“ Electricity generation currently accounts for 57% of India ’ s total carbon emissions and will continue to do so until 2020. India ’ s power network is highly inefficient and much of the generated electricity is wasted. The lack of transparency in the grid makes losses difficult to measure, but it is estimated that in 2007 India lost 32% of total generation. ” <sup>57</sup> For an economy of 1 billion people, one-third of the energy generated was lost in relay. That kind of signal-to-noise ratio cannot scale. To intervene, hardware consultants and equipment providers evangelize whole-cloth new grids, brought under the larger rubric of centralized information networks, such that grids for electrical “ packets ” working like grids for information packets would realize an “ Internet of energy. ” Even though to date ecstatic marketing visions far outpace reality, under the right pressure, incentive, and circumstance, and with enough patience, that may not remain true. <sup>58</sup>
Such energy-information networks (however theoretical or actual they may be at the time you read this book) are central to how the Earth layer functions within The Stack. They are also themselves designed as software-hardware platforms that can in principle reduce infrastructural costs and risks, which for some is earned through greater transparency and resilient decentralization and for others by greater centralization and system optimization. In principle, such grids can reduce peak demand crises through better energy storage, making the use of renewables for baseload energy more feasible, while also monitoring use through platform-standard metering making energy markets more liquid, resilient, accountable, and predictable. This may help to undistort market pricing of ecologically expensive energy use as well as the means to mitigate some of its associated risks — in theory, that is. For The Stack, this may allow for the production and consumption of flows of energy that are simple, omnidirectional, and ubiquitous. Any activity that generates more energy than it uses to sustain itself could invest that surplus into a vast metabolic agora where it powers and animates distant and complex projects, its muscular and cellular force captured, stored, and routed to where it can best collaborate with other aggregated exertions to power another unknown project. Yes, you are a battery. Our most visionary plots have the Stack ’ s carbon footprint measured not in debt but in surplus, and likely in our lifetimes or not, the geopolitics of a postscarcity Earth layer is worth articulating and defending as an ideal.
In the meantime, we note that many of the most important positive potential effects of ubiquitous computationally intensive, point-to-point energy flows are on “ non-Stack ” industries. The Climate Group ’ s Smart2020: Enabling the Low Carbon Economy in the Information Age report issues confident, sunny scenarios for carbon savings from ICT in five critical areas: smart grids, transportation, dematerialization, buildings, and information management. The key interventions include the more nimble transmission grids as discussed above, distributed energy storage systems, congestion pricing, vehicle-to-grid charging and energy storage, teleconferencing, desktop virtualization, building and facility management, fine-grain metering, and supply chain and logistical optimization. The conclusion of the report is that if ICT is more deeply integrated into the fabric of industrial economies, especially in China and India, it would realize a total carbon savings that is five times greater than the sector ’ s direct footprint based on projected growth (ICT ’ s direct footprint is estimated to be 1.4 GtCO2e in 2020, but the total ICT-enabled abatement is estimated to be a savings of 7.9 GtCO2e). According to this model, we cannot afford not to accelerate the construction of The Stack. This is the conundrum into which we are thrown: Can The Stack be built fast enough to save us from the costs of building The Stack?
Earth Layer
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