Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
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John Quiggin 
Energy will be abundant
Two previous posts developed a crude but IMHO usable theory of energy abundance, defining the terms. ( https://johnquiggin.com/2025/07/07/monday-message-board-689/#comment-265939 and https://johnquiggin.com/2025/08/04/monday-message-board-691/#comment-265990 ) I suggested that can energy may become abundant in my sense.
Does the real world agree with me?
Clearly energy is scarce now, as shown by the extraordinary lengths we go now to secure it: kilometre deep coal mines, huge dams, fracking, mining of oil sands, deep-water oilfields, and immensely complex nuclear reactors, requiring a thousand-year priesthood to safeguard the legacy of nuclear waste. These are all going to disappear in the next 20 years. I predict that renewable energy (wind, hydro, and above all solar) will become abundant.
Solar is now much the largest component, and growing faster than the others. It could secure the transition by itself, while the converse is doubtful for wind and untrue for hydro. You all know the story of the unrelenting growth of photovoltaics, on the back of a startling rate of technical progress and decline in prices. (Latest survey article by Bill McKibben: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-years-on-the-sun-is-having-a-moment ; paywalled. but other sources are easy to find.) For abundance they need to grow a lot more. My prediction depends on both demand and supply. To keep the analysis readable, the calculations and sources have been relegated to a downloadable spreadsheet on my website http://www.jameswimberley.es/Notes/Abundance_data.xlsx .
Demand first. In 2023, total world primary energy consumption was 173 trillion kWh, or 21,400 kWh per head. Abundance would require a large increase. As a first guess, let’s say that it would correspond to the energy lifestyle of today’s Americans. They used 82,300 kWh per head in the same year, 3.8 times the global average.
The actual primary energy demand in our scenario would be much lower than this. Electrification cuts waste dramatically. In an all-renewables regime a typical American would need 41,000 kWh primary energy to maintain their 2023 lifestyle. Scale this up to a peak world population of 10 billion, and the total demand comes to 420 trillion kWh, rounded up, only 2.4 times the current level.
It will be objected that many lower-income Americans are financially constrained in their energy consumption, and are not living today in energy abundance. Against this, wealthy Europeans and Japanese freely choose a more energy-frugal lifestyle, with less suburban sprawl. In addition, we can expect many energy services at the point of consumption will experience continued technical improvements, as with LED lighting, heat pumps and smart homes, not included in the cited calculation of efficiency. My number is no better than an informed guess, but 420 trn kWh will do as a starter estimate for energy abundance.
Is this feasible? Suppose for a moment we are relying only on solar. In 1986 a German physicist, Gerhard Knies, carried out a now famous back-of-an envelope calculation of the total energy of sunlight reaching the Sahara desert. This came to 189 times total world primary energy consumption at the time.
Knies ignored engineering practicalities, since that is that is what physicists do – quite rightly, as the technology of harvesting sunlight soon caught up with his insight. We can readily become more realistic by using the handy PvWatts tool developed by the US government when it was run by human beings. This gives insolation and production data for Tamanrasset, a desert town halfway between Algiers and Lagos. Using today’s technology, a simple solar installation on your desert holiday home (say I0 kw of 20 panels of the standard 2x1m each) will produce 18,570 kWh per year. If it’s on fixed ground mounts, it would take up 28 m2 of land.
Scale this up to a monster solar farm meeting our 420 trn kWh, you would need a square patch of desert 1,500 km on a side. That would take up 24% of the Sahara, or 89% of Western Australia. As a check, I updated Knies’ parameters with plausible current values for population, per capita consumption, ground cover, conversion efficiency and total area. The new ratio of Sahara potential to world demand goes from 189:1 to 51:1. Pretty good for a first shot.
The land take of solar energy abundance is doable, with some margin to spare, given that that we have all the continents to play with as well as rooftops and the oceans. But if I am out by a factor of ten, as I may well be, we could find abundance slipping out of reach and have to live with scarcity forever. I don’t see other materials as the barrier; there should be enough silicon for the panels and steel or aluminium for the mounts. The main resource difficulty visible just now is silver for the busbars inside the panels, but a lot of work is going into alternatives, including graphene, a form of abundant carbon.
We are not of course actually going to build our solar exafarms at Tamanrasset or Alice Springs. There is plenty of suitable land closer to centres of population – and large (>1 Gw) desert-edge sites are being developed today in Morocco, the Gobi, the Atacama, Arizona, and Pilbara. The partial shade and wind shelter from solar panels is generally a plus for biodiversity and re-vegetation, and
The feasibility conclusion is reinforced by the large areas still available for wind, including quire deep oceans opened up by floating platforms. As a bonus, the constraints on fishing near offshore wind farms make them de facto marine conservation areas. Wind has become the junior partner as solar costs have fallen faster, but it will keep a large niche in high-latitude regions like Scotland, and elsewhere for its handy inverse seasonal correlation with solar.
For abundance, the price has to be low enough not to trigger an income constraint. I don’t know what the cutoff is; it would be difficult but worthwhile to find out. I suspect the price is already below it for the majority of the OECD population. In Spain, the solar price without storage is around 3.5c per kWh. There is every reason to think that the generation costs of renewable energy will continue to fall from innovation and mass production, and at least stay flat for transmission and storage. As a bonus, the common PPA mechanism – just enabled in China – fixes solar and wind prices in nominal terms for 10 to 25 years. The real lifespan of solar panels is 30 to 40 years. Starting in the 2030s, a growing tide of PPAs will come to an end each year. The owners of these fully depreciated but still working assets will have an incentive to continue selling the output into spot markets at ultra-low prices (below 1c per kWh), until replacement or disposal becomes a better deal. I doubt if energy pricing will be a problem outside very poor countries, unless economic growth per capita stops entirely.
The data support a modest confidence that renewable energy not only can but probably will become widely abundant, in my defined sense, over the next few decades. There will be more than enough to go round, as long as we pursue reasonably moderate lifestyles and deal with the megalomaniacs whose desire for domination and appropriation are not constrained by humility or common sense.
Footnote on storage
A 100% renewable energy system requires bulk storage to make variable primary sources into a reliable year-round supply. In theory we could run out of storage opportunities before we reach energy abundance. This does not seem likely. One of the two key methods is grid batteries, which don’t face any obvious physical constraints. The often predicted shortage of lithium keeps being postponed as new ore bodies and extraction methods are discovered and the price stays flat. In addition, battery chemistries without lithium are in advanced development, including iron-air that uses abundant materials. V2G will allow much more efficient use of the large numbers of batteries in electric cars. At a pinch, you can just overbuild wind and solar generation and idle it much of the time, as is done today with gas peakers.
The other large-scale storage technology is pumped hydro. The Blakers-Stocks team at ANU currently estimate the global total of potential economic capacity as 22 million GWh. Their guideline for 100% renewable electricity is 20 GWh (1 GW for 20 hours) per million people at an Australian standard of living, similar to that of Americans. With 10 bn people, you get a global need of 200,000 GWh: 1% of the potential supply. Take out all the sites in national parks, volcanoes, inaccessible regions like Kamchatka, etc, and you still have a huge safety margin.
Meeting the full storage need in an abundance scenario should be technically straightforward, and the variety of options should keep costs down. Utopia need not have power cuts.
That’s all from me on this subject for a while. Go back if you will to your bed of nails of perpetual scarcity.
Abundance for whom? The problems to solve are those of the over-concentration of wealth and socio-political power and the consequent maldistribution of rewards and punishments. Energy and economics are tools. The current wielders of the tools are the problem.
Thank you again, James!! I hope and believe that you’re correct. (Plus, I think there is a lot of geothermal energy … if we could work out the transmission lines etc., then, wouldn’t we need less storage? It’s always on, isn’t it? But don’t bother answering if it’s too complicated, I’ll do a search.)
At least in the US, it is also true there are significant people-created barriers, as Iko points out. Especially now. [Big sigh … ] (I don’t even think it’s the plutocrats themselves though – why would they even care? I would imagine, the first thing those people do is diversify.)
No, I think it’s the rest of us getting manipulated by troublemakers. AI and our anemic media culture are the real problems. I am worried about this. But, the game’s not over yet. On the positive side, many on the right actually do care deeply about the environment. We just need them to remember it.
Iko, N: I don’t disagree with your diagnoses. Oligarchy and disinformation go together.
May I just suggest that social democrats are losing the fight with both in part because the positive vision does not resonate any more with large swathes of electorates. Net zero is OK and widely accepted, but it’s an exercise in damage limitation. The communist ideal – everybody to have as much as they want of everything – is infeasible barring an impossible reset of human nature. a Fabian universal egalitarian rationing of scarce everything is deeply unattractive.
My suggestion is to recognize that many goods and services are abundant today, using sensible definitions, and only a subset of goods and services is scarce, on the converse definition. This allows a feasible meliorist project of expanding the sphere of abundance and constricting that of scarcity. Health care is pretty much abundant in OECD countries outside the USA. Why not expand the scheme to education? “Everybody to get as much publicly-supported education as they want” may be an ambitious and expensive project, but it’s not utopian. I have supplied an argument that energy too is heading for abundance. These are not tinkering at the edges.
We should stop treating Keynes’ “Economic prospects for our grandchildren” as an amusing historical anecdote and start using it as the starting-point for a policy conversation.
I think health care reform might be a great sell here in the US, if it were approached properly. (In my mind, that means Medicare for All.) Because our politics are so dumb, it will take a while. But, maybe less than I think – I think people on both sides now realize how big of a mess it is, and how important it is.
Unfortunately, I’m wrong about politics a lot. Yet, I think that is a great suggestion, James. We waste so much money here. We could do so much better with it.
Ross, I think you’ve blogged about age verification requirements for social media.
Corey Doctorow has a very good blog post about the infeasibility of age verification requirements, which seems correct at least at a high level.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/
Mark
Mark, an interesting coincidence. Just before approving this comment, I saw Cory’s piece and reposted it on various media.
Hi John
I just listened to the most recent episode of the Joe Walker podcast and I’d be very interested in your thoughts
https://joewalker.substack.com/p/australias-great-stagnation-everything
@just I have written a vast amount on productivity, touching on many of the topics raised here. I need an AI to turn it into a book, or quasi-booklike artifact of some kind.
James W.
I’ve long thought about abundance in pretty much the way you define it. We are talking about energy here, but information provides even more striking examples. Roughly speaking, anything that can be digitized rapidly becomes abundant, or even over-abundant as we see with spam emails, phone calls etc.
Hyperaccurate time and up-to-the-minute (though sadly not hyperaccurate) news from all around the world are available to “even the basest beggar” (assuming they can get hold of a used iPhone for $30 and a free wifi connection). And much more of course.
$30? In South Africa, a reasonable approximation to the economic global average, you can get a new offbrand basic smartphone for 700 rand, or A$61. https://pepcell.com/products/stylo-marvel-16gb-dual-sim-eit48 Agreed that this is now a necessity, and can easily be made abundant. I understand that jobseekers in the Netherland who can’t afford a phone are supplied with one by the welfare agencies: without one, they can’t in practice get a job. The unbelievable markup on a $1,000 real iPhone – better than the cheapo, but not in any critical way – exhibits the fundamental scarcity of status. So what.