I like this post and agree with the point entirely.
However, I do have one nitpick. And that is that, at certain points, efficiency can be abundance. You seem to suggest in the part about initiatives to improve or create virtual power plants isn't energy abundance.
Narrowly, sure, it would be helpful to reducing prices or freeing up energy being wasted but it's not like building a Dyson sphere.
That said, it seems you reject the notion of efficiency gains as a form of abundance. That seems clearly wrong. If I invented a widget that increased the fuel efficiency of ICE cars by 1000% the maximum supply of car fuel would stay the same. But there WOULD be more of it available...it would, in fact, become more abundant.
We need new environmental organizations, ones that really care about the environment, and also have the intelligence to do what is best for the environment, rather than doing things that are profoundly harmful and dangerous for the environment, like stopping alternative energy generation.
I hope good people will start these new organizations, because the old ones are so dominated by the unthinking far left, and in many cases the uncaring far left, that they are likely irredeemable.
There are far too many degrowthers in the environmental movement as currently constituted. Many degrowthers have their pet issues they make exceptions for, but because energy, land use, and business are interconnected, it's impossible to get traction without a holistic and principled defense of growth for its own sake.
Right now, I believe our best chance for wins on climate change will pair eccentric silicon valley innovators who really work the problem with red state governments that haven't gone in on right wing degrowth ideas (like banning data centers and lab grown meat). Your average Fox news viewer is radicalized against clean energy, but the permitting and regulatory framework in southern red states is easier by default, and your average conservative member of the local chamber of commerce is far less radical when it comes to the culture war nature of clean energy. These are the types who actually do the work and run the businesses that build things, and they will prefer to have a thriving local economy.
You are drastically underestimating the importance of stuff like VPPs and DERs to the vision of energy abundance.
However much clean energy you build -- fusion reactors, geothermal, whatever -- you still have to get that energy to where it's ultimately used. This means you need to build power lines that are sized for the absolute highest demand they'll ever experience, even if that peak demand lands on a single hour of a single day out of the year. Some crazy hot day, when everyone blasts their A/C all at once, but also it's overcast so their home solar isn't producing all that much.
The thing about having distributed batteries, coordinated by VPP software, is that they let you avoid having the grid melt down. If each household needs to run the A/C for twenty minutes out of the hour, the VPP figures out how to make sure that at any given moment, only a third of households are running it. It coordinates charging up a bunch of home batteries in the morning, and discharging them when the sun gets low but it's still hot, at 4-6pm. (Smart utility regulation can also help incentivize this with Time Of Use billing, which the VPP helps the customer take advantage of.)
While it is certainly true, in theory, that you could just build 2-3x more grid, the costs involved in doing that would be truly astronomical, and would mean it takes _decades_ longer to achieve "electricity too cheap to meter". It is _already_ the case that Transmission and Distribution costs are what's driving rising electricity costs. If you invest in technology that allows us to raise the utilization rate of the grid, then adding new loads can actually drive the cost of the average customer _down_, because there are more kWh to spread the fixed costs over.
I use South Australia as an example. Very progressive, lots of solar. But expensive electricity. Middle of the day - it’s free. End of the day (the AEMO, the Australian Energy Market Operator has a term specifically for this, "the shoulder period") - it’s very expensive.
The free electricity- because of solar
The really expensive electricity - because of solar.
Once you understand both, you're on the way to grasping the pluses and minuses.
Matt, this was a good article but you often didn't go far enough transactionally. I'm fully bought into abundance and nuclear, my life's work is adding clean energy to the grid.
That being said, just bashing on coal isn't good enough. One of the big problems with coal is that conventional plants burn quite low compared to where we have developed materials science since the early half of the 20th.
There are updates we can build into coal plants to make them burn hotter and thus cleaner collectively known as supercritical coal. This is expensive as you need new turbines and not worth the effort financially for the amount of extra energy per coal burned.
This is a problem from an economics perspective as coal is already uncompetitive to almost any other form of energy production. However, the current administration really loves coal for weird machismo and blue collar fetishism reasons and hates doing anything remotely green. We should be selling them on supercritical coal turbines to MAGA as the future of coal, giving the lost Appalachia man back his sense of place and pride etc. etc.
They get their little psychological and pr dopamine hit, abundance gets our power AND it makes our power generation significantly cleaner in the short to medium term. Also, it's great because we won't run into jevons paradox because it's still uncompetitive even with the upgrades.
Also, no one talks about this but nuclear owners are currently building out nuclear, though not with new plants so it's not as flashy. There were always what a layperson would describe as expansion routes built into plant design that can be added upon which is being done now across the US fleet as energy is so expensive it's justifying these projects.
One good faith environmentalist argument I have some sympathy for is that limitless energy will both disincentivize any efforts at building efficiency, and that the manufacturing of limitless energy will itself generate new environmental harms.
The emissions created to mine silicon and build solar panels is not zero, and the natural environment would indeed be disrupted if we dramatically extend our solar footprint. The nuclear waste generated by fission plants is not zero. Battery recycling (as discussed here) can lead to massive negative health effects if done incorrectly. Heat generated by massive data centers has the potential to be disruptive to local environments.
I'm 99% with Matt here, but I think it's pretty important to be introspective about what harms limitless energy could bring. That shouldn't slow us down; the positives are extremely easy to see! But I am interested in the unintended consequences of when a precious resource suddenly becomes worthless.
Matt is right to ask people to be transparent about the kind of tradeoffs they want to make, but this article speculates a little un-generously about how an environmentalist might do that. I suspect they would say:
Have more forests and more utility scale solar, and, to achieve this, have less of the least productive agricultural land.
How does this get funded? The barriers mentioned contribute to a fraction of the electricity price. You still have to build expensive nuclear plants, build transmission lines, etc. If electricity is supposedly going to be“too cheap to meter,” what’s the incentive to build all this?
Don't think you've got virtual power plants right, it's not a grid response mechanism to kill demand. It's a way of linking up distributed batteries in significant enough megawattage to be viable as a small power plant. A single battery just isn't enough, but software that links 1,000 (say at cell sites and datacentres) which discharge power when needed by the grid (and soak up energy when it's cheap). It's a very valuable thing and with abundance because it allows deployed batteries to increase their utilisation, charging and discharging.
A battery that is giving taking energy all the time is doing more value add than a battery that's just say there waiting for a power cut.
This is the kind of essay that makes me question the decision to renew my subscription. Gibberish!
I honestly have no idea what Matt means by "but if electricity were too cheap to meter". It's like the economist in the old joke saying "but if we had a can opener!".
(Sure, you could stop *metering* electricity, and just charge people a flat rate for being hooked up to the grid, but that flat rate would have to be really high!)
You can't make electricity cheap merely by building more power plants. Someone has to pay for the power plants! Power plants are expensive!
It's good to point out specific ways we could try to somewhat bring down the cost of electricity but it's unconstructive to write as if those measures could work unlimited miracles.
Just like clockwork, an article today in the Atlantic with an environmentalists complaining people are too focused of “Climate-change” and not focused on trees and birds.
“But even if cutting “green tape” does unleash widespread decarbonization, the approach is a woefully incomplete answer to our environmental predicament. It reduces the complex physical and biological system that is our Earth to a mere carbon processor, ignoring the vulnerability of nature’s other gifts, such as fresh water and 8.5 million wild species, many of whose populations are already crashing. ” From
“How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Power”by John Reid
I think they have this “religious” belief and energy abundance doesn’t fit in their idea of “heaven”. Instead, they want everyone to follow these limiting “rules” because they are somehow “moral”.
Interestingly, The Atlantic published an almost exact counterpoint to this today. The basic point being there's value in conservation independent of climate and decarbonization. Not sure I totally agree with the article, but he has a point. I don't think clear cutting the forests around (eg) Walden Pond for a utility scale solar plant is going to please very many people. Trade offs, multiple interest to balance, etc etc...
I agree 100% that there is a lot of value in conservation for the sake of aesthetics, history, keeping around rare species, and so on.
I don't see this in conflict with clean energy abundance. There is a huge amount of land that isn't particularly aesthetic or historic or critical for habitat purposes; even if we went whole-hog on solar and wind we're mostly going to be building on old farmland or desert. There's absolutely no need to put solar panels on the shores of Walden pond or wind turbines on the Spanish Peaks.
Yeah, it may always be somewhat unrealistic to go full gonzo deregulation on solar and wind. Stuff like "preventing endangered species from going extinct" is still really important!
Fairness, however, requires the admission that right now the balance is completely out of whack the other way.
I do think you’re correct here for bugs in general, and the apparent collapse in insect populations should get more attention and probably ought to have some kind of policy and/or programs addressing it. That being said, we should still use gene drive to genocide mosquitoes specifically.
Heh. I remember when I was little, my mom once said, “I wish all bugs would die” and I replied earnestly, “But then all the nice birdies that eat bugs would starve!”
Sure, birds are cool, but I don’t think it’s worth suffering bugs to exist. Now that gene drives are a thing we should be wiping them out, starting with the pest bugs like mosquitoes, cockroaches, bedbugs. Then the spiders would die too, which is a bonus. Keep the bees, though…
I like this post and agree with the point entirely.
However, I do have one nitpick. And that is that, at certain points, efficiency can be abundance. You seem to suggest in the part about initiatives to improve or create virtual power plants isn't energy abundance.
Narrowly, sure, it would be helpful to reducing prices or freeing up energy being wasted but it's not like building a Dyson sphere.
That said, it seems you reject the notion of efficiency gains as a form of abundance. That seems clearly wrong. If I invented a widget that increased the fuel efficiency of ICE cars by 1000% the maximum supply of car fuel would stay the same. But there WOULD be more of it available...it would, in fact, become more abundant.
We need new environmental organizations, ones that really care about the environment, and also have the intelligence to do what is best for the environment, rather than doing things that are profoundly harmful and dangerous for the environment, like stopping alternative energy generation.
I hope good people will start these new organizations, because the old ones are so dominated by the unthinking far left, and in many cases the uncaring far left, that they are likely irredeemable.
There are far too many degrowthers in the environmental movement as currently constituted. Many degrowthers have their pet issues they make exceptions for, but because energy, land use, and business are interconnected, it's impossible to get traction without a holistic and principled defense of growth for its own sake.
Right now, I believe our best chance for wins on climate change will pair eccentric silicon valley innovators who really work the problem with red state governments that haven't gone in on right wing degrowth ideas (like banning data centers and lab grown meat). Your average Fox news viewer is radicalized against clean energy, but the permitting and regulatory framework in southern red states is easier by default, and your average conservative member of the local chamber of commerce is far less radical when it comes to the culture war nature of clean energy. These are the types who actually do the work and run the businesses that build things, and they will prefer to have a thriving local economy.
I agree with all of this so much. Bravo.
You are drastically underestimating the importance of stuff like VPPs and DERs to the vision of energy abundance.
However much clean energy you build -- fusion reactors, geothermal, whatever -- you still have to get that energy to where it's ultimately used. This means you need to build power lines that are sized for the absolute highest demand they'll ever experience, even if that peak demand lands on a single hour of a single day out of the year. Some crazy hot day, when everyone blasts their A/C all at once, but also it's overcast so their home solar isn't producing all that much.
The thing about having distributed batteries, coordinated by VPP software, is that they let you avoid having the grid melt down. If each household needs to run the A/C for twenty minutes out of the hour, the VPP figures out how to make sure that at any given moment, only a third of households are running it. It coordinates charging up a bunch of home batteries in the morning, and discharging them when the sun gets low but it's still hot, at 4-6pm. (Smart utility regulation can also help incentivize this with Time Of Use billing, which the VPP helps the customer take advantage of.)
While it is certainly true, in theory, that you could just build 2-3x more grid, the costs involved in doing that would be truly astronomical, and would mean it takes _decades_ longer to achieve "electricity too cheap to meter". It is _already_ the case that Transmission and Distribution costs are what's driving rising electricity costs. If you invest in technology that allows us to raise the utilization rate of the grid, then adding new loads can actually drive the cost of the average customer _down_, because there are more kWh to spread the fixed costs over.
https://www.utilizecoalition.org/
In "The Pricing Paradox: Why ‘Free’ Solar Leads to $15,000 Energy Rollercoasters"- https://scienceofdoom.substack.com/p/the-pricing-paradox-why-free-solar - you can see the problem.
I use South Australia as an example. Very progressive, lots of solar. But expensive electricity. Middle of the day - it’s free. End of the day (the AEMO, the Australian Energy Market Operator has a term specifically for this, "the shoulder period") - it’s very expensive.
The free electricity- because of solar
The really expensive electricity - because of solar.
Once you understand both, you're on the way to grasping the pluses and minuses.
Matt, this was a good article but you often didn't go far enough transactionally. I'm fully bought into abundance and nuclear, my life's work is adding clean energy to the grid.
That being said, just bashing on coal isn't good enough. One of the big problems with coal is that conventional plants burn quite low compared to where we have developed materials science since the early half of the 20th.
There are updates we can build into coal plants to make them burn hotter and thus cleaner collectively known as supercritical coal. This is expensive as you need new turbines and not worth the effort financially for the amount of extra energy per coal burned.
This is a problem from an economics perspective as coal is already uncompetitive to almost any other form of energy production. However, the current administration really loves coal for weird machismo and blue collar fetishism reasons and hates doing anything remotely green. We should be selling them on supercritical coal turbines to MAGA as the future of coal, giving the lost Appalachia man back his sense of place and pride etc. etc.
They get their little psychological and pr dopamine hit, abundance gets our power AND it makes our power generation significantly cleaner in the short to medium term. Also, it's great because we won't run into jevons paradox because it's still uncompetitive even with the upgrades.
Also, no one talks about this but nuclear owners are currently building out nuclear, though not with new plants so it's not as flashy. There were always what a layperson would describe as expansion routes built into plant design that can be added upon which is being done now across the US fleet as energy is so expensive it's justifying these projects.
One good faith environmentalist argument I have some sympathy for is that limitless energy will both disincentivize any efforts at building efficiency, and that the manufacturing of limitless energy will itself generate new environmental harms.
The emissions created to mine silicon and build solar panels is not zero, and the natural environment would indeed be disrupted if we dramatically extend our solar footprint. The nuclear waste generated by fission plants is not zero. Battery recycling (as discussed here) can lead to massive negative health effects if done incorrectly. Heat generated by massive data centers has the potential to be disruptive to local environments.
I'm 99% with Matt here, but I think it's pretty important to be introspective about what harms limitless energy could bring. That shouldn't slow us down; the positives are extremely easy to see! But I am interested in the unintended consequences of when a precious resource suddenly becomes worthless.
Matt is right to ask people to be transparent about the kind of tradeoffs they want to make, but this article speculates a little un-generously about how an environmentalist might do that. I suspect they would say:
Have more forests and more utility scale solar, and, to achieve this, have less of the least productive agricultural land.
How does this get funded? The barriers mentioned contribute to a fraction of the electricity price. You still have to build expensive nuclear plants, build transmission lines, etc. If electricity is supposedly going to be“too cheap to meter,” what’s the incentive to build all this?
Don't think you've got virtual power plants right, it's not a grid response mechanism to kill demand. It's a way of linking up distributed batteries in significant enough megawattage to be viable as a small power plant. A single battery just isn't enough, but software that links 1,000 (say at cell sites and datacentres) which discharge power when needed by the grid (and soak up energy when it's cheap). It's a very valuable thing and with abundance because it allows deployed batteries to increase their utilisation, charging and discharging.
A battery that is giving taking energy all the time is doing more value add than a battery that's just say there waiting for a power cut.
This is the kind of essay that makes me question the decision to renew my subscription. Gibberish!
I honestly have no idea what Matt means by "but if electricity were too cheap to meter". It's like the economist in the old joke saying "but if we had a can opener!".
(Sure, you could stop *metering* electricity, and just charge people a flat rate for being hooked up to the grid, but that flat rate would have to be really high!)
You can't make electricity cheap merely by building more power plants. Someone has to pay for the power plants! Power plants are expensive!
It's good to point out specific ways we could try to somewhat bring down the cost of electricity but it's unconstructive to write as if those measures could work unlimited miracles.
Just like clockwork, an article today in the Atlantic with an environmentalists complaining people are too focused of “Climate-change” and not focused on trees and birds.
“But even if cutting “green tape” does unleash widespread decarbonization, the approach is a woefully incomplete answer to our environmental predicament. It reduces the complex physical and biological system that is our Earth to a mere carbon processor, ignoring the vulnerability of nature’s other gifts, such as fresh water and 8.5 million wild species, many of whose populations are already crashing. ” From
“How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Power”by John Reid
Yes, because the entire point of the environmental movement is to advocate for… the environment.
I think they have this “religious” belief and energy abundance doesn’t fit in their idea of “heaven”. Instead, they want everyone to follow these limiting “rules” because they are somehow “moral”.
Matt bringing out the big guns! Absolutely love it!
Interestingly, The Atlantic published an almost exact counterpoint to this today. The basic point being there's value in conservation independent of climate and decarbonization. Not sure I totally agree with the article, but he has a point. I don't think clear cutting the forests around (eg) Walden Pond for a utility scale solar plant is going to please very many people. Trade offs, multiple interest to balance, etc etc...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/climate-change-nature-ecosystems-environmental-movement/687162/
I agree 100% that there is a lot of value in conservation for the sake of aesthetics, history, keeping around rare species, and so on.
I don't see this in conflict with clean energy abundance. There is a huge amount of land that isn't particularly aesthetic or historic or critical for habitat purposes; even if we went whole-hog on solar and wind we're mostly going to be building on old farmland or desert. There's absolutely no need to put solar panels on the shores of Walden pond or wind turbines on the Spanish Peaks.
Yeah, it may always be somewhat unrealistic to go full gonzo deregulation on solar and wind. Stuff like "preventing endangered species from going extinct" is still really important!
Fairness, however, requires the admission that right now the balance is completely out of whack the other way.
That being said, not nearly enough effort is being spent on making bugs extinct!
@Helikitty, not to be pedantic, but insects perform _a lot_ of hidden ecosystem maintenance without which they would collapse, and we’d all be dead.
I get what you’re probably saying: “Make bugs extinct in my living space, but they can have the outdoors."
I do think you’re correct here for bugs in general, and the apparent collapse in insect populations should get more attention and probably ought to have some kind of policy and/or programs addressing it. That being said, we should still use gene drive to genocide mosquitoes specifically.
Lies!
Heh. I remember when I was little, my mom once said, “I wish all bugs would die” and I replied earnestly, “But then all the nice birdies that eat bugs would starve!”
Can we at least get rid of all the mosquitoes?
I still remember how the car windshield could get literally tarred with insects (poor little guys). Haven’t seen that since I was a kid.
Sure, birds are cool, but I don’t think it’s worth suffering bugs to exist. Now that gene drives are a thing we should be wiping them out, starting with the pest bugs like mosquitoes, cockroaches, bedbugs. Then the spiders would die too, which is a bonus. Keep the bees, though…