A Gamers Perspective on our Energy Future

You can skip to the why we should play tall section if you don’t care about games.

Gaming Background

I love games and have a special place in my heart for 4X Strategy games. This stands for Explore, Exploit, Expand, and Exterminate. Essentially, the human condition if you take a pessimistic view of it.

In 4X games, you must balance Economy, Technology, Military, and Social structure to outmaneuver and eventually dominate your opponents, whether AI or other players.

Games allow us to explore how our choices and actions today impact our range of possible futures. It also gives us neutral language when describing and evaluating various playstyles. This can be difficult to do in the real world, where playstyles such as capitalism and socialism often come with a lot of virtue signaling of what people prefer.

And in games when you invariably f**k up, you can restart the game and try again. Implement the lessons you learned and adapt your playstyle accordingly. This is something we have yet to achieve in the real world. (Aside from some religions supporting respawn mechanics, albeit with a heavy Experience Point penalty for doing so)

I’ll also argue that strategy games give you a longer-term perspective on the world. I almost always plan and act based on a +5 year timeline. I’ve yet to see if this is an advantage or disadvantage in the real world.

In games, I tend to favor what is called “Playing Tall” This playstyle focuses on quickly developing your Technology and Economy and eventually dominating others with few but advanced units. The opposite of this is called “Playing Wide” where the goal is to quickly expand and conquer a lot of territory and overwhelm your opponents before they can pivot over to a superior military force.

Historically, most countries favored the Wide playstyle until after the Second World War when most pivoted to Playing Tall. Today, a few countries like Russia are trying to bring back the Wide playstyle, and we have yet to see if this becomes the preferred playstyle again.

Why I Think We Should Play Tall in Renewable Energy

Electrical energy is the closest thing we have come to finding a “Universal accelerator.” With electrical energy, we can create or massively accelerate the production of most things. This ranges from basic necessities like food, clean water, and heating to things like transportation, AI Models, and power phones to share pictures of the food we create with our friends.

Suppose we have abundant energy from a Renewable energy source that is not set to run out within the next 1.000 years. Then, we have essentially lowered the difficulty level for all subsequent new players.

This is more or less considered a good thing by everyone. And it is generally not a viable long-term strategy to intentionally make the world worse for your children.

So I think we should focus a lot of our investments on various renewable energies. Today, we still play a predominantly Wide playstyle regarding energy, with significant investments in traditional fossil fuels. Reference: https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2023/overview-and-key-findings

From an existential point of view, I cannot see why we would continue investing in a fuel source that, with current extraction levels, will be almost depleted within the next 100 years. And we will most likely still need oil for other things like plastics and other oil derivatives past this timeline.

Especially when several other technologies have a much longer potential utilization timeline.

But since I'm a pessimist, let's look at the challenges of Renewable Energy.

The Challenge with Renewable Energy

The big challenge with renewable energy is that, at a local level, we cannot control if the sun shines or the wind blows. However, this is not an issue at a global level since it is always sunny and windy somewhere.

If this stops, then we have bigger and more immediate issues.

The Solution

This means that the challenge is mainly building the infrastructure to transport energy from where it is produced to where it is needed. Luckily, transporting things is a technology branch many countries have been maxing out over the last century.

Therefore, I suggest we build a global energy grid for production, storage, and usage. And I’ll argue that this is not that difficult or expensive, considering the massive benefits of this.

My Walkthrough of How To Get There

I’m going to dive into the 3 main parts of this. The first part, cables, will be in this post, and we will dive into the Production and Storage in a separate post. I will go into detail with various projects and technologies in which we need to invest more.

I'm going to brush over the short-term feasibility of most of these projects since this is outside my area of expertise, and I will focus on the overall vision.

So, let’s look at the humble long cable.

In 1858, we laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable. Yes, you read that right. Over 150 years ago, we strung the first electrical cable sending a signal over the Atlantic Ocean. And today millions of telegrams are still being sent yearly. Reference: https://youtu.be/H8kdhlzueBo?si=BMotYmzgin2c5m1j

I’ll keep the references lightweight and mainly on YouTube to inspire you to explore these content creators further. I find that they are great sources of interesting tidbits of information.

Today, there are around 1.500.000 KM of Subsea internet cables, so it is a proven and scaled technology already.

Suncable

A great example of this in a global grid context is the Sun Cable project in Australia. This is a 4.300 KM Cable that will be built from Darwin in Australia to Singapore and, when finished, will transport 1.75GW of energy. The last I heard was that it just received environmental approval.

Reference: https://youtu.be/42b6xJFUSss?si=BydqwtFdUb7ToiAx

ElecLink

This is another cool project, and I love the idea of using existing infrastructure and just running another cable through the Channel Tunnel. This is a 1GW cable, which costs €600m to build, and in 8 months, it generated a revenue of €420m. That makes you wonder how many other similar bridges and tunnels are out there that we might hang cables on. Reference: https://youtu.be/JH9-0AbR_1U?si=BnCwPGfMiea1eOwO&t=320

There are many problems to overcome, as many of these videos highlight. But I believe these are trivial compared to what we are looking into. This is another great video from Bloomberg covering many of the same issues here: https://youtu.be/DN1mPBQd7fY?si=Z9bUp9sMEEe1h5Hw

My Hope

I’m at heart a pessimist. I love studying history, and I do not believe that, as a species, we will unite and rise in time to solve this problem. I think billions of people will die of the follow-on effects of global warming before we hopefully claw our way back from the edge and survive.

I think we are looking into another great filter, as coined by Robin Hanson. I think that if we do not find a sustainable way to become a Type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale that does not rely on fossil Fuels. we will NOT make it. And as a species we are doomed to become an interesting archeological site and lesson for some future species to find.

But I want to dedicate my life and work to try and avoid it, fight against the odds, and drive this agenda forward.

So, like Taylor Mali, I implore you, I entreat you, and I challenge you. Go out there, find the thing that lights a fire in your heart. And fight like hell to achieve it.