🏆2025 Year-End Wrap-Up
Product Updates
Energy Analyst
We’ve released a new version of Energy Analyst, our AI-powered regulatory and operations large language model, fine tuned on over 30k energy related regulatory documents from the US, UK, EU, and South Africa. We are currently deploying it as a chatbot supporting intergeneration applications navigating the South African Local Government Association’s (SALGA) small scale embedded generation applicant process. This update introduces conversation threading and several new features, developed during recent large-scale testing.
Alongside the release, we will be publishing a pre-print of our research paper on ResearchGate in early January 2026, giving early visibility into where our Energy Analyst research is heading and how we’re advancing applied AI for energy infrastructure. Our research partners on the project include Sustainable Energy Africa (South African non-profit), SALGA, and the University of Johannesburg.
More to come next year as the research moves toward peer review.
Ona Platform: AI-Driven Energy Asset Management
Over the past few months, our work across live portfolios has reinforced a core insight: the biggest constraint in energy operations isn’t generation — it’s fragmented intelligence.
OEM portals, SCADA systems, spreadsheets, and manual reports still operate in silos, slowing decisions and driving reactive maintenance. In response, we’ve continued refining the Ona Intelligence Layer to unify operational, financial, market, and compliance data into a single, real-time view.
This work underpins recent improvements across predictive maintenance, faster fault detection, automated compliance, and trading readiness and directly informs our ongoing research and platform releases.
To explore more on the Fragmented Intelligence Problem, read the full article to explore the Fragmented Intelligence Problem and view our update to see how the Ona Intelligence Layer brings it together
Partnerships
Building South Africa’s Energy Intelligence — Together with the University of Johannesburg
We’re proud to partner with the University of Johannesburg (UJ) to advance applied AI research for renewable energy infrastructure in South Africa.
Working with UJ’s Institute for Intelligent Systems, this collaboration focuses on real-world deployment of predictive and decision AI across distributed solar and wind assets. Engineering students gain hands-on experience by contributing directly to Asoba’s platform, while co-developing reproducible methods for AI-driven energy operations.
This partnership strengthens local skills, builds sovereign energy intelligence, and supports a smarter, more resilient grid for South Africa’s clean-energy future.
Events
Asoba at the NBI x Ninety One SA Climate Summit 2025
Asoba joined Ninety One and the National Business Initiative (NBI) at the Fueling the Just Transition showcase, highlighting South Africa’s leading early-stage climate innovators. It was inspiring to stand alongside EWaste Africa, Sonke Retail, Samanjalo Holdings, ABALOBI, MycoSure, and others, all driving practical solutions for a greener, more resilient economy.
Events like these demonstrate how collaboration and innovation are shaping South Africa’s Just Transition in real-time.
Read our full blog post on how Asoba is powering Africa’s distributed, intelligent energy future.
G20 / South Africa Climate Summit
Asoba’s founder, Shingai Samudzi, attended the G20 / South Africa Climate Summit in Johannesburg, a landmark event shaping global economic and climate priorities.
The G20 plays a defining role in establishing the foundations of global economic stability and climate coordination. As one of the world’s most influential platforms, it continues to drive commitments such as the Pact for the Future and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Agenda 2030) frameworks that directly impact climate action, energy access, and sustainable growth across Africa.
The summit brought together leaders, policymakers, and innovators to align on the future of climate finance, clean energy infrastructure, and global cooperation.
These conversations are critical to ensuring Africa’s clean energy transition is intelligence-led, inclusive, and globally connected.
🔥 AI, Energy and Geopolitics: 2025 in Review
Africa
South Africa launched wholesale electricity market (SAWEM) November 2025, ending Eskom's century-long monopoly—IPPs can now sell directly to consumers with 50% lower costs, while Eskom litigation challenges trading licenses
Sudan lost 40% of energy generation capacity as RSF destroyed Khartoum power stations (June 2025), while JNIM blockaded Mali towns banning fuel imports from 4 countries (September 2025)
Cassava Technologies deployed Africa's first GPU-as-a-Service across South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, Morocco via $700M Nvidia partnership—only 5% of African AI practitioners had GPU access before deployment, with GPU costs representing 75% of Kenya's GDP per capita
Alliance of Sahel States (Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso) withdrew from ECOWAS January 2025, disrupting regional energy cooperation frameworks as Mission 300 targets connecting 300 million to electricity by 2030
Americas
AI data centers drove PJM capacity prices to $329.17/MW (2026-27) from $28.92/MW (2024-25)—10x increase causing Baltimore bills to jump $17/month, with wholesale electricity up 267% near data centers since 2020
U.S. data center electricity demand projected to rise from 4% (2025) to 6.7-12% of total grid by 2028, with data centers consuming 26% of Virginia's electricity supply and straining PJM grid by $9.3 billion (2025-26)
Solar dominated 53% of new U.S. capacity in 2023 for first time in 80 years, adding 33 GW in 2025, while battery storage doubled to 29 GW with policy rollbacks reducing renewable investment 18% in H1
Grid integration delays and interconnection queue backlogs causing multiyear deployment delays in Northern Virginia, as Texas SB-6 mandates $100k transmission study fees for loads exceeding 75 MW
Asia
China added 210 GW solar + 50 GW wind in H1 2025 alone (doubling prior year), with May seeing 93 GW solar + 26 GW installed—nearly 100 panels/second and 1 turbine every 10 minutes
China's wind/solar capacity (1.4 TW) overtook thermal capacity for first time in Q1 2025, supplying 22.5% of electricity (up from 18% in Q1 2024), while operating 510 GW renewables under construction
China saw first emissions decline in May 2025 despite rising energy demand, with 73% of global utility-scale solar/wind construction (510 GW of 1.3 TW pipeline) concentrated in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia
India's renewable investment reached $11.8 billion in H1 2025 driven by solar+wind+storage auctions, with government deploying 18,600+ GPUs under ₹10,300 crore AI mission targeting 360-380 GW renewable capacity by 2030
Europe
EU renewables overtook fossil fuels generating 48% of electricity in 2024 (up from 41% in 2022), while offshore wind forecast revised down 25%+ due to supply chain challenges and project cancellations
Solar output surged 20.7% year-over-year in OECD H1 2025, with Germany adding 8.6 GW renewables (Jan-July) but falling short of 1,650 MW/month solar pace needed for 2030 targets
Curtailment levels rising across Germany, UK, Ireland as negative price hours surged during peak solar generation, signaling grid flexibility shortfalls despite 78 GW record wind/solar additions in 2024
EU launched InvestAI with €110 billion commitments targeting 450 GW renewable additions through 2030, while REPowerEU plan accelerates permitting amid grid expansion delays and local manufacturing bottlenecks
Quote of the Year
I just have to tell you, folks, I think the load is being overstated. We need to pump the brakes here.
It’s funny how often actual grid operators are excluded from mainstream conversations about power grids. Dominguez expressed skepticism on Constellation’s 2025Q1 earnings call that there was actual demand for the volume of electricity for compute that AI companies have been pushing in their AI hype.
2025 has been an incredible year, with our adventure kicking into high gear as we embark on a journey in 2026 of collaborative AI research with national electricity stakeholders in South Africa.
We look forward to bringing you more from the intersecting worlds of AI, energy, and geopolitics in the new year as we sign off on this one.
Till next time,