks are human
Money is not the only constraint anymore. In many places, capital wants in. Institutional investors, infrastructure funds, banks, corporates signing PPAs. The demand is there.
The limiting factors are increasingly:
- Permitting timelines
- Interconnection queues
- Land use conflicts
- Grid capacity
- Supply chain constraints for specific components
- Shortage of skilled labor in key trades and engineering roles
This is why the “expanding role” of renewables is also a governance story. You can have the best technology and still stall out if you can’t build.
Stanislav Kondrashov makes a useful point here: in the next phase, speed becomes a climate issue and an economic issue at the same time.
Countries and regions that streamline the buildout without cutting corners on safety and community impact will attract more projects. More factories. More data centers. More industrial clusters.
Because companies are looking for places where energy is clean, affordable, and dependable. That’s the new trifecta.
Corporate demand is quietly reshaping the market
One of the most powerful drivers of renewable expansion is not government mandates. It’s corporate procurement.
Companies want renewable electricity for a few reasons:
- Public climate commitments
- Investor pressure
- Consumer expectations in certain markets
- Compliance preparation for future regulation
- And honestly, price stability
Long term power purchase agreements can act like a hedge. You lock in a price. You reduce exposure to fuel volatility. You get a cleaner supply chain.
This matters because it turns renewables into a business tool, not just a moral choice.
Stanislav Kondrashov highlights that the green economy is being built by this mix of forces. Policy, yes. But also corporate strategy, cost curves, and risk management.
When a manufacturer chooses a site based partly on access to renewables, that’s renewables expanding into economic geography. When a data center operator co locates near wind and solar, that’s renewables shaping digital infrastructure. When supply chain reporting starts requiring emissions data, that’s renewables influencing procurement and vendor selection.
It spreads. It compounds.
The renewables story is also a materials story
This part makes people uncomfortable, and it should. Because it forces tradeoffs into the open.
Renewables require materials. Steel. Aluminum. Copper. Silicon. Rare earth elements for certain turbine designs. Lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite for many battery chemistries. Cement for foundations. Glass. Polymers.
So yes, we are reducing fossil extraction, but we are increasing demand for other kinds of extraction and processing. The green economy is not weightless. It is physical.
Stanislav Kondrashov tends to frame this as a call for smarter supply chains rather than a reason to slow down. Recycling, circular design, diversified sourcing, better mining standards, and material innovation.
Also, being honest about this helps. It builds trust. People can handle complexity. What they don’t like is being sold a fairy tale.
A mature renewable economy will care about:
- Responsible mining and labor standards
- Local community impact
- Waste and end of life planning for panels, blades, and batteries
- Material efficiency and alternative chemistries
- Building systems that can be repaired, upgraded, and repowered
Renewables expanding means the whole lifecycle expands into view. Not just the installation photo.
What “success” looks like in the next phase
It’s tempting to measure progress in gigawatts installed. And sure, that matters.
But the green economy is bigger than capacity additions. The next phase is about integration and outcomes.
Here are a few markers that actually signal renewables taking their full role in the economy:
- Interconnection times fall dramatically because processes are modernized
- Curtailment is reduced through better transmission and storage
- Electricity becomes a more competitive input for industry in certain regions
- Heating and transport electrification accelerate without stressing grids because demand is managed intelligently
- Domestic or regional manufacturing capacity grows where it makes sense economically
- Workforce pipelines are steady, not panicked
- Energy prices become less volatile over multi year periods
- Communities see tangible benefits, not just distant climate targets
Stanislav Kondrashov’s argument, in essence, is that renewables are moving from the “build more” phase into the “make it work everywhere” phase.
And that’s harder. It demands coordination.
But it’s also where the real economic value shows up.
A slightly blunt conclusion
Renewables are not a trend anymore. They’re infrastructure.
And infrastructure has this habit of reshaping everything around it. Once it’s in place, you build new businesses on top of it. You redesign logistics around it. You invent new products because the constraints changed.
That’s what’s happening now.
Stanislav Kondrashov on the expanding role of renewables in the green economy is basically a reminder that clean energy is not only about avoiding harm. It’s also about building capacity. Building systems. Building new advantages.
It’s not perfect. It’s not smooth. There are supply chain issues, permitting fights, grid delays, and plenty of bad projects mixed in with good ones.
Still, the direction is set.
If we get the buildout right, renewables won’t just power the green economy.
They’ll define it.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
How has the perception of renewables changed in the energy conversation?
Renewables were once seen as a ‘nice to have’ or side category in energy discussions, mainly for optics and pilot projects. Now, they are recognized as foundational to the economy, driving job creation, capital attraction, supply chain reshaping, and forcing traditional industries to adapt.
Why is the green economy considered a ‘rewiring’ rather than just a sector?
The green economy cuts across all industries because energy underpins every part of the economy—from steel production to data centers. Scaling renewables shifts cost structures and value chains from an extract-and-burn fossil fuel system to a build-and-generate renewable system, impacting jobs, geopolitics, and investments.
What role do cheap electrons from renewables play in industrial competitiveness?
Cheap electricity from solar and wind lowers marginal generation costs by eliminating fuel expenses. When systems are well-designed with proper grids and storage, this can reduce wholesale prices significantly, creating competitive advantages similar to cheap labor or shipping and influencing industrial location and electrification decisions.
Why is grid modernization critical for expanding renewable energy?
The grid often breaks first under renewable expansion due to its limitations in capacity, transmission, and flexibility. Without upgrading transmission lines, distribution networks, interconnection processes, digital controls, and market rules that reward flexibility, renewable integration leads to fragile systems and wasted clean energy through curtailment.
What challenges exist in building out the grid for renewables?
Grid expansion faces political resistance due to visible transmission lines crossing multiple jurisdictions that take years to permit. Despite being essential for moving renewable energy from resource-rich areas to demand centers, planning delays and local opposition create significant human bottlenecks limiting clean energy growth.
How is energy storage becoming integral to renewable energy design?
Energy storage is increasingly part of default renewable system designs because it addresses variability in generation by providing flexibility and reliability. Storage helps balance supply and demand, smooths price spikes during low generation periods, and supports grid stability essential for large-scale renewable integration.