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Almost-Free Energy and Food

Ever since the oil crisis of October 1973, when the members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries proclaimed an embargo and caused the price of oil to increase from $3 to $12 per barrel, the world has been in a constant state of fear of impending shortages of energy and consequent price hikes. We have begun to believe that the planet will soon run out of oil and will therefore be out of energy. Governments have been jockeying to secure oil shipments. In order to preserve the Earth’s dwindling energy supplies, the United States mandated increases in the fuel efficiency of cars.

Certainly the Earth’s stock of burnable fossil fuels is limited. But we have come to apply the same scarcity thinking to water; experts believe that large parts of the planet will run out of water and that wars will break out over access to the limited supplies. A few years after the last drought ended in 2016, Californians still live in fear that agriculture will have to be permanently curtailed, leading to long-term shortages of fruits, vegetables, and nuts.

Access to clean water is one of the most serious problems in the developing world. According to the World Health Organization, 1.8 million people die every year from diarrheal diseases.¹²⁰ Of these victims, 90 percent are children under five, mostly in developing countries. Eighty-eight percent of these cases are attributed to unsafe water supply and sanitation.

It’s not shortage of water per se that is the problem; it’s access to clean water. Water obtained from rivers and wells is infested with deadly bacteria, viruses, and larger parasites. These could be killed by simply boiling the water, but the energy necessary to do that is prohibitively expensive, so people die or suffer.

Yet we consume energy at an average rate of only eighteen terawatts, a miniscule fraction of the 174,000 terawatts rate of power available.¹²¹ And that is readily supplemented by wind, geothermal, and tidal energy. The Earth is literally bathed in energy. It’s the same with water; with 71 percent of its surface covered by water, Earth is a water planet. An extraterrestrial watching our news reports would think that humans are either crazy or stupid.

The problem in supply of both energy and water, so far, has been in the economics of our ability to harness solar energy—which is practically everywhere. If we could capture enough of it, we would never have to worry about shortages of energy, water, or food. We could boil as much water as we needed from the oceans, sanitize the water that is on land, and grow unlimited supplies of food.

All of this is becoming possible.

Take the problem of water sanitization. My son Tarun worked for three years with a Chilean inventor, Alfredo Zolezzi, to commercialize a plasma-based water purification technology (PWSS) that Zolezzi’s company, AIC Chile, has developed. It could give households in the developing world a source of nearly endless potable water. The marvel of the technology is its simplicity. It works by applying pressure and electricity to a continuous stream of water and converting it into a plasma state. In a matter of seconds, the system can eliminate 100 percent of bacteria and viruses, which are responsible for the majority of water-related illnesses. It uses less energy than a hair dryer does and could be powered by a solar panel.

Instead of retrofitting an industrial solution for the needs of the poor, Zolezzi specifically created PWSS for the slums of the world—and it worked. Thousands of children in Chile have a reliable source of clean drinking water for the first time.

Even though PWSS is not being mass-produced yet, a “camp unit,” which can provide enough water for a small village, costs a few thousand dollars and can treat 167 liters for just $1, which results in a significant economic benefit for families in villages whose only safe drinking-water source is bottled water, in some cases at a cost of nearly $1 per liter.

PWSS is being piloted in Mexico, Argentina, and other parts of Latin America, and I am very hopeful that this technology will also reach Africa and Asia—and save tens of millions of lives.

And, not surprisingly, it isn’t just the poor who stand to benefit from Zolezzi’s technology. A study of aircraft water quality, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health,¹²² found that the water tanks are conducive to microbial growth and that the problem is severe on long-haul flights. In 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency also sampled water from planes and found that 15 percent of the samples contained coliform bacteria, an indicator of poor hygiene.¹²³ Our hospitals, schools, and businesses often have water tanks with similar problems. Such contamination partly explains why in 2018 consumers spent, worldwide, more than $250 billion on bottled water.¹²⁴

European aerospace giant Airbus has recently been testing in Germany a version of the PWSS product that is the size of a suitcase and can work on board planes. The tests have shown the same results as with the PWSS camp units: 100 percent elimination of bacteria and viruses. We may well see these units in the West, introduced to reduce the demand for bottled water in plastic containers that pollute the environment. Even though the PWSS technology draws no more power than a hairdryer, many places in the world simply don’t have the means to power it. These places need the energy of the sun.

What blocked our ability to tap the sun until recently was the cost of capturing its energy and converting it into electricity (and, ultimately, heat). But a few things have changed since the 1980s. We have become much better at making semiconductors for computers; and those same pieces of silicon are what convert solar energy into electricity. We have developed ways to make solar panels from thinner slivers of silicon. We have gotten much better also at figuring out how to squeeze more out of the solar energy we capture. And, most important, economies of scale are beginning to affect the price. As more solar panels are installed, more are manufactured, and panel- and component-manufacture costs keep falling.

For these reasons, solar-energy capture is advancing on an exponential curve. With that advance, we are heading into an era of practically unlimited, clean, almost free energy. Ramez Naam explains the trend very well in his book The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet:

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1980, average retail electricity costs in the United States were around 5 cents a kilowatt hour (in today’s dollars). Electricity produced from wind power, on the other hand, cost around ten times more, at 50 cents a kilowatt hour. And electricity from solar power cost 30 times more, at around $1.50 per kilowatt hour.

How the times have changed. Today, new wind power installations in good locations are producing electricity at an unsubsidized cost of 4 cents per kilowatt hour, lower than the 7 cents per kilowatt hour wholesale prices of new coal and natural gas electricity. Solar has dropped as much and is still dropping. Large-scale solar installations in the very sunniest areas are down to 6 cents per kilowatt hour without subsidies, and are still dropping.¹²⁵

Those figures are constantly changing. When the first edition of this book was finalized in October 2016, Naam told me that the unsubsidized cost of solar capture in the sunniest areas in the United States was 4 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), and the lowest bid in the world was one received by Abu Dhabi for 2.42 cents per kWh.¹²⁶ As of October 2018, the unsubsidized cost of solar in the sunniest parts of the United States had fallen to below 3 cents per kWh, and the cheapest unsubsidized solar contract in the world was awarded by Chile for 2.1 cents per kWh. Even in Germany, with sunshine similar to that of Canada, an auction in early 2018 received unsubsidized solar bids at around 5 cents per kWh.

In fact, at times renewable power is so efficient that utilities literally give it away in order to avoid overloading the grid! In March 2017, over the course of fourteen days California utilities gave free power to Arizona utilities to keep the power supply on the California electrical grid in balance.¹²⁷ This happens in many places where daytime solar or nighttime wind production are so great that utilities have more power than customers can consume.

The first solar photovoltaic panel built by Bell Labs in 1954 cost $1,000 per watt of power it could produce.¹²⁸ In 2008, modules used in solar arrays cost $3.49 per watt; by 2018, they cost 40 cents per watt.¹²⁹ According to a pattern known as Swanson’s Law, the price of solar photovoltaic modules tends to fall by 20 percent for every doubling of cumulative shipped volume. The full price of solar electricity (including land, labor to deploy the solar panels, and other equipment required) falls by about 15 percent with every doubling.

The amount of solar-generated power has been doubling every two years or less for the past forty years—as costs have been falling.¹³⁰ At this rate, solar power is only five doublings—or less than twelve years—away from being able to meet 100 percent of today’s energy needs. Power usage will keep increasing, so this is a moving target. Taking that into account, inexpensive renewable sources can potentially provide more power than the world needs in less than twenty years. This is happening because of the momentum that solar has already gained and the constant refinements to the underlying technologies, which are advancing on exponential curves. What Ray Kurzweil said about Craig Venter’s progress when he had just sequenced 1 percent of the human genome—that Venter was actually halfway to 100 percent because on an exponential curve, the time required to get from 0.01 percent to 1 percent is equal to the time required to get from 1 percent to 100 percent—applies to solar capture too.

It isn’t just solar production that is advancing at a rapid rate, and solar will not be our only source of clean energy: there are also technologies to harness wind, biomass, thermal, tidal, and waste-breakdown energy, and research projects all over the world are working on improving their efficiency and effectiveness. Wind energy’s price became competitive with the cost of energy from new coal-burning power plants in the United States in 2016, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and prices have been continuing to fall.¹³¹ Unsubsidized wind-energy contracts were signed at 2 cents per kWh in Mexico and Brazil in late 2017 and early 2018.¹³²

Wind-energy prices are falling all over the world. For example, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, in India the levelized cost of electricity, which takes into account the net present value of the unit cost of electricity over the lifetime of a generating asset, for onshore wind, is now 3.9 cents per kWh, a reduction of 46 percent from a year ago, and the cost of solar energy is 4.1 cents per kWh, a reduction of 45 percent. By comparison, coal costs 6.8 cents per kWh, and combined-cycle gas, 9.3 cents per kWh.¹³³

Critics of clean energy, especially those from the oil industry, argue vehemently that the sun doesn’t shine at night and winds don’t blow twenty-four hours a day. They say that the Achilles’ heel of these technologies is the ability to store energy, because batteries are prohibitively expensive and big and bulky.

The critics are wrong on this front as well, because the cost of energy storage is also plummeting. Since 1990, the cost of batteries has fallen by a factor of roughly twenty. On current trends, the price of batteries and other energy-storage techniques will fall to just a few cents per kWh by the time solar and wind have matured, making energy from the sun and wind available 24/7 and cheaper than electricity from any other source.

The advances are exceeding expectations. In a study published in Nature Climate Change, Bjorn Nykvist and Mans Nilsson, of the Stockholm Environment Institute, documented that, from 2007 to 2011, average battery costs for battery-powered electric vehicles fell by about 14 percent a year.¹³⁴ This decline put battery costs in 2016 right around the level that the International Energy Agency predicted they would reach in 2020. Electric vehicles are fast reaching the point at which they will cost substantially less to operate, from cradle to grave, than gasoline-fueled ones. And the same technology that is used for car batteries can be used for homes and businesses to store solar energy.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the cost of electric vehicle batteries fell from $1,000 per kWh in 2008 to $268 per kWh in 2015, a 73 percent reduction in seven years, and the cost was on track to reach $125 per kWh, to be cost competitive with vehicles using conventional engines in the United States, by 2022.¹³⁵

In 2014, Tesla announced plans to build a gigantic $5 billion factory that would produce 35 GWh of battery storage a year—more than that of all the lithium-ion batteries produced worldwide in 2013. It set expectations that when it started ramping up production in 2017, prices for batteries would be around $200 per kWh. In mid-2018, Tesla announced that battery production at its Gigafactory had reached an annualized rate of roughly 20 GWh, making the Gigafactory the highest-volume battery plant in the world. Tesla also increased the planned annual capacity to 105 GWh of cells. In a shareholder meeting, Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly said that the company “is on pace to achieve a battery cell cost of $100 per kWh by the end of the year depending on commodity prices remaining stable in the next few months.”¹³⁶ This may be an overoptimistic projection, but is a target that Tesla is very likely to achieve by 2020 or 2021—beyond which prices will continue to fall. We are looking at a revolution in the making for electric vehicles.

By the way, many new solar (and battery) technologies are in development. For example, scientists are experimenting with a new material called perovskite, a light-sensitive crystal that has the potential to be more efficient, less expensive, and more versatile than any solar solutions to date. From 2009 to 2017, perovskite’s conversion efficiency increased from 3.8 percent to 22.7 percent, making it the fastest-developing technology in the history of photovoltaics.¹³⁷ In June 2018, Oxford PV announced that its perovskite-silicon tandem solar cell had achieved a 27.3 percent conversion efficiency, as certified by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems.¹³⁸

And perovskite holds much more potential: in comparison with silicon’s theoretical limit of about 32 percent, the theoretical limit of perovskite’s conversion efficiency is estimated to be about 66 percent, so it could be transformative if commercialized successfully.

How This Benefits Everyone, Everywhere

The effects of these advances are not limited to the developed world; they impact people anywhere solar panels can be installed. Free power will trickle down even to remote villages, with profound consequences. This is already happening.

In Africa, 1.2 billion people have no connection to a power grid, and another 2.5 billion can get power only intermittently. To make matters worse, the lack of viable electrical options creates perverse side effects. People use kerosene for lamps, a dirty fuel that, according to the Economist, costs $10 per kWh of energy that it provides—significantly more costly than the same unit of power in the West on a modern power grid.¹³⁹ Worse, kerosene fires are endemic in Africa, and their toxic fumes cause respiratory ailments that kill hundreds of thousands per year.

The plummeting cost of photovoltaic panels, along with the decline in the prices of light-emitting diodes (another semiconductor product), has brought light to more than 20 million Africans in the past decade. The World Bank’s Lighting Africa program is doubling sales of approved devices each year.¹⁴⁰ Solar-powered LED lamps with included battery storage sell for $8.¹⁴¹ That’s still a lot of money for the poorest to afford, but it’s within reach.

Central power grids will probably never be built to cover all of Africa. Power there will truly be a distributed endeavor. Schools, hospitals, and homes will all be powered by sources on site or nearby. The same happened with landline communications: Africa leapfrogged into cell-phone networks. In some places, these networks are better than those in the United States. By leapfrogging legacy infrastructure and focusing on the future, Africa will be able to take far better advantage of future price declines in solar, LED, and other energy-capture and -saving technologies.

Aside from its effect on lighting, distributed microgeneration in Africa will also allow cheaper charging of cell phones. This is, believe it or not, a major expense for many Africans who lack sources of electrical energy: they pay dearly for electricity at kiosks. By reducing the cost of phone ownership and making voice and data communication cheaper, low-cost electricity boosts a key service that lifts people out of poverty and improves their lives. Information is power: to get the information, you need the power. Within a decade, we should see 50 percent penetration of solar panels into Africa and total penetration of LEDs or close access to cheap electricity for running small household appliances or charging phones.

So everywhere on Earth, for rich nations and poor nations, there will be light for all, and it will be essentially free. This will lead to many other benefits. And as we have seen from the reverse innovation that Alfredo Zolezzi is doing with PWSS and Airbus, the relatively well off will also benefit from having inexpensive, clean water without plastic residues—as well as nearly free energy for electric cars and homes.

Free Power Means a More Peaceful Planet

Water and energy are the natural resources at the heart of many of the worst global conflicts. In the Ukraine, a core part of the dispute with Russia is over natural-gas pipelines. Japan started World War II in part due to its lack of natural resources, among them oil. India and China are tussling over water rights, a dispute that looks set to radically worsen as China seeks to expand agriculture in its south and India also pushes to grow enough food to satisfy its fast-growing population. China is proposing massive dams on major rivers flowing from China to India and Bangladesh.¹⁴²

With cheaper power making water more abundant, even more of the desert may blossom in green edibles. The world has plenty of desert with plenty of natural sunshine for farms. Israel has pioneered desert agriculture, and tomato farms in Arizona are some of the most productive in the world. Adding water to these vast deserts, far cheaper than fertile fields, will allow many arid countries to become efficient producers of crops. Vertical farming also has great potential. Imagine turning those city parking lots that are no longer needed because of self-driving cars into farms that grow organic food with LED lights and artificial-intelligence software—organic because when food is grown in buildings surrounded by glass, we have no use for insecticides or pest control.

In his book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, Peter Diamandis wrote about an era in which all the needs of humanity are met: a world in which no one on Earth suffers from hunger or lacks clean water; a world in which we all have clothes, electricity, cell phones, and housing; and he believes that this is an eminently achievable aim. I agree with him—if we do things right, if we can find a way of sharing the benefits of technology advances, and if we take the right paths.

I know I am making many leaps of faith in this chapter with the assumption that technology will fix all and that we will be able to get it to the right places. But when I look at how countries such as India are being transformed by cell phones, Internet access, solar energy, and education, I see the possibilities. When I spend time with entrepreneurs who are building these technologies, I see a determination to solve any problems confronting them—because it is about uplifting humanity. When I see the progress we are making with electric cars, solar energy, and battery storage, I become convinced that in the 2020s most of us in the prosperous world will have the choice of living in the same clean-energy future as I already live in—with the sun providing 100 percent of our energy needs.

Does the Technology Foster Autonomy Rather Than Dependence?

Nearly free energy and water will be, along with self-driving vehicles, the biggest boosts to autonomy that humans have enjoyed in history. Energy and water are the key to everything that offers us a more comfortable life. Energy keeps us warm, powers our vehicles, lights our homes, powers our communications systems, and much more. Inexpensive energy will also unlock an endless supply of fresh water and allow us to grow more food.

Combined, energy and water will give us as much as we could ever want or need. In those parts of the world that are poorly governed or have poor infrastructure, inexpensive energy and water will also allow people to experience lives of a quality far closer to that of us in the West and the developed world. There is no autonomy tradeoff; almost free energy and water will give us more autonomy and reduce our dependency. More than anything else discussed in this book, the ease of accessing energy and water will deliver a base level of abundance that will improve the well-being of all people on the planet, from the richest to the poorest.