Electric goods, including your car, won’t just be communicating with one another, but distributing and storing energy in real time. If that sounds like an analogue to the internet, it is. Energy internets will soon be operating within and between households, and even everyday objects.
This will be centred around the car, the fulcrum of the transition to renewables in its earliest stages and the leading edge of the clean, autonomous economy. Cars won’t just be data processors on wheels, they’ll be giant portable batteries. And because the average electric vehicle uses around a sixth of its battery each day, there will be such an abundance of storage capacity that the majority of energy will still come from solar even in countries with little sunlight during the winter months. The same will apply to an increasing number of gadgets, not to mention homes, schools and workplaces. And where solar exposure makes that dificult, in places like Britain, increasingly eficient wind farms will make up the diference.
Indeed this is already starting to happen. In 2016 wind farms across the UK generated more electricity than coal power plants for the first time. That’s all the more impressive when you consider the latter was responsible for more than two-thirds of the UK’s electricity as recently as 1990. The following October, wind power in Scotland produced twice that nation’s entire electricity needs.
Underpinning these shifts is the same thing powering the rise of solar energy – the experience curve. Just like progress with solar cells, development in wind turbine technology isn’t showing any sign of abating. In 2017 the British government announced energy from ofshore wind farms would be cheaper than that generated from new nuclear power stations as soon as the early 2020s. The implications of that announcement are hard to overstate. As recently as 2014, ofshore wind in the UK was priced at £150 per megawatt hour, yet less than a decade later its price is set to more than halve, making it cheaper than Hinkley Point C – Britain’s proposed new nuclear power station – before the foundations have even been laid.
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