What might a future with abundant energy look like?

Hello and welcome back to Energy Source, coming to you from London, where the wind has started blowing once again.

Last week, just as the UK unveiled its five-year plan to get to 95 per cent renewable electricity, Dunkelflaute struck.

The term comes from the German words dunkelheit, or darkness, and windflaute, or calm wind. It refers to those days, often in winter, when neither solar panels nor wind turbines generate any power.

The phenomenon is not common, but it is not rare either, and last week, a run of days without renewable generation, coupled with colder weather, caused panic across Europe.

In Germany, wholesale power prices jumped to an 18-year high. In the UK, the owners of gas power plants made millions. In Norway, politicians floated the idea of cutting themselves off from other countries to avoid having to export power.

Because the calm, cloudy weather tends to lie across multiple countries at the same time, it is hard to solve the problem by importing power from neighbours.

And each time Dunkelflaute comes, it brings with it a storm of criticism about the intermittency of renewables and whether Europe’s grids are too fragile.

In the medium term, more battery storage, more nuclear power and even more hydrogen have all been suggested to improve the problem. The UK’s 2030 plan, for example, sees battery storage rising from 5GW to between 23GW to 27GW. But it also has another, more mundane, solution: keeping almost all the UK’s gas-fired capacity on standby even as it races to net zero.

For today’s newsletter we look at a fun thought experiment posed by the respected energy transition consultant Rob West: what might a future with more, rather than less, energy look like? — Malcolm

A different take on the energy transition

One of the mental conundrums of our age is the idea that the world will start using less energy in order to meet its climate targets.

According to the International Energy Agency, the world used a total of 445 exajoules (EJ) of energy in 2023, but will only use 434 EJ in 2050 if governments stick to their announced climate pledges.

This is hard to square with the acceleration in energy demand across the world, particularly in Asia, and with the historic correlation between energy consumption and GDP growth.

Rob West, who runs the energy transition research consultancy Thunder Said Energy, presents a thought experiment: what if technology allows us to use all the energy the earth has available?

“Most long-term energy forecasts simply lack imagination,” he writes in a report. “In particular, most energy transition scenarios leave little room for new demand, which is why AI was such a shock in 2024.”

Currently, the world uses 80,000 terawatt hours per year (TWh/pa) of energy, but he notes that 900mn TWh/pa of solar energy reaches the earth’s surface. Better solar panels, as semiconductors improve, would capture more of this, ultimately bringing prices down to 1 cent per kilowatt hour globally.

With abundant cheap electricity, West hypothesises that we will build larger homes, increase our computing power and buy more stuff. But he also suggests some futuristic ideas.

Upgrading our materials from steel and concrete to higher-performance alternatives, such as advanced composites, carbon fibre and aluminium, would use another 10,000 TWh/pa of energy.

Bringing back supersonic aviation for 10 per cent of journeys, cutting the travel time from London to Singapore to under five hours, would add 7,000 TWh/pa. Flying cars would use the same amount.

Piping desalinated water to green 1bn acres of desert would use between 3,500 TWh/pa to 30,000 TWh/pa, he writes, while deploying 10,000 enormous tunnelling machines to move traffic in cities underground would use 876 TWh/pa of electricity.

Capturing carbon dioxide and transforming it into calcium carbonate, either for construction or to use as coastal breakwaters or new land, would consume 2000 TWh/pa for 20 gigatons a year.

Nevertheless, he still sees a future for oil, gas and coal, which will remain competitive against the cost of storing solar power, either in batteries or by turning it into green hydrogen.

It is a different take, but as West says, even though he started writing his research “as a science fiction fantasy”, by the end he had concluded that this kind of technology-driven energy transition “is a more exciting path forward for human civilisation than limiting global energy use”. (Malcolm Moore)

Power Points

Energy Source is written and edited by Jamie Smyth, Myles McCormick, Amanda Chu, Tom Wilson and Malcolm Moore, with support from the FT’s global team of reporters. Reach us at [email protected] and follow us on X at @FTEnergy. Catch up on past editions of the newsletter here.