TWO vast and deep revolutions are sweeping the world and transforming our relationship with things that we otherwise take for granted.

One is the revolution in power generation, where the proliferation of solar panels is rendering large-scale investments in grid-based infrastructure obsolete. That revolution is now set to undergo its first major evolution once batteries follow suit, first as electric vehicles and then for home use. The second major revolution is digital payments that are rendering the old world of cash obsolete.

Both revolutions bring enormous promise and can transform our world and lived experience in ways that we can barely imagine right now. Think back to the year 2000; mobile phones were beginning to become ubiquitous.

Who could have imagined back then that one day you would be able to make payments through one of these devices? Yet here we are, using our banking apps to transfer money and make bill payments.

The telecommunications revolution transformed our world and lived experience in ways so profound it was difficult to imagine at the start. Something along the same lines is happening all over again in the world of electricity generation and digital payments.

The starting point for the solar power revolution was probably the presidency of Barack Obama, who made it a central plank of his campaignin2008tospuralongtheburgeoningrevolution in renewable energy. They launched the famous `moonshot initiative` in which reaching `grid parity` in the price of a single unit of installed solar-generated electricity was the goal. That goal was crossed somewhere mid-decade in the 2010s. But then something happened that caused the revolution to pass out of American hands. China became the world`s largest supplier of solar panels and as prices dropped solar installations became ubiquitous around the world. In 2015 you probably knew very few people who had any solar panels installed in their home. By 2025 chances are most people you know, who live in houses, have some solar panels installed.

This was step one in the revolution. The problem was storage. We can generate electricity athome using solar panels, but we must either sell it back to the grid oruseit asitis generated.So now step two in the revolution is knocking on our doors: batteries. The price of large batteries is dropping very fast, and soon a system using solar panels combined with a battery will reach `grid parity`, meaning its price will be low enough to compete with grid-supplied electricity. That is when the revolution really takes off because it allows people to dissociate themselves from the grid altogether.

What will spur this revolution along is electric vehicles. Think of an electric vehicle as a battery on wheels. When home, you can plug it into your home electric system and use it as a UPS back-up. If you need to, you can order a battery to your home for a few hours to use only as back-up for the duration of a power outage. This would be the beginning. With the ability to generate electricity in our homes, and distribute it with batteries on wheels, the whole model of IPP-based power generation and grid-based distribution starts to look obsolete. In time, the grid infrastructure will go the way of landline telephone wires.

All those thousands of miles of telephone wires are still there, buried underground, relics of a bygone era when we relied on wires for our telecommunication needs. Now something similar is happening in the world of power generation, and as the revolution powers ahead, it will increasingly marginalise the grid, the large power generation plants and the precious `fixed costs` of our power bureaucracy. The decade ahead will see this transformation reach and cross the tipping point.

The other big revolution poses fewer chal-lenges to rethinking old schemes. There is growing momentum behind digital payments around the world, and even in Pakistan. The solar revolution has advanced rapidly here because the grid had left a large segment of the population underserved. Those are the people who are driving solar offtake the most in this country, a fact that conveniently liberates policymakers from investing in increasing the reach of the grid.

Digital payments don`t pose any threats to existing investments. That revolution does not threaten to leave behind large stranded assets.

So that is one less obstacle standing in its way.

But it needs to upend ingrained habits. So far, at the retaillevel,the corner store operator cannot figure out what problem that technology is solving. Solar panels solve the problem of serving underserved segments of the population.

Cash also finds a home in Pakistan due to the very large undocumented sector, the predatory nature of the state`s taxation policies now (amplified in the latest budget), and the very high prevalence of rackets involving speculation, hoarding and smuggling where a large number of income-generating activities are clustered.

Agriculture markets are massively vulnerable to the suppliers of capital. Land markets are riddled through with builders and developers who cater to speculative buyers. Fuel and consumer goods are smuggled in quantities large enough to dent formal sector operations in these sectors.

Digitising payments in these rackets makes them vulnerable to state surveillance. And for that reason cash will find an enduring place in the economy.

But the revolution will power ahead nonetheless, especially as technologies for secure cashless transactions permeate further. In time, the rackets can slow down the revolution, but they can`t halt it altogether. What would be required though, in both instances, is active state support to drive both revolutions rather than try to apply the brakes in a vain attempt to save their `fixed costs` and doomed stranded assets. For this, our policymakers will need to show they have the foresight to see the changes coming, and the mind to envision the promise of the future. • The writer is a business and economy joumalist.