Climbing the Energy Chain

by Evan Rusmisel

We’re on the cusp of a development matching the scale of the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions. Through history falling energy¹ prices have driven waves of widespread application of newly viable technologies. I posit we’re on the cusp of another such fall in energy price which will have effects of the same degree.

The amount of agency an individual has over their environment is bounded by access to a single resource: energy. Abundant access to energy enables just about every good or service you interact with on a daily basis - from the transportation you take to the materials, machines, and computers you utilize. Most things we take for granted are only possible because we’ve vastly reduced the cost of energy from what it was just a few decades ago.

Farther back, a person could only use the energy they exerted through physical strength; that is, the energy downstream of their digestive tract and ATP pathway.

This is quite limiting because it’s in lock step with the population - the only way to increase the total energy supply is by increasing the number of people. Worse, they scale linearly with one another at best; though for most problems you run into a combinatorial explosion in management, making usable energy scale sublinearly with respect to population. This sublinearity was improved upon by using more fungible distribution formats for energy like hydrocarbons or electricity rather than people or food.

That’s not the whole story though, because between hitting the earth as solar radiation and becoming the food humans eat the energy passes through many steps that each add their own efficiency losses. Because we were accessing energy downstream of these losses the total pool we were able to draw from was minuscule. Each step is some fraction of the one before it. This is the energy chain²: the set of conversions energy goes through between leaving the sun and us using it. To a rough approximation, the fewer conversions the more usable energy is left.

Eventually though, we built tools to harness animal labor rather than human labor. Rather than a human eating a mix of plants and herbivores, making use of only a fraction of the energy that went into creating those molecular states, we began to force animals to directly apply their stored energy in ways we valued. Using animal labor suddenly meant the average person’s energy allowance was greater than what they ate. Additionally, access to more energy meant a person could produce far more food meant for human consumption. This positive feedback loop spurred the agricultural revolution, allowing fewer people to produce more food than ever.

Later, we developed technology that allowed us to take a step further up the energy chain. Rather than harnessing animal labor we began to use the energy released by combusting hydrocarbons - oil and coal derivatives. The energy stored in these molecules originally comes from the photosynthesis of plants which decomposed in low-oxygen high-pressure environments. By switching from animal labor to hydrocarbons, we removed efficiency losses incurred by the animal digestive tract and began to tap into a cache of energy built up over a long period of plant activity. The sudden availability of this energy and associated technology like external and later internal combustion engines were instrumental to the Industrial Revolution. The increase of energy supply and resulting decrease in energy price drove technological development by making new things viable.

This gets us to the present day; we’re still using hydrocarbons as one of our largest energy sources. The next step along the energy chain, which we’ve already begun, is to cut out the efficiency losses incurred by plant chemistry and directly collect the solar energy that hits the earth’s surface. We’ve just started making this change, but if we can move to directly harnessing the energy that hits the earth’s surface we have the potential to massively increase the energy budget per capita. Energy prices will fall once more leading to technological development that wasn’t previously viable.

In order to make the switch to direct capture of solar energy feasible without falling back to diesel or coal during the night, we need to deploy large amounts of storage to the grid. Otherwise, it’s only possible to get your triple caramel macchiato and watch Netflix in a temperature and humidity-controlled room when the sun is up.

Economic production is tied to energy supply: an increase in the abundance of energy is a decrease in scarcity. The first-order effect of this alone is quite large - resources become cheaper to produce. Initially this will be pocketed as increased margin by incumbents, but given enough time price does converge on cost either by competition or revolution as history has shown.

What I’m excited about though are the nth order effects. Not how much cheaper do already viable products & services become but what becomes viable as a result.

Take farming for example - you could never make a combine harvester economically viable downstream of human output on the energy chain - the steel production alone would be too energy-intensive, let alone the aluminum, oil products like plastics, rubbers, and hydraulic fluid. This is all before we even get to the copper and silicon processes for the control electronics and the satellites that have to be built and launched for positioning.

By moving the energy sources in those processes up the energy chain we increased the abundance of the energy pool they were drawing from, which led to an exchange rate that was economically viable - combines reached the break-even point and our food production per capita skyrocketed, speeding up the flywheel.

What new developments will become viable in the coming decades as we transition the grid up the energy chain once more?

Footnotes

¹ If you ∈ physicists ∩ pedants s/energy/power/g

² If you ∈ computer-scientists ∩ pedants s/chain/graph/g