What Does Your Energy Utopia Look Like?
When I asked how we should power utopia, I wasn’t expecting so many replies. Over the past month, we’ve heard a multitude of perspectives on the ideal system for powering the world.
What struck me most when going through them to put this closing post together was how different many of those visions are from each other. From the billion-year gaze of Britain’s top fusion scientist, to worries over running out of lithium, to the communities rejecting big energy in favor of something they can own, it’s clear that there are many alternative answers. But many of them are complementary to each other — they work together, offering a bridge from the old to the new.
Given the importance that energy plays in modern society, it’s crucial that we get this right. This isn’t a short-term decision — our lives, as well as the lives of our children and their children, depend on it. What kind of world will we pass down to them? A huge part of the answer to that question lies in the energy choices we’ll make in the coming decades.
It’s due time for everyone to get up to speed. Here’s a list of all we’ve published over the last month—so you can piece together your own personal energy utopia. Please, tell us about it in the comments section below.
- How Do We Power Utopia? — My introduction to the month also profiled the world’s first climate change campaigner.
- Energy and Power: A Reading List — Our roundup of the best reading from the rest of the web on the future of energy.
- The Generation Game: Why Nuclear Energy Isn’t Getting Safer — The surprising reason why nuclear accidents keep happening.
- How to Charge Your Phone Off-Grid — Ian Steadman explains how to bend the natural world to your will to charge your smartphone.
- In Defense of … Fracking? —Julian Sayarer takes a good, hard look at his knee-jerk opposition to fracking and finds that maybe shale deserves a second chance.
- 7 Perpetual Motion Devices That Didn’t Work — A compilation of crimes against the laws of thermodynamics, by Ian Steadman.
- Batteries Not Excluded — The supercomputer in your pocket and your next car rely on batteries. Simon Parkin asks: What will we do if we run out of lithium?
- How One Village Threw Out the Frackers and Went Solar — Alice Bell visits a community that took charge of its own energy destiny.
- Fusion: “We’re So Close We Can Taste It” — Ian Steadman meets the United Kingdom’s top nuclear scientist and learns of his billion-year plan for humanity.
- Solar-Powered Farming, Built in Kenya — Thanks to local energy startups, the lives of Kenyan farmers are changing fast. By Justus Bahati Wanzala.
- How to Power a Refugee Camp — The world’s refugee camps are as big as cities but totally lack infrastructure. Jessica Bishopp produced this video showing the different ways they’re being lit up.
- Fueling Your Car With Hydrogen Isn’t Green — It’s Gray —Rowena Fletcher-Wood writes about hydrogen cars as a key technology for bridging the gap between fossil fuels and renewables.
- Sugar Batteries and Fake Leaves Will Light Up Your World — Claire Asher believes a combination of biomimicry and nanotechnology could help us beat nature at its own game.
- The Buses of Tomorrow Will Run on Sewage — Biogas represents a golden opportunity to clean up the transport sector, according to Daisy Malt.
- I Tried, and Failed, to Find Out Where My Electricity Comes From — In which Mimi Onuoha traces the power lines from her Brooklyn apartment to their source.
- A Coal Miner’s Daughter & the End of Fossil Fuels — Is this really the end of the line for coal, oil, and gas? Abigail Ronck goes hunting for answers.
- What It’s Like To Assess Perpetual Motion Machines For A Living — Ian Steadman had a chat with Swedish power firm Vattenfall’s head of R&D.
- What Does Your Energy Utopia Look Like? — That’s this post, marking the end of the month. Thanks for reading!
In the coming weeks, we’ll be looking at money and nationhood in a series called Made of Money, curated by Abigail Ronck. If you’ve got a story you’d like to tell about the future of finance, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
