Fully Automated Luxury Communism A Manifesto

This means that beginning in 2020, the wealthier countries of the Global North must initiate a transition to renewables, cutting $\mathrm { C O } _ { 2 }$ emissions by 8 per cent each year for a decade, aiming to completely decarbonise by 2030. At that point the countries of the Global South will embark on the same journey at the same pace. This will mean that by 2040, in spite of growing populations with rising expectations, they will have transitioned too. So in a little more than two decades, the world can go beyond fossil fuels in meeting all of its energy needs – not just electricity.

While that will be insuficient to stop warming of at least one degree, all the data indicates it will mean avoiding further calamity. What is more, it sets humanity on the path to virtually limitless energy that is permanently cheaper. Because unlike wood, coal or oil, the sun produces more energy than we can possibly imagine.

Solar Energy: Limitless, Clean, Free

The amount of solar energy constantly hitting the Earth’s atmosphere is around 174 petawatts (1.740 x 10^17 watts). Of this, approximately half hits the planet’s surface. Humans currently consume less than 20 constant terawatts a year, meaning that many thousands of times more energy furnishes our planet than we currently require. Indeed the energy of the sun is so immense that despite being millions of miles away, in just ninety minutes the Earth is hit with the equivalent energy all of humanity uses in an entire year.

This means something profound: nature provides us with virtually free, limitless energy. Like a nuclear reactor fixed at the centre of our solar system, the Sun is responsible for every organism you’ll ever see. Virtually all life on Earth, from bacteria to trees, plants and, yes, you, results from a series of chemical reactions whose genesis was powered by solar energy.

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While humanity has possessed the technology to capture and store this energy for decades, until recently it remained uneconomical and inconvenient compared to fossil fuels. Yet in the opening decades of the twenty-first century that has begun to change, meaning that just as the Third Disruption is powered by extreme supply in information and labour, the same also applies for energy.

A Quiet Revolution

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that solar energy has been with us since the earliest days of the Third Disruption, with photovoltaic cells first used on NASA’s Vanguard 1 satellite in 1958. While an impressive feat of engineering, each panel only generated a maximum half watt at a time, meaning energy cost per unit was many thousands of dollars – far more than fossil fuels. By the middle of the 1970s, and as a result of the experience curve, that figure had fallen dramatically to around \$100 a watt – still uncompetitive, but an eye-catching improvement.

More recently, however, solar costs have changed beyond all recognition with compounding improvements in priceperformance meaning a watt of solar energy in sunnier countries can cost as little as fifty cents. Few disagree that this trend is only set to continue, and with global solar capacity doubling every two years – it increased by a factor of one hundred between 2004 and 2015 – it is likely that the dividends of the experience curve have much further to go. Installations of PV have grown by 40 per cent every year over the last few decades while in the UK, remarkably, 99 per cent of solar capacity has been installed since 2010.

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It’s little wonder, then, that by 2016 solar power was the fastest-growing source of new energy installations worldwide, outstripping the growth of all other forms of power for the first time. While renewable energy accounted for twothirds of new power added to the world’s grids that year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) found solar was the technology that shone brightest.

The prospects for solar haven’t always seemed so positive. As recently as 2014, the IEA concluded that in the event of current trends persisting through to 2050, ‘the best case will lead to generating costs lower than five US cents a kilowatt.’ Within months of publication, however, that forecast was revealed to be unduly pessimistic. By 2017, the cheapest unsubsidised US solar contract was already below six cents a kilowatt and it now seems inevitable that by 2020 – thirty years ahead of schedule – the cheapest solar in the United States will be below three cents a kilowatt rather than five. If correct, that would mean it makes financial sense for virtually every home on Earth to install PV cells – even in cloudier Northern Europe.

Indeed, just a year after that report Deutsche Bank claimed solar had reached ‘grid parity’ in half of the sixty countries it analysed, predicting further price falls of 30 to 40 per cent before the end of the decade. In plain English that means that by 2020 new installations of solar cells – almost anywhere in the world – will generate cheaper power than a newly built plant that burns fossil fuels. In 2018 the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) repeated that prediction claiming all renewables will be competitive with fossil fuels by 2020. They concluded how turning to renewable energy ‘is not simply an environmentally conscious decision, it is now – overwhelmingly – a smart economic one ’.

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So while solar presently provides little more than 2 per cent of the world’s electricity, trends observable for more than a decade indicate this is set to change dramatically – especially in those parts of the world where parity with fossil fuels will be achieved over the next ten years. Were the 40 per cent annual growth rate which has persisted over the last half century to continue through to 2035, that would mean global solar capacity of 150 terawatts – meeting not just the world’s electricity needs but, on those projections outlined already, humanity’s entire energy requirements. Were that trend to slow down in the coming years, as is common with the progression of any experience curve, it remains reasonable to predict a complete global transition to renewables sometime in the 2040s. Glimmers of that are already in evidence: in 2010, 2 per cent of UK electricity came from renewable energy, by late 2018 that figure was 25 per cent. Even more impressive is Scotland, a nation presently on track to completely source its electricity from renewable energy by 2020.

While that projection is staggering enough, even more incredible is that transitioning to solar will require no net increase in spending. Moving to clean, abundant energy is cost neutral. And that’s before it gets permanently cheaper.

Here ’s how that is possible. The world currently spends around \$2.2 trillion on fossil fuels every year. If today’s demand of 15–17 terawatts doubled over the intervening period, that would mean compounded energy costs of around \$80 trillion by the early 2040s. The UN has put a price on a complete transition to renewables, with their figure coming in at \$1.9 trillion every year for forty years – which works out at slightly less than what would otherwise be spent burning oil, coal and gas to keep the world moving.

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Yet those numbers might even be too kind to fossil fuels. They presume that oil and gas will stay at their presently low price for several decades into the future, something without historical precedent. Even if you take away climate change, solar and wind makes more business sense than the status quo.

And just as with automation and work, the ground zero for where the Second and Third Disruptions will converge will once more be in transport, with the autonomous electric vehicle solving as many problems as the automobile did when it replaced the horse. A few short decades from now, the seemingly terminal problems of today will appear as absurd as the London manure crisis of 1894 does to us.

Racing to the Future

In the summer of 2017 the British government announced it would ban the sale of all petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040. While well-intentioned, that lofty ambition failed to account for a crucial point – with current trends there will be none left to buy.

The reason why is that the cost of energy storage technologies, specifically lithium-ion batteries, are falling at an even-faster rate than solar cells. In 2009 Deutsche Bank reported the cost of lithium-ion batteries as \$650 per kilowatt hour, predicting that figure would halve by 2020. Just like the IEA’s solar energy forecasts in 2014, however, those predictions were way of, with the price of the technology falling 70 per cent over the following eighteen months. As a result, Tesla now expects to produce batteries for \$100 per kilowatt hour by the early 2020s, although privately shareholders are told it could happen in 2019, while GM expects the same by

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1. In the last fifteen years the energy capacity of lithiumion batteries has tripled, and the cost per unit of stored energy has fallen by a factor of ten.

The consequences of such shifts are hard to overstate. If Tesla and GM’s forecasts are correct, then by the early 2020s a battery pack for a new electric car with a range of 200 miles could cost as little as £5,000. That would make the price of electric cars directly competitive with petrol versions while remaining on a downward curve. That is before considering how they’ll be cheaper to run, insure and maintain over the course of their life. A generation from now, purchasing the energy powering your car may seem counter-intuitive, and a generation thereafter it will border on absurd.

That energy storage technology is subject to the experience curve just as much as renewable generation is important, because in any transition beyond fossil fuels – and towards extreme supply, where it becomes permanently cheaper – both will be necessary. If the experience curve persists across both, even just for another decade or two, the paradigm shift in energy will be every bit as disruptive as the rise and difusion of fossil fuels after the early 1800s.

Solar and the Global South

Given renewable energy is a twenty-first-century technology, many would presume its efects, as with the mobile phone and internet, will be felt most profoundly across the Global North – at least initially. And yet it is in the poorer countries of the Global South where renewables, especially solar, will prove most transformational. In the right political framework they could even end the historic imbalance, present since colonialism and profoundly deepened by the Second Disruption, between the world’s wealthiest and poorest nations.

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Take Nigeria. The most populous country in Africa, half of its 180 million citizens presently lack access to electricity. As is common across the continent, the country is not only poor but experiencing a demographic boom, and some forecasts estimate that by the middle of this century it could have a population of more than 400 million people. What is more, tomorrow’s Nigerians will rightly expect a higher standard of living than their forebears of today. But with fossil fuels that wouldn’t just prove catastrophic, it likely isn’t possible.

Which means the only way Nigeria, by 2050 possessing a larger population than the United States, will be able to provide universal access to electricity is solar power. Such a transition ofers the opportunity to leapfrog some of the world’s wealthier countries, enjoying cheaper energy with barely any of the sunk costs associated with extensive national grids. The same holds true for other developing countries which will similarly see rapid population growth alongside rising energy demand.

Instructive of how renewable energy may difuse across presently low-income, energy-poor countries is the precedent set by the mobile phone. At the turn of the millennium there were a quarter of a million active mobile phone contracts in Nigeria, far fewer than the 600,000 landline connections. If you said then that access to a phone would be commonplace within two decades – in the absence of costly new infrastructure and with even the spread of electricity remaining mixed – you would have been laughed at.

And yet today Nigeria has 150 million mobile phone subscriptions – far exceeding the 200,000 fixed phone lines in active use. Meanwhile half the country has access to the internet. Importantly, this high level of connectivity has developed in a diferent manner to wealthier countries across Europe and North America. Rather than copying the sequence of infrastructure seen there – adopting the landline and then the mobile phone – Nigeria simply leapfrogged the former technology and adopted mobile internet en masse.

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No technology has ever scaled as quickly as the mobile phone. It has allowed millions of people to open bank accounts in Kenya and Tanzania, register to vote in Libya, and access agricultural information in Turkey. Research reveals that mobile phone use is as common in Nigeria and South Africa as it is in the United States, with about 90 per cent of adults owning one – making it the most rapidly adopted technology in history. As recently as 2002, around 64 per cent of Americans possessed a mobile phone, a figure now beaten in places such as Tanzania, Uganda and Senegal. While these remain low-GDP countries, such a rapid spread of a technology which, only fifteen years earlier was viewed as the exclusive preserve of the global rich, is a significant development.

If the world is to completely decarbonise over the next twenty-five years, something similar will have to happen with solar generation and storage technologies. Just as with mobile since 2000, the adoption of renewable energy in poorer countries will be modular and distributed. Modular because solar cells and lithium-ion storage can be easily added to or upgraded, and distributed because generation and storage will often happen at the level of the household or street rather than a distant power station or energy hub. All of this is possible because of the good fortune of geography: despite being among the poorest countries on Earth, those nations near the equator – in Africa, Central America and Asia – enjoy sunshine like nowhere else. Now, with the onward drive of the experience curve across a range of renewable technologies, we are coming close to a tipping point – where nature ’s gifts become an economic blessing.

The numbers speak for themselves. In 2009 a radio, mobilephone charger, and solar system suficient to provide four hours of light and television a day would have cost a Kenyan \$1000. Today it’s \$350 and falling. Each passing year not only brings energy closer to the world’s poor, but energy far cleaner than fossil fuels and which is price deflationary – forever.

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It’s no surprise, then, that a new generation of businesses are looking to cash in on the convergence between rising electricity demand and declining costs for solar. One is M-Kopa, an American startup launched in Kenya in 2011. Today the company has half a million pay-as-you-go customers generating their own solar energy. The company’s model is straightforward and, perhaps rather predictably, resembles the kind of contract associated with mobile phones. Customers pay a deposit of KES 3,500 (approximately \$35) to take the system home and then a further KES 50 (\$0.50) a day for a year before owning the system outright. Daily payments are made through M-Pesa, a mobile phone–based money system. Consumer renewable energy paid for by cashless, digital payments – the reality of African energy in the early twenty-first century.

Ofering their products through a network of licensed dealers across Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, the company’s latest ‘M-Kopa 4’ package ofers an eight-watt solar panel that charges appliances through USB ports, as well as two LED bulbs with light switches, a rechargeable LED torch and a radio.

One of M-Kopa’s competitors is d.light, who boast ofices in California, Kenya, China and India. They claim to have sold more than 12 million solar light and power products across sixty-two countries, the aim being to provide cheap, solar-powered electricity to 100 million people by 2020.

Another operator in the field is Of-Grid, whose model is similar to that of M-Kopa, the company providing the financing as well as the infrastructure to consumers. In Tanzania customers pay a deposit of around thirteen dollars to buy Of-Grid’s cheapest starter kit: a panel, a battery, a few LED lights, a phone charger and a radio. They proceed to pay approximately eight dollars a month for three years, after which they own the products. Of-Grid’s most popular bundle – for about twice the monthly price and a larger down payment – includes a few more lights and a flat-screen TV. As with M-Kopa, customers pay their bill by phone. All of this is made possible by the experience curve in solar cell and lithium-ion technology – as was the case with mobile phones over the last two decades – and it represents only the beginning for extreme supply in energy.

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Just as solar technology has been getting cheaper, its performance has also been improving, and Of-Grid are planning for a point in the near future when their products are suficiently powerful to have applications in industry such as pumping water for irrigation or milling cacao. This is partly thanks to the fact that solar is modular – you can simply add more capacity over time – as well as prolonged and impressive falls in its price–performance ratio. If the next decade sees change as rapid as the last, then it won’t just be household appliances that are powered by solar energy in Kenya and Nigeria. Workshops, schools, restaurants and clinics will run on cheap, clean energy.

Such astonishing change isn’t limited to Africa. Indeed the consultancy firm KPMG anticipates that a similar consumer model, allying increased credit with ever-cheaper technology, will mean that by as soon as 2025, 20 per cent of Indian homes will have some form of solar installation. And as bottlenecks like integrating larger solar farms with a patchy energy grid are overcome, India’s renewable capacity is forecast to double by 2022 – overtaking even the European Union on growth.

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