Here’s a very interesting look at Solarpunk – and how it could be made more ‘ambitious’ with the promise of “a world where energy too cheap to meter unlocks technology that is indistinguishable from magic”:

Sustainability means different specifics to different people, but to everybody it roughly means ‘hold our current levels of energy consumption constant while shifting how we generate that energy to wind and solar while making existing processes more efficient so we can do more with the same amount of energy’. Sustainability is both reasonable and ergophobic.

The optimistic vision of a sustainable world could be beautiful. If you draw the thread of sustainability out into the future, you get a small, consistent population with moderate ambitions living in a few places around the world. Fields of solar panels and wind turbines producing a sustainable amount of energy. Aesthetic, plant-covered buildings that produce food for the local population. Solarpunk.

However, choosing a sustainable world is choosing to put an upper bound on humanity’s physical capabilities.

The amount of energy we can access, how densely we can store it, and how quickly we can deploy it are the closest things to measures of our ability to manipulate the physical world. Energy creates a ceiling on what we can do – Leonardo da Vinci could never have implemented his famous helicopter designs with the energy technology available at the time. Even the most powerful AI in the world wouldn’t be all-powerful given a finite energy budget. In the extreme, energy is the only scarce resource. With infinite energy, it is possible to realize the dreams of the alchemists and transform one element into any other element. Nuclear fusion and fission aren’t magic; they’re just energy intensive. Energy is the difference between lead and gold. To cap our energy ambitions is to commit to permanent scarcity.

That energy needs to be generated in ways that don’t re-create the problems it’s solving, but that is entirely within our grasp. Modern nuclear reactors are different beasts than their more-than-50-year-old ancestors. And uranium is not the only energy source below our feet: Thanks to advances in drilling technology, geothermal energy has made massive leaps. Perhaps most heretically, not all fossil fuels are equally bad as short-term bridges to other energy sources. Natural gas is abundant and produces far less carbon and other pollutants per unit of energy than coal or oil. ^[1] Longer term, fusion power can enable us to build miniature suns and space-based solar can tap into more of the actual sun’s power than land-based installations. None of these magically create infinite free energy: Capital, maintenance, and infrastructure costs are real. Energy will always cost money (remember, it is the ultimate scarce resource) but we could drive it to a point where, like data plans, you could pay a flat fee for as much of it as you can use – in other words, make it ‘too cheap to meter’. The universe is awash with energy, we just need to be clever about harnessing it.

This snapshot is obviously optimistic and it’s impossible to predict the future. Nevertheless, energy-enabled physical capabilities are the only way that the future world will look drastically different in a good way. A sustainable world, on the other hand, implies that our capabilities are now good enough. Many people have given up on the idea that the world our grandchildren live in could look radically different than the one we live in. The ergophilia of the past is what transformed a world that looked roughly the same for thousands of years into the one we recognize today. The Romans and Aztecs thought their (undoubtedly impressive!) capabilities were good enough too…

We can build a world where energy too cheap to meter unlocks technology that is indistinguishable from magic. Chunky, fixable technology unconstrained by the need to make everything as efficient as possible. A return to the belief that our children will have better lives than our own. Airships sailing the sky, hypersonic craft skipping along the atmosphere, and ion-belching behemoths plying the stars. Fusionpunk.

Making energy too cheap to meter – Works in Progress

We are using less energy today:

Where is my Flying Car?: The Henry Adams Curve: a closer look

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