Envisioning the New Energy Future

From campfires to steam engines, gaslights to LEDs, stones to nukes, abacuses to AI, and wagons to racecars, the story of modern humanity has been largely told by the evolution of our technologies and the ways in which we use them — for both good and ill. In particular, our energy technologies have played a leading role in our history, shaping the very foundations of our relationships with our planet and each other. It has allowed us to forge new and powerful tools, light the darkness, heal the sick, and create an interlinked society spanning the entire globe, but has also brought inequality, conflict, destabilization, and degradation. As we stand at an unprecedented crossroads between prosperity and chaos, what lessons can we learn from our energy history to build the best possible new energy future?

Look at all that technology! (Source)

There are all kinds of different lenses through which we can analyze the impacts of energy technologies on our history and present, like wealth creation, environmental impact, political power, or population changes, but here we’ll try for a perspective that ties all those factors together in a way that centers the one thing that really matters at the end of the day: is it good for humanity as a whole (“pro-social”) or not (“anti-social”)? This does require us to take a bit of a long view, but with the stakes as high as they are today we want to try to get it as right as we can. 

Let’s start by looking at the reigning energy paradigm — fossil fuels and centralized power generation with limited accountability to key stakeholders. Before renewable energy technologies were viable, combusting fossil fuels in large power plants was the primary method by which we were able to generate enough electricity to fuel population and industry growth. Fossil fuels have the advantages of being energy-dense, easy to use, cheap (if you ignore the external costs), and pretty stable for transport and storage, but they also have some significant disadvantages that have become more and more apparent over 150-ish years of use.  

For starters, fossil fuels have a limited and geographically patchy distribution, which has resulted in some countries having more access to energy resources than others — with all of the conflict and inequity that entails — and also means that one day, inevitably, we will run out of accessible fuel. In the meantime, extracting, refining, transporting, storing, and combusting fossil fuels carries heavy human and environmental costs, including but not limited to causing a cornucopia of diseases, polluting soil and water supplies, and destabilizing the global climate.

Pictured: A sub-optimal byproduct of being able to drive to the grocery store (Source)

And the power generation/distribution system we have created with these fuels is based on a fragile top-down model where a small number of high capacity power plants provide a one-way flow of electricity through expensive and inefficient high voltage lines, resulting in multiple critical failure points, wasted fuel, and a lack of control and accountability for communities and other key local stakeholders. We are quite familiar with this trend here in California, where state-backed monopoly utilities have successfully lobbied for huge executive pay packages (the four CEOs took home a total just shy of $70 million in 2023) and dangerously perverse incentives (like having ratepayers foot the bill when under-maintained power lines fail and burn large swathes of the state).

Safe to say, the fossil fuel paradigm has some major anti-social aspects. It is neither sustainable, secure, nor equitable, results in wealth and power being concentrated in the hands of the few, and places heavy burdens on future generations in the forms of economic and political instability, environmental degradation, and climate change. But it does give us a good counterexample for designing a new, pro-social energy future: it should be decentralized, democratized, efficient, resilient, sustainable, coordinated with robust materials recycling efforts, and should account for external costs as much as possible. What could this look like with the technologies we have today?

Let’s start putting the pieces together. We’ll need renewable energy resources that fit our criteria for sustainability, recyclability, decentralization, and low external costs; so, solar, wind, geothermal, small hydroelectric, tidal/wave energy, and certain types of biomass, but not large hydroelectric or nuclear. Next we’ll need a diverse array of energy storage technologies to fully harness these intermittent power sources in a resilient way, such as large-format batteries, flywheels, compressed air, pumped hydro, and chemical energy sources like green hydrogen and ammonia paired with fuel cells. Tie these resources together in interlinked, islandable “mesogrids” (as in, larger than a microgrid but smaller than the “macrogrid” of today) that are able to import and export power to adjacent grid cells, back them up with recycling capabilities to ensure a sustainable, affordable supply of materials, and we’re getting close! 

The last step is to base the whole system in responsible financing and governance that centers energy as an essential service, rather than a tool for large-scale profit extraction, through private local investment, government-led green banks, and public crowdfunding services (like MYNT partner Climatize!). While this isn’t a mechanical technology like the others we have discussed so far, it is a technology as defined as “the specialized aspects of a particular field of endeavor”; in this case, the endeavor of leveraging pro-social funding techniques for essential energy infrastructure. This step reflects the fact that the purposes for which we use technologies play a large role in the development of the technologies themselves — for example, we could have had cleaner, safer nuclear power if the Nixon Administration had chosen to invest in thorium-based tech rather than uranium, whose main “advantage” over thorium is that its waste byproducts can be used as fuel for nuclear weapons. 

Another key technology for creating the new energy future, the California Senate (Source)

So now our vision of a new energy paradigm looks something like this: electric service regions are divided up into interconnected mesogrid cells that are self-powered as much as possible by in-cell, locally-controlled renewables and energy storage, with cells that have excess generation trading power to those with excess demand. This arrangement reduces line losses and wildfire risks by siting generation sources nearer to end users, enhances resilience by diversifying and decentralizing energy resources, and incentivizes communities to invest directly in efficiency, electrification, and clean energy by maximizing the benefits of adopting these new technologies. And prioritizing reuse and recycling over new resource extraction means that communities will continue to benefit from their energy resource infrastructure for generations to come, creating stability and security. Not to mention the climate benefits!

Now, this is just our bare-bones sketch of a much more detailed and collaborative picture of what the future could be, and, of course, much easier said than done. But like anything, it first starts with a vision; one we’ll flesh out a little more in the next blog in this series, where we’ll talk about some basic steps businesses and local governments can take right now to start laying the foundations for the new energy future. What do you want to see when we get there?