Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
We present the best case scenario over the next 25 years across different domains of life.
Kevin Kelly (00:00)
Hello, welcome to the best case scenarios. I'm Kevin Kelly. This is my cohost Dan Pink. And our aim is to promote the best case scenarios for the next 25 years. What would our lives look like if everything went well? Well, our topic this episode is the future of energy and our expert is none other than Ramya Znam and
Ramiz is the smartest guy I know about energy and an optimistic person as well. So Ramiz, would you like to introduce yourself to our audience?
Ramez (00:33)
Sure.
Thanks, Kevin. Thanks, Dan. Happy to be here. Delighted, actually. I'm an ex-software guy. I've written some science fiction. And I'm one of the people that first predicted that technology like solar and batteries would drop in cost exponentially. So I've been doing clean energy forecasting and speaking and investing for the last 15 years or so.
Kevin Kelly (00:52)
Well, great. It's so fantastic to have you here. our job is in some ways trying to offer people a optimistic vision that we can aim for. And again, these aren't really predictions. These are scenarios meant to help guide what we want to do. So what would be one example of a best case scenario?
for energy. And let's start with something that's easier to talk about, maybe in the US. And then we'd to go a little bit globally as well.
Ramez (01:20)
Yeah.
So in the US, 25 years from now, mean, we've already today started dropping our carbon emissions. Solar.
and wind have grown a lot and especially solar. So then what we're going to see is solar costs will continue to plunge. They will have dropped by more than half and maybe as much as three or four times in that 20, sorry, that 25 next year, 2050 timeframe. Electric vehicles will be just obviously the cheapest vehicle you can buy and we'll be in the midst of a huge rapid switch over.
We'll still have some carbon emissions. We'll still have some natural gas on the grid, but we'll clearly be on the down slope and the generation of energy itself, of electricity, will be much cheaper than it is today. So we'll still have a grid that costs a lot. And I think that'll power economic growth as well as less air pollution and so on.
Kevin Kelly (02:16)
So to summarize, in 25 years, we have primarily solar as the major energy producer.
Ramez (02:26)
We'll still have a mix. We won't be at zero carbon, but solar is already the fastest growing energy source in the US. The bulk of everything we have in the queue to add to the grid today is solar and batteries. So I think solar will have grown dramatically from maybe 8 % of US energy generation today to more than a third. And it might be the number one electricity source in the US.
Kevin Kelly (02:52)
You say in 25 years, there might be a third, but also number one. What does that mean?
Ramez (02:57)
Well, I think solar will eat into the share of natural gas. so wind will keep growing, solar will keep growing. It's possible that with initiatives that we have in government now, that nuclear will start growing again. But right now, natural gas is the number one electricity source in the US at maybe 40%. And so think there's a very good chance it will be dethroned by solar in that time frame.
Daniel Pink (03:18)
you
Kevin Kelly (03:21)
So we still have a, in 25 years, we'll still have a mix. So maybe solar a third, maybe gas a third, and then nuclear and wind another third, and hydro.
Daniel Pink (03:21)
you
Ramez (03:29)
Yeah, something like
that. And that's that's actually probably a conservative estimate for me. If you look at the doubling time of solar, if you just continue to expect the exact same growth rate, solar could be everything by 2050. But I think there's a natural phenomenon that as you increase penetration in the market, your growth rate does have to slow somewhat.
Kevin Kelly (03:36)
Right.
Right.
So you said that's kind of conservative. If you took your best best case scenario, what would that look like?
Ramez (03:56)
Yeah.
I mean, the very best case scenario if we aligned policy with technology is that we have essentially a carbon free grid in 2050. That is a lot of solar, a fair bit of wind.
Daniel Pink (04:08)
Wow.
Ramez (04:11)
nuclear, growing again, and hydro. Or close to that. It might be a 90 % grid. Natural gas is just too useful as a of a balancing force, but close enough.
Kevin Kelly (04:22)
So let's just take either your best best or this other conservative best in 25 years. For a typical American driving around or whatever, what would, it would look any different? you see, would you see, where would these vast solar farms be? Or would it almost be on top of every roof that you wouldn't even notice it? What would actually that look like?
Ramez (04:43)
It's kind of fascinating. Like I'm a supply cider in this sense. Like at the end of the day, most individuals, families don't want to have to think about where their energy comes from. They just want to flick on the lights and it works. They want to get into a car or summon a car, which is what you'll be doing in 2050. And it picks you up and takes you someplace and it's cheap. Like people actually don't really care. People do like solar on their roofs. It is a...
a virtue sign, people like feeling like they're making a difference. And there is a role for solar rooftop, but the bulk of solar, and I think a lot of in sunny places, ⁓ buildings will be covered in solar, because it will just be so cheap, why not? Especially newly built buildings with lots of buildings. But the bulk of the generation will still come from large solar farms.
Daniel Pink (05:09)
Yeah.
Ramez (05:30)
that are primarily in places that have the best weather. And in the ideal world, if we had a cost optimized world, the way we'd really do this, two thirds of electricity demand in the US, a bit more, is east of the Mississippi.
And with the exception of the very southeast, that's not really a super sunny place. So actually the cheapest way to do this would be to put huge amounts of solar in the southwest and ⁓ long high voltage DC power lines. You could power New York with a solar farm in New Mexico, two hours when the sun has gone down. So that's sort of actually the dream in a way.
Kevin Kelly (06:06)
Right. besides having zero emissions, zero carbon emissions, what were some of the other consequences of having this arrangement of primarily solar as the source of electricity, or even a third of it?
Daniel Pink (06:23)
Yeah.
And to add on to that, what about cost? Because I think what you're saying is that not only are we going to eliminate all these externalities, but we are actually going to reduce the cost itself, which is a huge best case scenario. Because a lot of times when we think of solar, we think of, it's expensive, but we're going to eliminate or reduce the externalities. But are you saying we get both the
no externalities and the cost savings.
Ramez (06:52)
So solar is the cheapest electricity at sort of a wholesale sense, the border of the plant.
if you will, and that's going to be even more true going forward. in the U.S., electricity wholesale again, before it gets to across the grid to you. From a natural gas plant, historically has been about five cents a kilowatt hour. Today, if you build a new natural gas plant, it's more like 12 cents a kilowatt hour for a variety of reasons. Natural gas turbines are sold out for a long time. Solar in the Southwest is unsubsidized. It's three cents today.
Daniel Pink (07:25)
Wow.
Ramez (07:26)
we think solar in the Midwest could be two cents, something like that. And by 2050, you're talking about a penny a kilowatt hour solar at the gate. That said, I think this will be amazing for industrial uses that use electricity. I think a lot of data centers and a lot of other...
big industrial loads, the most rational economic thing is to move them to the southwest or west Texas and so on and take advantage of that abundant sunshine. And even with batteries, it ends up being cheaper than anything else in the next, certainly by 2050. And data centers are nice because they have not been built yet. And you can kind of do compute anywhere. Some other things you want close to population centers and so on. That said,
The grid, like poles and wires, are not today improving at the same rate as...
solar is or that batteries are. And actually, if you look at how utilities are spending money, the biggest capex is actually on the distribution grid. So not even the long range, the grid within a couple of miles of your house and leading up to your house. So we have some challenges there to address. So the average homeowner might not see their power bill change very much.
Actually, outside of California, electricity costs overall have grown a little bit slower than inflation. So they've dropped over the last 25 years in real terms. And I'd expect something like that, flat to a slight decline and certainly a lower portion of income than it is today.
Kevin Kelly (08:57)
Right, but it won't be virtually free. this idea that it will be free, should, maybe that's a trope. ⁓
Ramez (09:07)
There are some wild
cards that might make it even cheaper than I'm saying though. I will say that.
Kevin Kelly (09:10)
Okay.
One of the promises of cheap solar was that it would make water purification, desalination cheap enough to water the deserts. Is that something that you see kind of going on?
Daniel Pink (09:21)
Hmm.
Ramez (09:28)
Maybe there's some complexity there. So today, if you look at large scale desal, it's about half energy cost and half capex. So even if you made the energy cost zero, you only cut the cost in half. Secondly, desal in the US is more limited by environmental and permitting issues. ⁓ Desal is already cheaper than city water. It's not cheaper than ag water.
Kevin Kelly (09:45)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Ramez (09:51)
And it's a long ways before it gets that cheap. But I think people don't understand this. Ag water is like one tenth the cost of city water. So there's actually a huge gap between like when you get to city water levels and when you get to ag water levels.
Daniel Pink (09:53)
Really?
Kevin Kelly (10:05)
Is that just for the cost of purification?
Ramez (10:07)
I'm just talking about the way that we price water today when we pump it out of aquifers.
Kevin Kelly (10:11)
Yeah.
So wait, wait, wait. So why is the difference in the price and the cost?
Ramez (10:15)
Because
our water markets in the US are broken. That's really the issue. The way that water works in the US and in most countries around the world is an ancient setting, century or more set of rights that a property owner has to withdraw, in many cases, unlimited water from under their property or some amount of water from rivers. And so it's not actually a market.
And then when you get into cities, there's like lot more piping that we've got.
Kevin Kelly (10:43)
Okay.
All right. Well, that sounds like maybe another discussion, but let's go back then to the energy part. So in addition to the little bit that might be happening on top of residential buildings, you have this idea of solar farms. What could we imagine solar farms in, again, in 25 years from now, are they...
You say maybe in the southwest with high voltage DC, but what kind of a scale are we talking about? How ⁓ big and how much do we actually need to have a third of the power coming from these solar panels?
Ramez (11:15)
It is.
It is both epic in size and small at the same time. basically in the US, it's epic in absolute size and small in relative size to the land that we have in use.
Kevin Kelly (11:26)
True politicians answer.
Okay.
Ramez (11:37)
Like in the US, back of the envelope is if you powered 100 % of electricity in the US with solar, it would take about 1 % of US land. And the number one land use in America is agriculture, broadly construed, which is about 30 % of US land. It is, is. Yeah, basically. The flip side of that is 100 % of electricity coming from solar is about
Kevin Kelly (11:53)
Which is another form of solar, by the way. Yeah, right, right.
Ramez (12:02)
as big as all built up land that we have. So if you add all the like cities, houses and roads, if you had an equivalent area, and some of it will be over the buildings, if you had sort of an equivalent area for solar, that would power all electricity in the US. It's actually hard to power the entire US with solar because of winter.
but that's the ballpark on energy. You know, all golf courses put together add up to a very substantial amount of U.S. electricity if they were all solar farms instead, which is not what we'll do, but to give you some...
Kevin Kelly (12:39)
What's your
saying that the amount of soul that we need would be about equivalent to the amount that we have on golf courses right now?
Ramez (12:46)
It's more than that, but golf courses get you shockingly close.
Kevin Kelly (12:50)
Okay.
Daniel Pink (12:50)
Wait, wait, so the area that golf courses comprise right now?
Ramez (12:55)
The area the golf courses comprise right now is larger than the amount of solar area we use today to generate about 8 % of the US's electricity from solar.
Kevin Kelly (13:07)
But if you were to do a third, then you need three times that. So you have three times the amount of golf course right now.
Daniel Pink (13:09)
If we were to
Ramez (13:15)
Yeah, the better comparison is like how much total land do we cover with buildings and roads and stuff. And doing all of that with solar gets you to 100 % of current electricity use.
Kevin Kelly (13:25)
Right. Well, that's saying then that we would sort of double the Occupy because we take, if they have a similar amount of what we are now occupying with buildings and roads, and we're going to double that, that would be, that would be noticeable. That would, that would be noticeable.
Daniel Pink (13:39)
Yeah.
Ramez (13:40)
It's noticeable, but you don't notice the bulk of the agricultural land in the US unless you drive through it. so, yeah, or fly over it. most of, and again, this would be 3 % the size of the land that we use for agriculture.
Kevin Kelly (13:47)
or fly over.
Right,
Yeah, yeah, I guess you don't notice it because it wouldn't be in your town. It was going to be way out somewhere.
Ramez (14:02)
Yeah,
for a lot of reasons it gets built in rural areas.
Kevin Kelly (14:04)
Yeah.
Right. Let's talk about aesthetics. know, wind farms are very noticeable. You can, they're often on ridges of mountains, which, you know, they have this silhouette, a profile, which you can see from hundreds of miles away. And what about solar farms? What are you imagining that their aesthetic would be that?
Ramez (14:10)
Yes.
Kevin Kelly (14:24)
They're probably not going to be on hilly land, so they're maybe not as visible. What do you say about that?
Ramez (14:30)
Yeah, most of them are on flat land. A lot of them are in desert where you can find it. Some in other areas, marginal lands that we're using for grazing and so on. And you really can't see them from a distance if you're at ground level yourself, which is an advantage that solar has. Like wind runs into various permitting issues.
Kevin Kelly (14:36)
Right.
Ramez (14:51)
especially in states where every county can have a process to say we don't want this. Solar has its permitting challenges, but they're not nearly as substantial because the neighbors aren't annoyed by the solar because they don't even notice that it's there unless they come right up to the edge of the solar farm.
Daniel Pink (15:04)
Mm-hmm.
Kevin Kelly (15:07)
Yeah.
Daniel Pink (15:07)
Are there, mean, one of the reasons that solar has gotten so cheap is this kind of this learning curve that's gone on where you start producing some of these panels, you get better at it, the costs come. And do see that happening as a way to actually even further reduce this footprint? how long does that kind of trajectory continue where these panels become more more efficient and therefore take up less room?
Ramez (15:24)
Absolutely.
Yeah, that's interesting. So most of the cost reduction is not efficiency, though efficiency does is part of it. So efficiency being what percent of the photons they turn into electrons, basically, right? But most of it is actually manufacturing cost declines and cost declines in the process of how we deploy them in the field. Now you can see robotic trucks are starting to enter the market and
Kevin Kelly (15:45)
Bye.
Daniel Pink (15:46)
I see.
Ramez (15:56)
And we've reduced the cost of the panels. We use less silicon, less silver. We slice the wafers thinner. We recycle the scraps. Less energy input, less human labor. But the efficiency part is substantial because it shrinks the land footprint.
Kevin Kelly (16:03)
Yeah.
Ramez (16:13)
That helps in cost. You need less land, less labor for deployment, fewer trackers. Most solar has at least a single axis tracker where it follows the sun. Some have dual axis. Efficiency of the cells that we deploy commercially today, little over 20%. And by 2050, I'd expect that to be 30%, maybe more. And so it can shrink the land footprint by a third.
and you'll have more trackers as well and that also sort of shrinks the land footprint that you need.
There's other stuff that's actually really cool that's not what you'd expect. So a recent trend in solar is what we call bifacial cells. so bifacial cells can get sunlight and turn into electricity on either side, right? Like additional solar panel has a black back sheet, but the bifacial cells can go either way. And so they're good for things like car parks or canopies, because sunlight bounces back from the ground. And even just traditional solar on fields with trackers, you have some additional light bouncing back.
Daniel Pink (16:59)
Okay.
Yep.
Ramez (17:14)
But turns out you can do really cool things with them, like you can make solar fences. You can actually literally make your fence out of solar panels. By square foot, solar panels today cost less than like plastic fencing that you buy from Home Depot. That's crazy. That's really crazy. And it's just going to get cheaper. And so when you...
Kevin Kelly (17:20)
I vertical, vertical.
Daniel Pink (17:23)
That's cool.
And what is
it, what, oh go ahead, go
Ramez (17:40)
When you put these things vertical, it does something really cool. A, it takes no land. And B, it produces no electricity at noon, right? It's more south, but it produces a bunch of electricity on the shoulders. Yes, so at sunrise and sunset, traditional solar panels are not getting a lot of electricity because of the rain. But if you have something vertical, that actually complements the kind of solar we have today. It's incredibly land efficient.
Daniel Pink (17:50)
When it comes at the angle, yeah.
Kevin Kelly (17:53)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Daniel Pink (18:02)
That's awesome. Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (18:05)
That's fantastic.
Daniel Pink (18:06)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kevin Kelly (18:06)
That's really great.
Daniel Pink (18:07)
What do those look like? I actually am really curious about Kevin's earlier question about the aesthetics of this. How is it going to change our experience of the physical environment as we navigate that? Like the fences things.
Ramez (18:19)
I mean, those solar,
yeah, the solar fences look a little sci-fi, right? They are like, you know what a solar panel looks like. And so if you imagine that just put vertically and it's, on both sides, it's a solar panel. That's what it looks like. So definitely looks more futuristic. Yeah, well, we will see lots of that. Like as solar gets so cheap, we are gonna cover loads of surfaces with it because why wouldn't you?
Daniel Pink (18:25)
Okay. Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (18:33)
Well, there's going be a fence. It could be the side of a building, too.
Ramez (18:44)
We'll do more of that for new stuff we're building because a lot of the cost actually ends up like as the panels get cheap, the panels or the cells or the fraction of cost drops. And it's really like the labor and the electrician so I can get in. So retrofitting old buildings will take longer, but like new stuff we build will just be covered at.
Kevin Kelly (18:47)
Right. Right.
Ramez (19:06)
There's also an interesting trend. There's a new solar material called perovskite. It's not that new anymore, but it hasn't quite come to market yet. Perovskite is interesting.
Silicon, you absorb certain wavelengths of light. The light coming from the sun is a mix of wavelengths. Silicon solar panels predominantly absorb certain wavelengths. Perovskite is a clay and you can make it in a super thin layer with very little material and very little energy cost and you can tune it to absorb different frequencies of light. For most, it's going to be cool because we're making these new panels that are silicon with a layer of perovskite on top that at a very low cost can
Daniel Pink (19:35)
Hmm.
Ramez (19:42)
boost
the energy efficiency, right? But perovskite can also be made flexibly. So just if you perovskite only, can make, people are already making these things, sheets that come off a printer, basically, rolls of solar. And you can also make curved solar that conforms to any shape you have. So I think we'll see more and more cars, maybe even aircraft, whatever.
And it won't, it's not gonna provide all the power for these things. like solar cars basically don't make sense as the only energy source, except in very, very few scenarios, but it'll be so cheap that why not boost the energy that you're getting in the vehicle.
Kevin Kelly (20:20)
Right. Right. You could help recharge
while sitting there in the parking lot all day. Right.
Ramez (20:25)
Yeah.
Daniel Pink (20:26)
Do you see room for, and I say this, I'm sort of speaking, talking to my own book here, but do you see room for aesthetic innovation here? Because I happen to be, like we have a house, I'm talking to you from the Hudson Valley, New York. We have a house and it has Tesla tiles on top. And so, and you look at the tiles on the house and there is no virtue signaling in the way that solar panels are. It looks like tiles.
And, you know, and we're getting, mean, I can check the date. It's a very cloudy day today, so it's not a good day, but I have an app, you know, that, that tells me how much of our energy we are getting from the tiles, how much they're pulling from the grid here, you know, the central Hudson grid, and then how much we're getting off of these two gargantuan, probably very inefficient batteries in the basement. ⁓
Ramez (21:13)
That's really fun, right?
Like, it's really cool to look at that stuff. Yeah.
Daniel Pink (21:16)
Yeah,
no, it's cool. But my point is the aesthetic, that if you were to drive by this house, you would have no idea that the house is being powered by solar. And I wonder if that's where we are, where solar becomes less of a kind of a virtue signaling and more just simply about this is how houses are built, because it's a good way to build a house. it doesn't necessarily work for the industrial side, but for the residential side, I wonder if this becomes the norm.
Ramez (21:42)
I think the solar tiles have two challenges. Like one, they're just, they're a premium product that's more expensive. And two, they, so they only really make sense if you are reroofing your house right then or building the house. And even then they're still a premium product. But I do think, you know, I think Tesla has one competitor for tiles now that's still very small scale. As we see more companies enter that space, costs will drop as you get to scale, as you get to higher volume.
Daniel Pink (21:48)
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
Ramez (22:10)
will drop and it'll become more common.
Daniel Pink (22:11)
Right, but this is the same trajectory that you've always talked about, which is that you go from, you have this very predictable, somewhat predictable trajectory where it becomes a kind of a toy, a premium product, something sort of more for the rarefied group of people. But then as we get better and better at it, it becomes much more mainstream to the point where we might not even, I wonder where we don't even notice it.
Ramez (22:34)
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I think in a way, the most important thing you've done, Dan, by putting those tiles on your roof is you have driven them down their cost curve so that they're cheaper for people that follows you to be totally honest. And help the whole world, really.
Daniel Pink (22:44)
I'm here to help Tesla any way that I can.
Kevin Kelly (22:48)
⁓ Thank
Daniel Pink (22:49)
Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (22:49)
you for paying for that, overpaying. ⁓ So going back to the very, very cheap bulk panels that you might use for fencing in 25 years, what are they made of and what kind of issues might we imagine after they hit their lifespan and they have to be started or recycled?
Daniel Pink (22:51)
Hahaha
Hmm.
Kevin Kelly (23:10)
What are they actually made of? What are the actually components inside these things? And what happens to them when they're not needed? If we, if the scale that we're talking about.
Ramez (23:17)
Yeah.
Yeah. They are almost entirely silicon. So there's really, there's a couple different chemistries on the market and there's a little bit of cadmium based flexible or thin film solar, but the bulk of the market globally, more than 90 % is silicon based traditional panels. And those are basically silicon with a little bit of silver and some copper. So nothing.
Kevin Kelly (23:32)
Mm-hmm.
Do they be turned into sand? Some sort of sand
they use for paving on roads or something like that?
Daniel Pink (23:46)
Hmm.
Ramez (23:47)
I mean, think what the reality is, and we should talk about batteries too, think batteries are an amazing set of innovation and they have sort of similar but more complex challenges at end of life. But the reality is like solar panels degrade at about half a percent to one percent per year. So they end up being used for, you know, like 30 years.
commercially, 25 years is the warranty that you'll see. And so we just haven't hit end of life for very much solar. And recycling industries work when you have millions of tons and up of material. Like that's why, like what do we recycle the most of? Steel, copper, aluminum, like industries where you have like
billions of tons, actually. And so we just haven't hit that scale. But that said, we have recycling tech for solar. Solar is not that hard to recycle. Really what you want is you want to recover the silver and the copper out of it. And then the silicon, whatever. You can grind it up. You can melt it. You can melt it and reuse it to make new ingots, to make more solar, et cetera.
Kevin Kelly (24:50)
Right. Okay.
But then going back then to the origins before we get on the batteries, there really isn't rare earths in solar panels. It just requires sand.
Ramez (25:01)
Yeah,
that's a, yeah, in the bulk of solar panels, there are no rare earths. That's a myth. There are, I don't know if you'd call cadmium a rare earth, but you know, cadmium is a more challenging material to work with and it has some toxicity in the one sort of thin film technology that we have from first solar, but it's a very small part of the market overall.
Kevin Kelly (25:15)
Mm-hmm.
OK. All right. that's did you have any more questions about solar?
Daniel Pink (25:29)
Well, I think it's a good time to move to the bottlenecks, which, you what are the possible bottlenecks here? And one of them sounds, think it's, seem to be transmission and then batteries. So you want to take either one of those.
Kevin Kelly (25:39)
Right. Batteries. Right, Right, right.
Ramez (25:42)
Yeah,
I mean, I'll say this like, in a sense, the bottleneck from a problem standpoint, one is the day night cycle. And the second is weather.
as it applies both geographically, some places are less sunny than others, and especially as it applies seasonally. It's actually winter. Batteries will solve the day-night cycle. We can get to that in a sec. The thing that batteries, as we know of today, cannot solve is winter in the Eastern Seaboard or winter in London or Northern Europe.
That's where we hit challenges. And so, let's start with batteries. think batteries are awesome and they affect also transport. Solar has dropped in cost by about a factor of 10 in the last decade. Batteries have too. Batteries are basically where solar was 10 or 15 years ago, both in terms of maturity of a technology and scale of the industry in some ways, at least for stationary storage.
And they are continuing to improve rapidly. A bunch of stuff is interesting that's happening in batteries. Like one, if you look at what's happening in China, the cost of grid scale batteries are being deployed is just stunningly low. I made a forecast a decade ago that we'd see battery costs at about $40 kilowatt hour by 2030. That number is sort of meaningless.
I'll give you one comparator. The general consensus is that about hundred bucks a kilowatt hour EVs become cost competitive in purchase price to gasoline cars. In China, we're, I mean, we're shockingly close to those numbers. Like we have numbers for grid scale batteries fully deployed at like 65 bucks. And we think the cheapest batteries you can buy for EVs there are probably at 50 bucks.
So again, I might have been conservative. We have massive tariffs in the US on those batteries. So it's not the same price here, but modular trade policy, like we're getting to the point where batteries A, make EVs just cheaper than gasoline cars. Like we're at that crossover point now. And B, at large scale grid deployment, if you look at those battery costs,
out of China, they would add two or three cents to the cost of electricity to have batteries deployed for 12 hours next to your solar farm. And if you imagine 2050, we could easily have that solar at about a penny, a kilowatt hour, and at large scale and large farms, batteries that are costing you one to two pennies a kilowatt hour for the nighttime cycle.
And again, that's cheaper than natural gas. It's cheaper than nuclear.
Kevin Kelly (28:13)
Right. So, so going back then to this idea, see solar farms would themselves have an adjacent battery farm, or do you also going back to Dan's house and my house where we have these two big batteries that were storing energy from the noon time for night, or, or if everybody has electric cars, do those car the batteries of those cars just serve?
as some way to charge during the day. so is it distributed batteries or centralized?
Ramez (28:43)
Yes, the way to think about it is centralized batteries are cheaper. It's just way cheaper to build them at scale. Like a lot of it's like less labor and less electrical work sort of per unit of energy storage. But distributed batteries, either in your house or like at the substation at your neighborhood have a lot more value.
and they have more value because they avoid transmission and distribution cost. So imagine like everything we build for electricity is built out for peak. Like the power generating stations and the grid are built out for peak demand, which happens in summer afternoons that are really hot when the AC is on, right? And
Daniel Pink (29:15)
Yeah.
Ramez (29:25)
most of the time they're at way less than peak. And at night, the utilization is about half of what it is in like, you know, the afternoon, right? So the transmission line, distribution line are sitting there underutilized. And as I said, like distribution is actually the area where costs are rising the fastest. So if you put that battery in your house or in your substation or in a commercial building, what you do is you just like fill it up at night.
and you don't need to have as big a transmission or distribution line for that peak of power. You just suck off the battery and it gives you additional resilience. Basically all blackouts in the US with a few exceptions are caused by power lines, know, trees going through power lines and so on. So it gives you some resilience against that and so on. All that said, like the costs in your house today are just ridiculous.
A battery deployed in a home costs about 10 times as much per unit energy as a battery deployed in a large grid project. The large grid deployments, by the way, are mostly not entirely, but they are very common in new solar farms that are being built. It's just very efficient to put them all there. They're behind the same grid connection, the same bank of inverters and so on. But we do have some large scale just like grid battery projects.
So I'm waiting for ways to, new companies and innovations to shrink the cost of putting batteries in your house. In the meantime, you absolutely observed Kevin, that EVs are huge batteries. And up until recently, we really haven't had any vehicle to home EVs out there, but they're like,
Basically coming. I the models being released in the next two three years Not just from Tesla Tesla's actually a laggard on this besides the Cybertruck but from all the other auto OEMs or not all but most of them we're seeing that they're you model year 2027 2028 will have the ability to put power back into your house and that's really interesting because the batteries and EVs are Enormous and you've already you have a different cost tolerance
Daniel Pink (31:01)
Interesting.
Ramez (31:29)
And they're cheaper also than the home battery and you're even cost tolerance for that battery because use it for different reasons. And so like a Tesla Powerwall I think these days is you on the order of 7 kilowatt hours, maybe it's 10. And the battery in my EV which is not even very high-end is 85 kilowatt hours. So it's just enormous.
what's in these electric vehicles. And so I think people who are looking at batteries as a backup solution, like if you're going to buy an EV, like just hook it up, right? Get the right sort of charger that has that vehicle to home situation. If you're at it more for
the purpose of grid balancing and lowering transition distribution costs. It's a little bit more complicated. You got to figure out like what are the driving patterns? ⁓ Is the vehicle going to be there when you need it? That sort of thing.
Kevin Kelly (32:16)
Right. Right.
Right.
looking at the transmission part a little bit here and taking a momentary global view, I spoke recently in China to the Chief Technical Officer at CATL, how do you say it? K-T-L. I'm not sure what the pronunciation is. The big battery maker, the world's... Cattle? Yeah, cattle. And he was really, really enthusiastic.
Ramez (32:38)
Cattle is how I say it, yeah.
Kevin Kelly (32:43)
about a global grid for energy with high voltage DC lines, which he said could also go underwater, and that you have a balancing of the planet with energy. So ⁓ you have a global grid that is trying to balance some of the issues with seasons and night and day. Does that, in your best case scenario, does that seem like
Daniel Pink (32:46)
Hmm.
Ramez (32:51)
⁓
Kevin Kelly (33:10)
something that's feasible.
Ramez (33:12)
So that's jumping ahead. Like the first step is to build continent scale grids. And that's something that China is doing. China is the only country that's doing it. In China, in Western China, where you've been, Kevin, and people have, you have vast swaths of land that are extremely sunny and extremely windy. And so when you look at the Chinese grid,
Kevin Kelly (33:17)
Right. Right.
Yeah.
Ramez (33:33)
You have these high voltage DC or now they call it ultra high voltage DC lines. I just call them they like step up beyond HPDC that run, you know, 3500 kilometers from the sunny interior out to know, Shanghai and Shenzhen and you know are powering the iPhones that are getting made for you.
And so China's done this, or they're doing it actively, because the math makes sense. It makes sense on every continent, really. And because the Chinese government, you know, lot of things we can say about them, but they are able to push through large infra projects. So the first step before we get to global is we ought to have a macro grid in the US. We'd have a continent scale grid. we run these
not me, but researchers run these enormous models to try to model, you know, grid build out and like least cost cost optimized models.
what it looks like in the US. And all of them say that with a macro grid that is really spanning the continent, you get lower cost and higher penetration of renewables. Again, that sort of New Mexico to New York sort of scenario. So that's the first thing. Now, do we need a global grid? I think for most continents, you do not.
But there are a few places where really going intercontinental makes sense. One of them is Europe.
⁓ Europe because Europe is the least sunny place where a lot of people live, right? Billion people in Europe and know, the solar resources of Europe are like Germany where solar started has solar resources similar to Canada, honestly. So does the UK. Southern Europe's better, but still in winter they don't get nearly as much sunlight. But so Europe is just north of North Africa.
which is closer to the equator. So you get less shifting of sunlight resources from summer to winter, something that you want. And it has just enormous amounts of land in deserts. And so there have been projects proposed, real projects trying to raise funds for intercontinental power transmission. The first one actually wasn't for Europe.
It was Singapore, just because they have very little land and take their commitments to decarbonization seriously. I've looked at lots of options and one of them was this project called Sun Cable, bringing solar from Northwestern Australia underwater to Singapore. It hasn't gotten funded, it hasn't gotten built. Singapore is probably finally waking up to the fact that if they just make nice with their neighbors, they can get a lot of solar from Indonesia and Malaysia.
Daniel Pink (35:45)
Mm-hmm.
Kevin Kelly (35:53)
Wow. Wow.
Ramez (36:05)
slide once in Singapore and I showed arrows and people in the audience told me that they viewed it as an invasion. So there's some political and cultural stuff that maybe it'll increase regional cooperation. But some cables are really interesting because I got to see sort of their math and honestly the bulk of the cost is the cable in that scenario. But it's still penciled out to like affordable electricity in Singapore. It would however require
Kevin Kelly (36:12)
You
Yeah.
Okay.
Ramez (36:31)
building factories to make more underwater HVDC cable than the world's ever made, and building ships that don't exist today just for that one project. So this is a great idea.
Daniel Pink (36:41)
What's
a timetable on something like that? Is that a decade long project at best?
Ramez (36:45)
You
do it in a decade, 15 years, something like that. Like it's big.
Kevin Kelly (36:49)
Yeah,
yeah, we've 25 years. So that's a no.
Ramez (36:53)
Yeah,
Daniel Pink (36:53)
So we can do two.
Ramez (36:54)
there's one of these, by the I'll just say the one that actually I think is more interesting is a project called X-Links that would take Morocco, and Morocco is one of the countries that has amazing sun and amazing wind, by the way, and deliver power up to the UK. That one's also unfunded, but that, like the UK has a really, like solar doesn't work in the UK, right? It'll work in the summer.
but it's not gonna get you through winter, which is when their peak electricity demand is. So I hope that we start looking at those sorts of projects, maybe not from the West Coast of the US to China. I don't think we need that, but for other closer things, it's useful.
Daniel Pink (37:31)
For these, sort of these within continent projects, what, who pays for that? Like what's the, is it a public private thing or how does it, know, in an ideal world, how does it work?
Ramez (37:41)
So cost allocation of the grid ⁓ is a hot topic in electricity. And the electricity regulators help figure that out. But there are fully private electricity transmission projects. Private developers can actually fund these things, it's somewhat regulated market. so capital is not really the bottleneck. The bottleneck in the US, and you asked me for
like later on we'll talk about like actions and so on. The bottleneck is our permitting and regulation. Permitting new transmission lines is incredibly hard. People talk about NEPA at the federal level, that's just one of many, many, issues. So have this mix of federal, state and county, local level.
agencies and places where people can veto. Like it takes just one person along, you know, a piece of land, a long, you know, multi-thousand line, multi-thousand mile line to say absolutely not to stop the whole thing. Then you have a second problem and this problem is insidious. Most US electricity
is handled, delivered to you by monopoly utilities that are regulated by their utility commission. Those monopoly utilities are paid for deploying capital. So they like to spend money because the way that the regulator sets it up is you spend a billion dollars and we'll give you 10 % return on that billion dollars. So more spending is great. They own the distribution line to you and they own generators like natural gas power plants, solar farms, nuclear
farms and so on. when you, let's say you have our neighboring area that has better sunlight than you and somebody says, oh, we're going to build a transmission line from this neighboring area to bring power into your region. What does a monopoly utility say? It says no. mean, like stealthily funds groups to oppose this line because they don't want cheaper electricity coming into their market and undermining them. I'm a
this is an overstatement because it's actually complicated. I would just break up the monopoly utilities and you know Texas has this very market oriented system that has its own flaws but it's very permissionless and it just has like rabid economic competition between actors and I think that's how we have to get to with electricity.
Kevin Kelly (40:01)
So.
Daniel Pink (40:01)
Do
you think there's a political movement here, sort of incipient? Because of what you're talking about there, your diagnosis of the problem is very consistent with the diagnosis that underlies the abundance agenda.
Kevin Kelly (40:10)
Yes. Right.
building the building permit issues of building everything. Yes.
Daniel Pink (40:15)
Yeah, exactly, which
I think, actually, I think the tide politically could be turning on that one. And then, but also this idea that what you have now, at least in the US federal government, is this kind of visceral cultural revulsion for renewables based on, know, based on what it seems to signal.
Ramez (40:40)
Vice signaling is what's happening at the federal level. They want to signal vice is how I view it.
Daniel Pink (40:44)
Yeah. No, but I
think that there are people out there for whom being a vegetarian is a signal of vice and having solar panels is a signal of vice. And so I'm wondering whether we somehow get past that politically on both of those. There's kind of a triangulation, what I'm talking about here, where we get past the NIMBY permit maniacs and we get past the Solars for hippies maniacs and somehow find a point where this becomes
politically viable and politically appealing for someone to take forward
Ramez (41:15)
I think there is progress, for sure. I think the second thing I said about monopoly utilities is still too geeky to be understood. But I think on the permitting side, I think Derek and Ezra's book is the most important policy book the last several years, honestly. And I do see a movement forming.
Daniel Pink (41:32)
Hmm.
Ramez (41:34)
I think this is not energy, but in housing, the Yenbys are winning in California right now. We've had a number of electoral or legislative victories. It hasn't turned into actually more housing yet, but it's a good sign. And I think at a federal level, right now, I think out of committee, we already have this bill called the Speed Bill that's a bipartisan permitting reform bill.
And it's really interesting. There's a lot of dynamics of that. We've had multiple, multiple sort of shots on goal for permanent reform that hasn't succeeded for a variety of reasons. This one's very interesting because under Trump, the feds are, you know,
dragging their feet or just outright saying no to permitting for renewables. They're just using regulatory discretion at the agency, so just block it. So this bipartisan permitting reform bill would reduce the permitting burden on clean energy and on natural gas power plants and on pipelines and on transmission, all of it. The far left
doesn't love that. There's a supply side attitude on the left. We have to constrain fossil fuel production or movement of it. I'm the opposite. like, look, clean stuff is going to win on cost. So if you just level the playing field, it's actually harder to permit clean stuff or transmission than it is pipelines or gas or even coal today. You just level the playing field, you're going to give the advantage to the clean side. And out of committee,
I think it was Brasso's committee.
They came out with a pretty good bill and the Republicans are saying they will include language in the bill that will not make it possible for an administration to just reject all clean energy permits, which is the key demand. The Democrats were like, we like permitting reform, but we're not going to agree to it if the Fed still keeps blocking everything. So, you know, ⁓ this would be like the third or fourth time I heard
gets broken if it fails. Let's keep going. Let's keep trying.
Kevin Kelly (43:31)
Right,
So we have over 25 years, the best case scenario would be that some of that reform does happen and we are able to build it. So moving on away from solar and maybe even wind, but to nuclear. ⁓ So there's been a lot of talk recently and even of which we haven't talked about AI, just the need for energy and maybe
Daniel Pink (43:39)
Yeah.
Ramez (43:46)
Yes.
Kevin Kelly (43:55)
even private nuclear. So in 25 years, what's the best case scenario for energy and in relation to nuclear? What's your best case scenario for nuclear in 25 years?
Ramez (44:06)
In 25 years, my hope is that the cost of building nuclear reactors is back down to what it was in the 70s and that we're actually building some. And building it to provide power in winter in places that are not.
super sunny. think that's the real scenario is the eastern seaboard, all that area where the bulk of US electricity is and it doesn't get tons of sun, especially if we don't get a lot of transmission build out. I think that's where you really see a ton of value of nuclear. And so really, this is phenomenon. The last nuclear reactors we built in the US cost almost four times what it cost to build a nuclear reactor.
in China today, or like two and a half times the cost the South Koreans can build nuclear reactors. And it costs, you know, 100, sorry, 220 % of the forecasted cost. And that's, it doesn't have to be that way. But I think we have this sort of chicken and egg or this flywheel that's broken. Like the flywheel in
in the learning grade, right, is you build stuff and so you make process improvements as you scale and that makes the thing cheaper. And as the thing gets cheaper, you find new markets and sell more of it. And then you, you you find other ways to improve it because you're a big industry. And in the U S we've got the opposite because we stopped building nuclear, the supply chain and labor force.
has just atrophied to almost nothing. And so I'm actually a fan of what the White House has recently announced, that the Trump White House, Trump DOE have got a lot of criticism, but on nuclear they're being ⁓ ambitious. A lot of the stuff they've done is kind of like, whatever. But they announced something recently, which is that the US government will actually buy and operate nuclear reactors. And that's not normally what I think of as like the best way to build stuff in general, but they're
breaking this chicken and egg. Because today, everyone would benefit if we were building a lot of nuclear. The cost would come down, and it's great, clean, baseload power. But nobody wants to take the risk of being the first person to build or buy a nuclear reactor, because it's basically guaranteed it's going to go over budget. So there's this externality of like, as we're talking about with the panels on your house, it's not the same steepness of running rate, but building more nuclear would make nuclear cheaper.
And so the best case is that these efforts to kickstart that flywheel again work, and we start building again.
Kevin Kelly (46:33)
What about these ideas of having privately built corporate nuclear power plants to run a data center? Does that get away from all the other kinds of costs that overruns? Or are they still stuck in the same?
Ramez (46:40)
Yeah, I most nuclear power plants are.
No,
they're still stuck in the same thing. And the tech companies in particular are signing deals for SMR, small modular reactors. SMR is kind of a word that's gotten abused at this point. the hope at the, there's one, probably the leading SMR model is not really small in my view. It's just sort of more prefab that you assemble on site. There's hope that'll bring costs down.
Daniel Pink (47:02)
Hmm.
Ramez (47:13)
But then the sci-fi hope sort of is these nukes that are so small that you can essentially build them in a factory and ship them to site. Or if they're not quite that small, at least you can build them in a...
handful of components in a factory that you then move to site and do the final assembly there, because everything that we do in factories has a much faster learning rate than stuff that you do stick-built in the field. And so that's what the tech companies are signing off-take agreements. They're signing these agreements that say, we'll buy electricity from this project at X cost if you build it. And that allows the small modular reactor manufacturers or developers who go out and get raised capital
because it's at least de-risked on the customer side. You have a customer willing to buy the power. Nevertheless, the first SMRs would be expensive and they'll probably go over cost and over time. But ⁓ because they're smaller, you get more repetitions. You build more units and that should make the learning go faster on those than on big reactors.
Kevin Kelly (48:17)
So let's take a global view. Like does the rest of the world have the same natural overrun issue where things are almost guaranteed to cost far more than they were budgeted? Or is that just, I mean, like if they're gonna build in India, if they're gonna build in Brazil, do they escape some of that and have a more ⁓ reasonable role?
Ramez (48:39)
Right now,
only China and South Korea can deliver a nuclear reactor on time and on budget. Europe has a set of fiascos. Hinckley Sea is going to come in at two to three times budget and late. France...
who had an amazing nuclear build out in the 70s, where they just, they did the smart thing. They picked a design and they cookie-cutted it out repeatedly. Their Flamanville, I'm probably not pronouncing it right, that looks like an even bigger disaster than Hinkley Sea. There's not a ton of great data about India, so I don't really know. But we look overall.
Kevin Kelly (48:58)
Absolutely.
So, but we're talking about best
case scenarios. like in 25 years, best case scenarios. Do these things get easier? Is there some learning momentum and flywheel going? Is this your best case scenario? Do the small versions work? Again, let's get away from that today and talk about 25 years.
Ramez (49:16)
25, yeah, 25 years is...
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, in the best case, we start the flywheel spinning, and that puts us on a path where nuclear costs are declining. They can't decline as fast or as much as the cost of like solar and batteries for a variety of reasons. But we should be able to make new nuclear reactors at 60 % lower than the cost that we build them today. If we get
Daniel Pink (49:56)
Both the big ones
and the SMRs.
Ramez (49:58)
both the big ones and the SMRs, if we get them to scale, we should be able to drop the costs to where it makes sense, to where they can just economically make sense, especially with any sort of decarbonization policy.
Kevin Kelly (50:10)
And is the SMRs, would they be the state of the art in 25 years or is there something coming after them that would be even maybe smaller or more efficient or something?
Ramez (50:21)
I mean, fission tech evolves slowly. And so, you know, I think the biggest thing, if you look at even not the SMRs, but the Toshiba AP1000, which is a large reactor model, a couple have been built in the US and China has a variant of it that they've built like a dozen of. That has some big advantages. The biggest one is it's passive safe, right? So Fukushima happened because you need pumps.
put water into the reactor core to suck the heat away, the water comes out and you turn a turbine. But if you stop wicking away heat from a reactor's core, that's when a meltdown occurs, right? And it melts through the steel because it's just still producing this heat. Past reactors have required pumps to move that, to circulate that water. And in Fukushima, the pumps were
plugged into the grid, not plugged into the reactor itself. So the tsunami washed away the power lines and the pumps stopped working. Well, like the AP1000 and basically all the SMRs that are being built are passive, meaning that just the heat itself drives the circulation of the water. So that's amazing, right? It's not like you could never cause a meltdown, but it gets harder and harder and harder. And hopefully that would increase people's confidence of these things.
Kevin Kelly (51:33)
No. So we haven't mentioned fusion. Trope, 25 years? Yes. Of course we are or not.
Daniel Pink (51:38)
Well, was the yeah, that was I was going to I was going to do it an
elegant segue from fission to fusion as the as the first trope. So, yeah, I mean.
Kevin Kelly (51:43)
Whatever.
Ramez (51:46)
That's exactly what I was
going to say, it let's talk fusion. So I think we're all great.
Daniel Pink (51:49)
Spider-Man, Spider-Man
2 is the trope, right? Because one of the bad guys had a fusion reactor.
Kevin Kelly (51:56)
Yeah.
Ramez (51:57)
Fusion's coming. Fusion used to be 50 years away. It's not anymore. At this point, I have extremely high confidence we're going to see practical net energy gain probably within the next decade and maybe before, maybe in 2028, maybe this, maybe December. It's that close. The question is economics, the spreadsheet models of these fusion companies and they're like,
55 fusion startups that have been raised like four or five billion of private capital and the start-ups just move faster than the national projects. ⁓ The spreadsheet models of the cost of these reactors make them look pretty competitive. They make them look like a little bit cheaper than a best-case fission reactor for the sort of more conservative designs like Commonwealth Fusion. So ETER is the big project in France. It's the TOKOMAC. It's a donut.
Daniel Pink (52:24)
Really?
Wow.
Ramez (52:48)
that has plasma in it and use magnets to guide the plasma and so on. Eater is like enormous and the smaller size you can build costs you tens of billions of dollars. The safe bet in fusion, and it's crazy we can say safe bet in fusion, is a company called Commonwealth Fusion in Boston.
and they basically took a new material, this thin film that can be made into a superconducting magnet that is just much, much smaller than the old magnets and are doing the same design, the best design validated by physics, but they can shrink the whole thing down. And so we're like, well, we know the physics, this just should work, but they still have this fascinating thing, which is
almost all of how we generate electricity from these sorts of situations is the reactor generates heat and the heat makes turns water into steam and turns a turbine. So you're still losing half the energy and you still have this additional capax of like the turbine and all this stuff. But there are a couple other fusion startups, Helion Energy here in Seattle. I just visited them last month and saw their latest prototype reactor. They do direct conversion. So they like they
Kevin Kelly (53:37)
Right, right, Yeah.
That's
Ramez (53:57)
have a rail gun that shoots two plasmas at each other, and then these magnets, power electronics that compress it down, and a fusion explosion happens. And that explosion presses against the magnetic field, and it drives a current in reverse. And so that, instead of being like 50 % efficient,
is like 85 % efficient and has a lot fewer moving parts and so on. Helion is sort of the bad boy of big fusion startups because they don't publish academically. And so a of people are skeptical of them for that reason. And I'm not a nuclear physicist, so can't tell you it's gonna work, but they've raised a lot of money. Sam Altman, think, is chair of the board and their biggest investor. And if that works, plausibly,
Daniel Pink (54:35)
Hmm.
Ramez (54:37)
you could see rather independent 24-7 meltdown impossible energy at like 2 cents a kilowatt hour, maybe. Maybe.
Daniel Pink (54:46)
It's
just like what on what time horizon?
Ramez (54:50)
They have a commercial deal with Microsoft to produce a small but still commercial reactor, 50 megawatts, a big fusion reactor is a gigawatt, so a thousand megawatts, that's supposed to power on in 2028. And they say there are financial penalties if they don't get that date. So, you know, everything runs late. Everything that's first of a kind runs late. But...
Kevin Kelly (55:03)
Wow.
Wow. Wow.
Daniel Pink (55:08)
Wow.
Kevin Kelly (55:13)
But nonetheless,
taking a 25 year horizon, that would have to be part of the mix.
Ramez (55:18)
And there's a whole lot of other Fusion startups that are doing wacky and interesting things in my mind.
Kevin Kelly (55:23)
Right.
Daniel Pink (55:24)
Wow,
what portion of the US energy source do you think could come from that in 25 years?
Ramez (55:29)
I mean, honestly, if it really works and if the cost is that low, it could be half of US electricity in that time frame or even more. yeah, there's just like enormous, enormous, enormous financials. It's still a wild card because they haven't done it. But I know more than I can say, but I like their approach from a cost basis for a lot of reasons. They actually, unlike most
Daniel Pink (55:42)
That's a big deal.
Yeah.
Ramez (55:54)
And unlike nuclear in general, Helion in particular, and maybe a couple other companies in that space, could achieve a learning rate that looks almost like solar or like batteries. And I don't say that lightly. And if it works and if a lot of things pan out, you could see this, even if the first generation is not two cents, even if the first generation is 10 cents, people will pay that.
Daniel Pink (56:07)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Ramez (56:18)
And you could see the cost decline rapidly as they scale.
Daniel Pink (56:22)
I know it's a similar trajectory to other things that we've seen. mean, there's this great line saying, if you want to know the next big thing, look at what's been failing for 20 years. so, I mean, that's sort of the case with solar, you know? So, I mean, Jimmy Carter was putting solar panels on the White House in 1977 and it's like, hey, we're not there yet, but it's like, suddenly we're there. And I didn't realize it was similar kind of trajectory with fusion.
Kevin Kelly (56:29)
You
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's gonna be the same thing.
Ramez (56:44)
Yeah, there's a great
animated GIF or like a video. ⁓ I'll just describe it to you. In the upper right quadrant is Q greater than one. And that's when you have like net energy gain. And it doesn't matter what the axes are. But if you animate every fusion experiment that's happened since the 1950s, they get, you know, they kind of spread out, but they get closer and closer and closer to this barrier. And we're basically right on the barrier right now. So I like trends.
I don't think everything that's failed for the last 20 years is gonna work out. I like trend lines. so like solo, can just chart the trend line of cost. Fusion, I can't, but I can chart the trend line of how close they're getting to that net energy gain. And that looks aggressive.
Daniel Pink (57:18)
Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (57:23)
Yeah. Okay. That's, that's really fantastic. that's some of the best news I've heard in a long time. what, what would the, ⁓ the, ⁓ first, let's call it the first decade of these plants look like what kind of, ⁓ like what kind of scale are they going to be? What kind of, of, ⁓ precautions would entail what, what, what kind of, again, maybe not the aesthetics, but,
Daniel Pink (57:28)
That's exciting. think it's, yeah.
Kevin Kelly (57:49)
Are they going to be about the size of a nuclear power plant or a gas power plant? they going to have what kind of security, additional security might they have over a gas plant? Just give a little bit of a sense of what we could expect from the first decade.
Ramez (58:04)
So
let's start with safety. These are massively safer than fission power plants. And in some ways, they're safer than natural gas power plants. And the reason for that is no meltdown is possible. In fission, you have a big pile of uranium, and it naturally gives off heat and radiation, right?
Kevin Kelly (58:09)
Sure.
Daniel Pink (58:09)
Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (58:12)
Okay.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ramez (58:25)
In fusion, you have this fusion reaction going on that only continues or is pulsed like Helion is pulsed and a few others are too, like, you know, one to 10 Hertz, let's say, but that only continues either the like movement of the plasma through this donut only continues or the pulsing of these plasmas hitting each other only continues if you keep feeding power into it. What's the opposite of Fukushima? Fukushima, if you stop feeding power to the pumps, you get a meltdown.
Kevin Kelly (58:46)
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Right.
Ramez (58:52)
in
Kevin Kelly (58:52)
Right.
Ramez (58:53)
every single fusion design, if you stop feeding power back in, it just fizzles out and nothing happens. And there's no stockpile of natural gas that could explode. There is, like, I don't want to overstate this, there's a little bit of radiation, but it is not the long-lived isotopes that happen in a fusion reactor, and it's just massively lower. So, aesthetics, yeah, so I mean,
Kevin Kelly (58:59)
Right. Right.
Daniel Pink (59:04)
Interesting.
Kevin Kelly (59:15)
So what about scale?
Ramez (59:19)
So what might it look like? Something like Commonwealth Fusion would look sort of like an actual gas plant, probably, that sort of size, less than efficient plant. Something like Helion or some other companies like ZAP, also a Seattle company, would look more like just a building. It just looks like a square building. It could be a warehouse. It could be an industrial site. You're just not going to even know. Scale, really depends. If the cost is, let's say we get a
fusion reactors at 10 cents a kilowatt hour. Okay, like that's a little bit cheaper than the fusion reactors we can build right now. Those would scale. And if you have like, you know, four or five year construction times, they'd scale, but you know, probably not super fast. What if you had fusion reactors that are competitive with natural gas, that would be old natural gas prices, like the five cent a kilowatt hour or lower.
they're just going to spread like hotcakes. I mean, we had this surge of natural gas power plants in the 2000s and 2010s, and gas went from not a big part of our electricity mix to surpassing coal and being number one on the basis of being able to generate power at five cents a kilowatt hour and being able to build the plants in a year. And so if you have similar dynamics in fusion, that will happen also.
Daniel Pink (1:00:32)
Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (1:00:33)
Okay, well that is really fabulous.
Daniel Pink (1:00:35)
That's a great
best case scenario.
Kevin Kelly (1:00:37)
Yeah, it is really
fantastic. So, let's move to some tropes besides.
Daniel Pink (1:00:42)
Yeah,
we don't, we'll go ahead, if you have another, yeah. Yeah.
Ramez (1:00:44)
Can I say a couple things about global? Let's start with
the US, but let's talk globally too. I just want to point out a few things. There's about a billion people that lack electricity access today. And those people are basically all in sub-Saharan Africa and a little bit of South Asia. And those some of the sunniest places on earth. India has actually made a lot of progress electrification. So I think that's a hidden blessing.
Kevin Kelly (1:00:47)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ramez (1:01:07)
We've seen this incredible thing happen recently where Pakistan has this incredible surge in solar and a number of countries in Africa have imported enough solar panels that in theory they could be generating half of the country's electricity in just their last 12 months imports. Because it's always been hard to do solar in very poor countries because you have to take out loans for it. It's all capital in front.
But now that the panels are just so cheap, you have this incredible surge just in the last 12 months of some of the poorest countries on earth buying incredible amounts of solar that's gonna be DIY installed on buildings. So think that's huge. And I just wanna also say like the...
If you look at a whole bunch of other issues, energy is not the only issue involved in poverty by any means. But why do US farms produce four times as much food per acre as a farm in Bangladesh? It's because the Bangladeshi farmers don't have tractors or...
synthetic fertilizer, honestly, which are both like pretty coupled to energy in various ways. So I think that's an incredible opportunity. And the other thing I want to say globally is as electrified transport.
Oil is within 10 years of hitting its peak of demand, maybe five years. I think it'll happen in the next five to 10 years. And then demand will start dropping. It won't be zero in 2050, for sure. It'll still be quite high. But I think in 2050, it'll be obviously on a decline from the peak it hit by 2035. And that...
It depowers, it reduces the world's dependence on a few states, in the Middle East in particular, but also Russia. And it depowers some of the worst regimes on earth. Some of them we nominally call our allies. And I just think that's beautiful. Like EVs are a pro global democracy technology. And EVs, we didn't talk about them a lot, but like today in China, you can buy a four door EV for $8,000, right?
Kevin Kelly (1:02:59)
Yeah,
Ramez (1:03:04)
We've been, I've been saying for a decade now that the crossover point would be about now between 2025 and 2030, it's just cheaper to walk out of a dealership with an EV than a gasoline vehicle and your ongoing cost is lower too and commercial vehicles are switching too. So I think that's an amazing, amazing thing that's gonna happen globally.
Daniel Pink (1:03:15)
Mm-hmm.
Kevin Kelly (1:03:15)
Yeah.
Right, right.
Daniel Pink (1:03:24)
Well, Romes as a sci-fi writer, know, like the, there's all, you know, the unintended consequences that we, we D power the oil States. And then suddenly the States that are the, the, the countries that are the sunniest become these despotic regimes because they have this resource of sun. Yeah. So there it is. That's the, that's the, well, no, the tagline is like, you know, the sunniest countries are the darkest places, you know,
Kevin Kelly (1:03:39)
You
Ramez (1:03:43)
I'd love to write that for you.
Kevin Kelly (1:03:44)
You
Hahaha
Ramez (1:03:49)
I said, we'll deal with that if we get there.
Like it's a great thing to have.
Daniel Pink (1:03:52)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I mean, you never know. I mean, when oil became the coin of the realm, I don't think people projected that we would have these petro-states. always with these things, are unintended consequences. Can we do a quick round of tropes? We've covered a lot of them, Kevin. But just get your quick top of mind, like, yeah, that could happen. No way. What are you talking about?
Ramez (1:04:06)
It's true.
Kevin Kelly (1:04:09)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Daniel Pink (1:04:18)
So one of them is basically infinite clean energy, free unlimited power, what we used to refer to as like too cheap to meter.
Ramez (1:04:25)
It'll, I mean, we'll always meter it because you gotta like generate revenue to build more, but it'll get, it'll be cheaper as a fraction of our income and everything else.
Daniel Pink (1:04:33)
but not infinite and free.
Ramez (1:04:36)
As much as you want, but not free.
Daniel Pink (1:04:38)
Okay. Well, okay. That's all right. Infinite. That's good. Solar harvesting at a stellar scale.
Ramez (1:04:44)
not in this timeframe, but space-based solar to beam solar down to Earth is another wild card tech that is possible in the 2050 timeframe. And now people are talking about data centers in space as well. Really get around permitting issues on Earth. But you know, in space you can collect 24-7 solar power. So I think...
Daniel Pink (1:04:48)
Ha
Interesting.
Really?
I guess that's true. Yeah. You don't have the day
night problem.
Ramez (1:05:09)
Yeah, so think it's a, know, if fusion doesn't work, it's actually a fusion like power source in many ways. And I think it's under invested in, it could happen.
Daniel Pink (1:05:11)
Wow.
Kevin Kelly (1:05:16)
So yes, so you have near earth solar farms and that would, and how's the energy being down? Is it microwave? Can you really make it?
Ramez (1:05:20)
Huh?
Microwaves. There's a couple
startups that have been funded that do it via lasers. And that's great, but lasers don't penetrate clouds and rain. And again, the day-night cycle is not going to be the problem because batteries are getting so cheap. It's winter. And it's winter in places like New York City and London and so on. Microwaves penetrate clouds and rain.
Daniel Pink (1:05:42)
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah,
yeah. mean, it's basically revolution is the bigger challenge than rotation, you know, in this kind of thing. How about another one where basically everything is recyclable fuel that trash or random garbage becomes fuel. So you have, you know, in Back to the Future, you're powering time travel with trash.
Kevin Kelly (1:05:45)
Any?
Ramez (1:06:02)
Mr. Fusion, probably not in your car, but I think already in Europe, we actually do landfills to energy. And so, I don't think it'll be everything, but there are some use of that.
Daniel Pink (1:06:14)
Another, how about energy as a weapon? You sometimes see that in sci-fi movies and things like that, that energy itself is deployed as a weapon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, or just like giant energy waves rather than bombs and bullets.
Kevin Kelly (1:06:22)
I mean, like a laser, like a laser beam.
Ramez (1:06:30)
Yeah, so mean, lasers on the battlefield are getting a lot of attention right now as anti-drone weapons. And I think that's actually really important. Like drones up in the warfare were incredibly vulnerable. And so, I mean, the UK just had a demo this past week and they say it's a missile, an anti-drone missile sometimes costs a million bucks or at least a hundred thousand bucks a shot to take out a thousand dollar drone.
Daniel Pink (1:06:37)
Bye.
Ramez (1:06:55)
And so the UK boasted that their ⁓ laser weapon picking down drones cost 13 cents a shot. And that'll be really interesting because you want like big energy generation or big energy storage. You'd like your portable Mr. Fusion or an aircraft carrier, you're taking advantage of the nuclear reactors that are on the carrier itself.
Daniel Pink (1:07:01)
Whoa.
Yeah, what about, we didn't talk much about this, I don't know if you see it so much as a trope in science fiction, but I guess it's been in a few things, kind of wireless energy, sort of energy transmission through the air rather than through lines.
Kevin Kelly (1:07:25)
Tesla, Mr.
Tesla himself.
Ramez (1:07:28)
Yeah,
I think space-based solar would be the way that that would happen at super large scale. And there's a few other scenarios that can happen at large scale, but mostly not. But we do see some low-power wireless transmission startups and tech.
for like beaming power to your device or beaming power to IoT sensors in your home, just because you want to avoid the cost of opening up your walls and running power and stuff.
Kevin Kelly (1:07:57)
Right.
This is not very sexy and fairly boring and pedestrian, but I don't understand why buildings aren't just wired for nine volts DC instead of 110 AC, because all you do is step it down with all these little wall warts everywhere. No one's really using 110. Everything is running off of low voltage DC. They should just put that into the walls.
Ramez (1:08:15)
Yeah.
It's path dependence, right? It's just like how we got here. But I think one thing we'll see is the data centers have very, very concentrated load. And right now, mean, the power coming off of spinning turbines is AC, right? So that's a lot of our grid. We're not quite at the point that fully off-grid
Uh, solar and battery power data centers make sense, but I think it'll make sense back to the envelope, you know, in the next 10 years in the U S Southwest, uh, maybe a little bit faster than that. That's DC power. So I think you will see things like data centers to just skip, you know, the cost of inverters, the cost of power blocks and just get direct DC power delivered to them in that way.
Kevin Kelly (1:09:04)
Right.
So this is not so much a trope, but it is kind of a crazy idea going back to this kind of this marriage of fusion and solar. If solar is panels are making taking photons and turning them into electrons, why can't you just have a fusion that's making photons and then having solar panels on the outside immediately turn them into electrons without the heat part?
Ramez (1:09:28)
Yeah,
it's just not what happens in a fusion reaction.
Kevin Kelly (1:09:34)
But you could imagine
maybe that happening in the future.
Ramez (1:09:37)
Somebody might come up with that. There's a really cool startup doing not that, but it's called Light Cell Energy that does something quite fascinating. It's like a portable Dyson sphere is how Danielle Fong, their founder, talks about it. So they use a fossil fuel like propane or butane to heat up sodium, and then sodium glows incredibly brightly.
Kevin Kelly (1:09:48)
You
Ramez (1:10:01)
And then they surround it with what we call thermal PV, infrared PV, that's optimized those wavelengths to directly convert it into electricity. And so it's still a fossil fuel, but they get basically twice the energy out of it because you're not wasting it as heat. And you can make it really small and really light. So they're definitely like a wild card, deep tech approach, but that's the closest thing I've got for that portable Bison sphere.
Kevin Kelly (1:10:26)
Okay.
All right. Great. Anymore Dan? Chops?
Daniel Pink (1:10:31)
I guess the last one would be, am I going to have a mini fusion reactor in my house?
Ramez (1:10:36)
Probably not, but the most ambitious Fusion startup, as far as most sci-fi, closest to Mr. Fusion, is a company called Avalanche Energy, also here in Seattle. And I cannot judge their physics. I would say they're definitely a wild card. But their Fusion design, if it works, is small enough to power a car.
Like it's not like quite the Mr. Fusion size, but you know, let's call it like, I don't know, hundreds of kilos, not one or two kilos, but small enough that you can put it everywhere basically. And so if they succeed and it's cheap, then that's like a really wacky best-case scenario future.
Kevin Kelly (1:11:14)
Yeah, that's
really fabulous. Well, this is really fabulous. So, so as you think about the next 25 years, is there anything that you feel certain enough about that should happen that you'd be willing to bet a hundred dollars that it would happen or would not happen?
Daniel Pink (1:11:17)
Okay. Yeah.
Kevin Kelly (1:11:33)
we can have a negative bet too, where you, where you would say, here's something everybody thinks is going to happen. And I'll, and I am certain that it's not going to happen. Either one of those something that, that, you, you have some certain toot about.
Ramez (1:11:46)
I will have solar projects wholesale costs below a penny a kilowatt hour for sure.
Kevin Kelly (1:11:52)
In 25 years, the cost of solar will be less than a penny a kilowatt hour on average or.
Ramez (1:11:57)
In
Daniel Pink (1:12:00)
At the transmission.
Ramez (1:12:00)
sunny parts of the that's before transmission, that's just at the gate. I'm not saying that'll be the average price, though I think we'll be approaching that in the Midwest. But I think in the US Southwest or the Middle East or Chile or Mexico, we'll be down below a penny a kilowatt hour wholesale. Yeah. I'll make another one. We will have practical net energy gain fusion.
Kevin Kelly (1:12:04)
Okay.
Daniel Pink (1:12:04)
at the gate.
Kevin Kelly (1:12:08)
Okay.
25 years. Okay?
Ramez (1:12:24)
⁓ before 25 years from now.
Kevin Kelly (1:12:26)
wow. Okay. That's you could, you could get a lot of people on the other side of that one. ⁓
Ramez (1:12:28)
I'm not sure it'll be cheap, but we'll have it.
Daniel Pink (1:12:29)
You
Ramez (1:12:32)
Yeah. Maybe I should have
Daniel Pink (1:12:34)
Yeah, yeah,
Ramez (1:12:35)
gotten more.
Daniel Pink (1:12:35)
OK. I mean, because you're investing, mean, you're sort of, you you are betting your own money in a way, right, as an investor in these kinds of things. So, yeah.
Kevin Kelly (1:12:41)
Right, right, right.
Well, that's really great. So we kind of want to end with one for the road. So do you have either a source either for your own writing or other people's like a book, magazine, an article that you think encapsulate a lot of what you're thinking about and what you're talking about today? have either people read or...
Ramez (1:13:01)
The biggest.
Kevin Kelly (1:13:03)
an action item that they should do to further this vision of a best-case scenario in NG, or finally even a question that we might be asking ourselves right now.
Ramez (1:13:14)
Yeah, I'd frame it as the biggest barrier to energy abundance in the US is that we get in the way of building stuff, honestly. And so I'd ask people to read Abundance. It's a great book, it's a fast read, and get involved in your state, in your county, and be the person who says, let's build, and be the person advocating for laws and candidates in your state level and the county that are pro-building stuff.
Kevin Kelly (1:13:41)
Okay. That's fabulous. think, yes, listeners go out and do vote. Right. Exactly. And vote abundantly.
Daniel Pink (1:13:42)
I love it.
read abundance and act abundantly.
Ramez (1:13:48)
Yeah.
Daniel Pink (1:13:50)
Yeah.
Ramez (1:13:51)
Yes, vote abundantly.
Kevin Kelly (1:13:52)
Yeah. Well, this has been really fabulous. This has been one of the most informative hour long conversations I've had in a long time. You changed my mind on a couple of things, including the feasibility of fusion, which I did not feel was that close. So thank you for that.
Daniel Pink (1:13:56)
Yeah.
Ramez (1:14:08)
My pleasure. I mean, Kevin, you've changed my mind on so many things over the years, but my pleasure. Great to be here with you, Kevin and Dan.
Kevin Kelly (1:14:16)
Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Yeah.
Daniel Pink (1:14:17)
That's fantastic. Thanks a lot, Ramiz.