Energy Resilience vs Technocratic Pipe Dreams

In climate change policies, and particularly in the field of energy, there is still the notion that there has to be the big solution. This is how nuclear and cold fusion keep popping up since the Paris Agreement. However, these are technocratic pipe dreams of the 1970s. We have experienced the vulnerability of massive power generation systems (add large hydro, if you will) leading to questionable political control mechanisms. Dictators love nuclear power, and that is not only because of their military dual use ambitions. It is because of the totalitarian, centralized concept behind it. Luckily, the world has been changing massively since then.

Take the Internet. It came about as a strategic solution to the vulnerability of communication systems. Today, there is no communication blackout, period. The web is so failsafe, because of its distributed computation power, and by the same token, it has led to an empowerment of the individual, an unexpected spinoff effect and certainly unintended by the militaries who initially promoted the concept.

A decentralized power system leads the individual to asking themselves what energy source is available to feed into the grid locally. Germany with its preferential green energy feed-in tariff has spearheaded a movement of distributed energy production, allowing new renewable technologies to mature to a point they no longer need subsidies. None of these individually will make the change; it is the combined intelligence and creativity of the grid that makes the energy transition viable. This also responds to the need of demand-side energy savings. If your household or company is consumer and provider at the same time, you will automatically start thinking about where to save energy, having the option to sell your excess to the grid instead. The more distributed the system, the less there is a need for energy transport and related grid losses. The success story is copying from nature: systems of intelligent units that organize into larger, more resilient life forms.