What 5G Means for Energy

The long-awaited rollout of 5G is now underway.

Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile have initiated 5G service in some U.S. cities. And 5G services are also already available in parts of Europe and Asia.

It’s expected that by the end of this year, every major mobile carrier will be offering 5G services nationwide with new phones and plans. By 2024, it’s expected that 1.5 billion people around the world will be connected to 5G networks.

The next generation of mobile technology will upgrade your smartphone with faster speeds and greater connectivity. It will essentially upgrade your cell phone’s speed and connectivity from dial-up to broadband.

But 5G is bigger than just faster smartphones.

5G is expected to propel innovation across multiple fields, including transportation, manufacturing, defense, health care, agriculture, shipping, warehousing, education… the list goes on.

In manufacturing, 5G is already being implemented and experimented with in efforts to improve efficiency, prevent maintenance, and generally lower costs associated with the manufacturing process.

In health care, 5G will offer more customers new access to care outside of traditional hospital environments, provide new methods of delivering treatments and services, and give hospitals much-needed data management programs.

Among the most highly anticipated industries expected to benefit from the proliferation of 5G services are the energy and utility sectors.

What 5G Means to Energy

5G wireless connectivity and speeds are expected to provide higher profitability for energy producers and suppliers, create lower costs and increased accessibility for consumers, and promise significant environmental advantages.

International engineering firm Black and Veatch predicts, “For the utility sector, 5G technology will help unleash the next wave of smart grid features and efficiency through low-cost connections, improved monitoring capabilities and better forecasting of energy needs.”

Smart grid combines the traditional energy grid with better communications and information control to increase efficiency and reduce waste. The various parts of our current electric grid systems communicate with each other in what we call “real time” right now. But what we call “real-time” communication today can take a few seconds or even minutes.

5G will change that.

Faster wireless 5G services will enable energy grids to communicate in real real time to understand usage, predict energy peaks, support load balancing, avoid waste, improve energy distribution, and ultimately reduce energy costs.

With 5G connectivity, utility companies will also be able to capture and analyze data from millions of currently unconnected devices in order to more accurately monitor demand and enable better forecasting of energy needs.

Smart grid systems are already being installed, despite connectivity issues with current 4G technologies being used. But the results are very promising.

By installing smart grid systems, Chattanooga, Tennessee, was able to reduce the duration of one power outage caused by a severe windstorm by over 50%. Doing this saved the utility $1.4 million in operational costs — for just that one storm!

Smart grid systems also allow utility companies to reduce energy waste in quite practical ways. Smart street lighting can automatically dim public lighting when no pedestrians or vehicles are present. This can save on city tax bills and reduce energy waste.

Dr. Jeffery Torrance, vice president of business development for Qualcomm, says:

We are all mindful of becoming more efficient with our energy and with 5G connectivity this can extend to infrastructure that has remained consistent for years. For example, intelligent street lighting, where street lights can dim when no activity is detected, could be a significant saving in both money and wasted electricity. This thinking can be used in other instances, such as smart grids, or smart meters, to help us understand how we consume energy and what we can do to improve.

Smart lighting has begun to be rolled out in cities like San Diego. And again, the results are very encouraging.

By networking the lights, the city of San Diego has saved $250,000 a year in electricity and maintenance costs.

Across the nation, the potential savings from smart street lighting alone is estimated to be more than $1 billion per year.

The evolution of wireless networks toward 5G will also allow utilities and consumers to monitor individual energy use via smart meters.

Smart meters work with smart energy monitors to allow customers to view how much energy they’re using and how much it’s costing them.

Smart meters have already been introduced to many homes around the world using existing 4G telecommunications infrastructure. But with the introduction of 5G, smart meters will be more precise, allowing for more data to be sent and received more often, resulting in a lot more detail for the consumer and service provider.

5G also offers the energy sector a more advanced architecture for security. This will enable utilities to have better features and protocols for authentication, integrity protection, network security, and user confidentiality.

There is much more potential for energy companies to save costs, operate more efficiently, and improve customer service by connecting plants and devices to data processing facilities and each other.

See, 5G is more than just fast cell phones!

It’s the network of the entire future.

That’s why guys like Chris DeHaemer have been sounding off on the investment opportunities.

Trillions of dollars are headed toward 5G. A report published in February by financial services firm Greensill Capital estimated $2.7 trillion will be spent on the rollout of 5G technology by 2020.

$1 trillion of that is needed just for infrastructure upgrades.

DeHaemer says, “5G is as close to a guaranteed winner as you can get. Every major company in the world is going to be pumping money into new 5G networks. It’s not a fad. It’s what’s next.”

He means 5G isn’t like many of the other hyped-up opportunities out there. Markets like cannabis, cryptocurrency, and meatless meat have limited consumer bases. Sure, lots of people smoke weed, love Bitcoin, and want vegan meat. But everyone is going to use 5G.

5G is the new standard.

And the fact is, you’re really not going to even have any other option.

For most people, 5G is just another service provided by their cell phone carrier, like 4G is today.

And sooner or later, like 4G, 5G is the only thing that’s going to be offered.

Fact is, you can’t buy a phone using 2G technology exclusively right now. It’s just not offered.

3G is still around, but it’s quickly disappearing. Verizon says it will shut down all of its 3G networks by the end of this year.

Now, that doesn’t mean you have to (or should) upgrade now. 4G networks will still be supported for the next several years.

But anyone buying a new cell phone or upgrading their plan is sooner or later going to be on the 5G network.

5G isn’t something you’re going to choose.

You can choose to buy cannabis, crypto, meatless meat, gender-neutral air-conditioning, cruelty-free jeans, sustainable lettuce, or whatever…

But 5G is not something you’re really going to be able to choose. It’s what’s going to be offered.

That’s what has guys like DeHaemer so amped up. 5G is a guarantee for investors.

DeHaemer has found a group of companies that control a major share of the infrastructure space that 5G networks are going to need. He says these companies control some 80% of the space major cell carriers like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and others are clamoring to get their hands on.

DeHaemer says, “It’s like they have a monopoly on the hottest real estate of the 5G future.”

He’s found the one subsector that’s virtually a guaranteed winner amid the larger guaranteed winner that is 5G.

Cannabis, crypto, meatless meat… they’ve all done great, and there are still opportunities for growth.

But 5G…

The 5G investment market is what you’ve been waiting for.

“It’s not a fad. It’s what’s next.”

DeHaemer’s 5G subsector and the companies he says have a stranglehold on the entire 5G market are laid out in a recent report published here.

If you’re wise, this is something you’re going to want to check out. Remember, 5G is much bigger than just fast movie downloads. Manufacturing, transportation, health care, defense, consumer electronics and appliances, agriculture, shipping and warehousing, education… all of these and more will see innovation from 5G.

International IT firm Teralink Solutions says, “The biggest impact of 5G connectivity won’t only affect the realm of smartphones. The Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) infrastructure, for instance, have long been held back by the limited latency and download speeds of 4G.”

Over the next several weeks, we plan to bring you more regarding how 5G will transform our lives and how to profit from the transition. So please be on the lookout for that.

For now, I urge you to check out Chris DeHaemer’s report here.

Until next time,

Luke Burgess

As an editor at Energy and Capital, Luke’s analysis and market research reach hundreds of thousands of investors every day. Luke is also a contributing editor of Angel Publishing’s Bull and Bust Report newsletter. There, he helps investors in leveraging the future supply-demand imbalance that he believes could be key to a cyclical upswing in the hard asset markets. For more on Luke, go to his editor’s page.