IO’s week: Free energy. And abundant. It will change everything.

By Bart Brouwers

In our Sunday newsletter, we, as editors, reflect on the past seven days. We do this on the initiative of our cartoonist Albert Jan Rasker. He chooses a subject, draws a picture, and we take it from there.

You have to take a while to imagine it, but that it’s coming is, in our opinion, certain: abundant, free energy. We wrote about it before, but this week, we had another trigger thanks to comments Mustafa Suleyman (co-founder of DeepMind) made in a podcast: “When energy is abundant, everything changes. It becomes highly unlikely that we will all continue to work, and our social structure will look completely different.” That that moment will come, he is convinced, as we are. But what exactly will change? “Everything. From water desalination to food production, carbon capture and storage, our education system and health care, and everything in between. It’s the foundation that makes everything else possible.”

We made a preliminary attempt to pick out the most defining elements. Transportation, urbanization, our social structures, health care, education … indeed, everything becomes different when energy is abundant. In the coming weeks, we will look at these elements in more detail.

There are so many energy developments now; the main question is which energy source will be the most decisive. Nuclear fusion, Suleyman thinks. Or solar, if that takes too long. Geothermal? Could be as well. However it will happen, for Albert Jan it already conjures up somewhat humbling images.