Why and how business must shift tactics — by Anthony Milewsiki in FastCompany
For decades, just-in-time procurement was treated as a triumph of modern business. Inventory was minimized, capital was freed up, and global supply chains were optimized for speed and efficiency. If something was needed, it could be ordered. If prices moved, they could be hedged. If disruptions occurred, they were assumed to be temporary.
That model worked—until the energy transition exposed its limits.
The clean-energy economy was built on an assumption that proved dangerously optimistic: That critical commodities would always be available when needed, at predictable prices, through familiar market mechanisms. That assumption shaped everything from EV rollout timelines to grid-expansion plans to climate policy targets. And it was wrong.
The bottleneck in the energy transition isn’t technology. It’s materials.
The transition was planned like software, but runs on atoms
Digital thinking shaped the innovation culture over the past two decades. Software scales quickly. Capacity can be spun up on demand. Constraints are largely human or computational.
But the energy transition is not a software problem. It’s an industrial one.
Electric vehicles are powered by and run on lithium, nickel, copper, graphite, and rare earths. Wind turbines and transmission lines require enormous volumes of steel and copper. Solar panels depend on polysilicon, silver, and specialty metals. None of these materials is produced instantly, and most require years—often decades—of planning, permitting, financing, and construction.
Yet procurement strategies remained rooted in a world treating materials as commodities in the narrowest sense as interchangeable, liquid, and always available.
