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Are you interested in the effects of superabundant energy?

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Our summary today works with the article titled Superabundant energy – What will we do with it? from 2022, by Austin Vernon and Eli Dourado.

This is a great preparation to episode 350 with Alan Pears, Adam Dorr, Ramez Naam and Mark Nelson about the urban energy matrix.

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see the potential effects of superabundant energy on cities. This article challenges the current focus on energy efficiency, advocating for a shift towards energy abundance to drive economic growth and improve living standards.

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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today we will introduce a research by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original investigation, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole documentation. This conversation was produced and generated with Notebook LM as two hosts dissecting the whole research.

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Speaker 1: What if energy wasn’t a constraint? Really wasn’t an issue. Imagine power So cheap, too cheap to meter. Remember that phrase?

Speaker 2: From the Atomic Energy Commission way back in 54. It feels like a lifetime ago,

Speaker 1: right? A vision we abandoned. But today we’re asking what if that future was real? What will we actually do with truly limitless, you know, dirt cheap energy?

Speaker 2: That’s really the core question, isn’t it? There’s a fascinating June, 2022 policy paper that dives into this at Utah State University. And their work, it really challenges us to think beyond, just say energy efficiency. It pushes us to explore the potential of what I call energy super abundance.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Super abundance. So they don’t just mean a little bit more power.

Speaker 2: No, not at all. This is looking at a future where per person consumption hits 40 kilowatts,

Speaker 1: 40 kilowatts per person. Wow. Put that in perspective for us.

Speaker 2: Okay. So that’s roughly double what a really high energy place like Iceland used back in 2019 and for the entire planet. Compared to now, it’s nearly an order of magnitude increase. A huge jump.

Speaker 1: An order of magnitude. Yeah. So 10 times more. Globally speaking, that’s massive.

Speaker 2: It is. And the paper argues. This isn’t just about making, I don’t know, your current gadgets cheaper. This level of energy, if fuels economic growth, boosts living standards. But crucially, it does this by enabling completely new goods and services. Things that just aren’t feasible today.

Speaker 1: Things that are impossible now because it costs too much energy wise.

Speaker 2: Exactly. Redefines what’s even possible.

Speaker 1: Okay, so let’s unpack this vision. Where’s the first place? This super abundant energy really makes a difference. Travel seems like a big one.

Speaker 2: Definitely. And it’s interesting, you might think, okay, better energy efficiency means less energy used overall, right?

Speaker 1: Yeah. It seems logical,

Speaker 2: but there’s this concept, the Jevons paradox. It basically says the more efficient you make something, the more we actually end up using it.

Speaker 1: Can you give an example?

Speaker 2: Sure. Think about hair dryers. They got smaller, lighter, more powerful because the motors got better. More energy dense. Did we use them less? No.

Speaker 1: Okay, I see. Or maybe electric cars, they make driving per mile super cheap.

Speaker 2: Precisely. So you might just drive more, take longer trips, commute further,

Speaker 1: which connects to another idea mentioned in the paper, right? Something called Marchetti Constant.

Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s a fascinating one. It suggests that humans, historically, culturally, have this pretty fixed daily travel time budget, about 1.1 hours, give or take. So when transport gets faster, say trains replace walking, or cars replace trains. We don’t bank the time saved.

Speaker 1: We just go farther.

Speaker 2: We go farther. We expand our world, our economic reach, our social circles within that same rough

Speaker 1: time window. Okay, that makes sense. So how does super abundant energy play into future travel? According to this paper,

Speaker 2: think about electric airplanes, not just giant jets from massive hubs. Imagine flying from smaller, local general aviation airports. The paper notes that 94% of people in the US live within 30 minutes of one

Speaker 1: 94%. Wow. So regional travel could become way faster, door to door,

Speaker 2: drastically faster. Your weekend trip might become, I don’t know, an easy day trip.

Speaker 1: And what about even more local stuff like commuting from the suburbs,

Speaker 2: right? VTOLs, vertical takeoff and landing taxis. Think drones big enough for people. The paper calls it Land and Ride instead of park and ride. These things use a lot of energy, especially lifting off.

Speaker 1: But if energy’s super cheap,

Speaker 2: then it doesn’t matter as much. You could potentially travel like two to four times farther each day. It changes everything about where you could live and work.

Speaker 1: A flying taxi commute, that feels very sci-fi.

Speaker 2: It does. And then there’s the really out there stuff. Yeah. Supersonic and even suborbital flight becoming common

Speaker 1: suborbital like rockets.

Speaker 2: Exactly. They mentioned the trade off. Incredible speed for way higher energy use. Think New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes via rocket.

Speaker 1: 39 minutes. That’s insane.

Speaker 2: It is, but it would use maybe 20 times the energy of a 7 47 for that same trip with super abundant energy. Though, maybe that becomes feasible long distance travel could feel like a daily commute.

Speaker 1: The energy implications are just staggering. Yeah, this suggest we might use as much energy just for long distance travel in 2050 as we is for everything today.

Speaker 2: Yeah, the scale is hard to grasp. What about stuff, goods, deliveries?

Speaker 1: Does that get the Jetsons treatment too?

Speaker 2: For the last mile? Maybe picture tiny, little wheeled bots bringing your groceries, your takeout right to your door. They’re efficient individually, but because they make getting one thing delivered cheaper than you driving to the store,

Speaker 1: you just order way more often.

Speaker 2: Exactly. Fewer big weekly shops, more like food on demand for every meal. Yeah, a huge increase in the number of delivery trips. Okay. And for bigger things, trucks and freight electrification alone could cut trucking costs, say 10, 20%. Then add automation, maybe another 40% cost reduction.

Speaker 1: So trucking costs could drop by more than half. Nearly 60%

Speaker 2: potentially. Yeah. Which could mean more stuff moves by truck instead of rail industries might consolidate production because shipping is cheaper,

Speaker 1: leading to more truck miles, more energy use. Again, it’s that jevons paradox everywhere.

Speaker 2: It really is, and the paper even floods this longer term vision. Portable nuclear reactors powering swarms of heavy lift VTL drones,

Speaker 1: drones carrying shipping containers or whole truck trailers.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it just shows how energy density not just cost. Could drive even more consumption and change logistics completely.

Speaker 1: Okay. This is expanding way beyond just transport. What about the basic materials Our world is built on like concrete.

Speaker 2: Super abundant energy could change that too. Take quick lime. It’s key for cement. Instead of mining limestone, you could potentially make it from sea water and CO2, from the air using electricity. A startup called Heim Doll is working on this

Speaker 1: using CO2 from the air. So it would be carbon neutral

Speaker 2: or even carbon negative because the concrete eventually absorbs CO2. As it cures, it takes way more energy than traditional methods, but with cheap power,

Speaker 1: it becomes viable. What about other material shortages? I’ve heard about issues with sand, surprisingly.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It’s a real thing. We’re running out of the right kind of sand for construction. Desert sand is too smooth, too rounded,

Speaker 1: so you can’t just use any sand.

Speaker 2: Nope. But the paper suggests with enough cheap energy, you could take that useless desert sand, heat it up really high center it basically fusing the particles together,

Speaker 1: making usable construction sand from desert sand.

Speaker 2: Exactly. But the energy required just for that, potentially like 34% of today’s total global energy demand just for sand,

Speaker 1: 34%. The scales here are just mind boggling

Speaker 2: and it gets even wilder. Think about plastics. Polymers. What if you could make them directly from CO2 out of the air plus water using electricity

Speaker 1: instead of using fossil fuels as the feedstock?

Speaker 2: Right? If electricity gets cheap enough, maybe below 2 cents per kilowatt hour, this actually becomes cost competitive with using oil and gas.

Speaker 1: Okay. Making concrete and plastics from thin air, essentially. That’s amazing.

Speaker 2: But here’s the twist. This is where the paper introduces a really counterintuitive idea. The coming carbon shortage.

Speaker 1: Wait, a carbon shortage. We spend all our time talking about having too much CO2.

Speaker 2: I know it sounds crazy, but think about it. If we start making vast amounts of plastics and cement this way, pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, every ton of polyethylene plastic made like this, for instance, sequesters over three tons of CO2.

Speaker 1: So these processes would actively remove carbon dioxide from the air on a massive scale.

Speaker 2: Yes. And the paper speculates. What if we get so good at it? We actually lower atmospheric CO2 too much. To the point where future generations might need to drill for fossil hydrocarbons. Again, not for energy, but just to get carbon back into the cycle.

Speaker 1: Or we might need to tax carbon removal to stop runaway global cooling. Yeah, that completely flips the script.

Speaker 2: It really does. It makes you rethink everything about long-term environmental goals in a world of energy abundance.

Speaker 1: Okay. Beyond materials, does this energy change where or how we live? Cities development

Speaker 2: potentially, yes. Cheap energy makes things like large scale desalination, affordable, so you could build cities and deserts. It makes vertical farming more viable. It enables those new transport options we talked about. So maybe new cities and places that weren’t practical before,

Speaker 1: and for the developing world. Can they leapfrog some stages?

Speaker 2: That’s a key point. Yeah. Think about solar power already transforming agriculture in places like Afghanistan with solar water pumps, or imagine miniaturized nuclear reactors. Bringing reliable, rich world levels of energy to remote villages without needing a massive unreliable grid first.

Speaker 1: That could be truly transformative for billions of people.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. But

Speaker 1: there’s a catch new, couldn’t be that easy. What’s the roadblock?

Speaker 2: The paper is pretty clear. It’s not necessarily the technology that’s stopping us. It’s regulation, red tape, building new power plants, new transmission lines, getting permits for advanced transport. It’s incredibly slow and difficult.

Speaker 1: They mentioned the nuclear regulatory commission, right not having fully approved, a new reactor design from start to finish since 1975.

Speaker 2: That kind of highlights the challenge. We might have the tools for abundance, but our systems make it hard to actually build it.

Speaker 1: Wrapping this up, what’s the big takeaway for someone listening?

Speaker 2: I think it’s that energy is just fundamental. It underpins almost everything. Food, water, transport, shelter, our cities, and we are nowhere near some kind of natural upper limit on how much energy we could productively use if we embrace this idea of abundance.

Speaker 1: The paper’s core message seems to be, don’t just focus on replacing today’s energy sources one for one with clean versions. Use these new clean technologies to radically increase human prosperity to fundamentally improve quality of life across the board. Aim higher.

Speaker 2: Aim for abundance, not just efficiency or replacement.

Speaker 1: So maybe the final thought to leave people with is this, if achieving this energy super abundance, this incredible future is more about policy and regulation than some massive technological leap we’re still waiting for,

Speaker 2: then what are we actually limiting right now by sticking with the status quo? What kind of future are we holding back, perhaps without even realizing it?

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What is the future for cities podcast?

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Episode and transcript generated with ⁠⁠Descript⁠⁠ assistance (⁠⁠affiliate link⁠⁠).