Energy Superabundance: How Cheap, Abundant Energy Will Shape Our Future - The CGO

The goal isn't to use less energy, or even to just replace fossil fuels. The goal is vastly more energy, to help more people live better lives, and to make it all clean.

But the big picture question of how we orient ourselves is important. We shouldn’t be looking at our current energy usage and asking, “How can we get this much energy, but cleaner?” We should be looking at a 45-year energy diet and asking, “How can we use clean energy technology to shatter this barrier and open up incredible new vistas?”

What does having a lot more energy let us do? For starters we can avoid the worst of the climate crisis by aggressively shifting to electrification of transportation, heating and cooling, production and so forth. We can also deal with water shortages through desalination. We can produce food in climate controlled environments. And we can fortify an... See more

In the “energy is a necessary evil” frame, we look at our current electricity needs and then ask, “How can we generate all that from zero-carbon sources?” In the alternate framing, you say that to the extent we can develop affordable, zero-carbon sources of electricity, we want to generate tons and tons of electricity. Ideally, we would want to rep... See more

It comes on top of more visible good news—the IEA said this weak that oil demand around the world is softening because of “surging” sales of electric vehicles. In China, demand for gasoline will peak this year or next and then decline sharply. Britain, where the coal era was born, will close it’s last coal-fired power plant at the end of this month... See more

Just imagine: what could humanity do with 2-3x the amount of electricity on today’s grid (what Seba calls “SuperPower”)? How about 10x? 100x?