Should we imagine unlimited electricity?
Insights from TPEX consultancy for decision makers.
As a energy crisis occurs what if we had abundant energy?
Written SH on 2022-10-24.
In future . Tagged politics energy uk
The perceived climate crisis combined with the cost of living crisis has resulted in an increased awareness as to the dependency and use of energy by businesses, citizens and government. The obvious response, particularly driven by the energy price shock and it’s associated market signals, has been to seek to reduce energy use. Reinhard remarks on this,
It’s no wonder that many people... either implicitly or explicitly have taken a stance against increased energy consumption.Reinhardt, B., 2022. Making energy too cheap to meter.. online.
While a conservation first approach is intrinsically valuable as it allows for immediate savings and efficiency gains it does lead to an energy constrained future unless future energy generation strategies are also considered.
Energy creates a ceiling on what we can do – Leonardo da Vinci could never have implemented his famous helicopter designs with the energy technology available at the time.Reinhardt, B., 2022. Making energy too cheap to meter.. online.
A future rich with highly capable and powerful automated processes governed and driven by sensor rich powerful artificial intelligence’s is likely to be a significant consumer of electrical energy. Would humanity being willing to pass up on this opportunity and also other yet to be imagined or realised technologies just to save electricity? Of course not! It is even imaginable that a future dominated by electrical usage constraint could lead to terrifying outcomes where reducing the number of uses becomes attractive.
Consequently while energy conservation is an appropriate immediate step to take, perhaps due to short term-ism in government thinking, it cannot be the foundation of a long-term solution. A perhaps unintentional, yet grand, energy conservation experiment has actually been occurring in the UK with the shift to LED lighting changing the typical energy use of a UK home. This makes the home charging of electric vehicles entirely practical but has still led to this current energy crisis. The smart grid offers yet more valuable conservation but perhaps what we really need is greater ambition on the supply side.
Greater ambition on the supply side must be informed by the climate change crisis and its foundations are likely. Significant renewables generation build out with substantial energy storage on a pan-national scale combined with additional power interconnects. Additional nuclear generation capabilities to provide base load and generate sought abundance. Research and Investment into experimental technologies is also critical if an ongoing age of abundance in electrical power is the preferred outcome.
...Capital, maintenance, and infrastructure costs are real. Energy will always cost money... but we could drive it to a point where, like data plans, you could pay a flat fee for as much of it as you can use – in other words, make it ‘too cheap to meter’.Reinhardt, B., 2022. Making energy too cheap to meter.. online.
Now imagine a world transformed by the abundance of electrical power, increased communication and travel, weapons of incredible power, terraforming experiments on parts of earth, increase space travel, AI networks with near unlimited computing power, but perhaps also with significant resilience.
Tenth Person
Advocating for a future of abundant electrical energy is an example of tenth person advocacy, the consensus approach is for increased conservation due to the climate crisis. However, the dangers of a non-energy abundant world are significant and should not be ignored due to a more pressing and immediate combination of crises.
Future Imagining
A future rich with abundant clean sustainable electrical generation would allow for infrastructure and societal transformation bring about various opportunities. Would such a world penalise those who have learnt to conserve? In our view unlikely rather they would be posed to take advantage earlier of such a change.
References
Reinhardt, B., 2022. Making energy too cheap to meter. Works in progress. [online] Available at:
About TPEX
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