Who owns the Himalayas?
In the Greek myth the titan Prometheus steals fire from Zeus to give it to humankind. It is a revolt, one that puts into human hands a source of energy far more powerful than physical strength alone, and lets them forge tools, cook food, keep warm and protect themselves from wild animals. Soon, though, humankind will also discover that managing that gift isn't simple.
Human evolution can be read as the continuous search for flows of energy in ever more effective and versatile forms, to be converted into heat, light and movement. Today our Promethean revolt is the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced: making energy clean. A revolt that isn't negotiable, because the future will be sustainable, or it won't be.
In this newsletter we tell the story of the energy transition starting from the status quo: the obstacles and the resistance we have to face. And then we try to work out how we can turn them over: through new points of view, and solutions capable of building a future-proof society. It is towards this future that our energy is turned.
Three of the world's great rivers come down from the Himalayas — the Indus, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra — with all their tributaries. These monumental watercourses sustain millions of people, they saw thousand-year-old civilisations born, and they are inexhaustible sources of energy. They cross different territories, they run through different states, and so they are geopolitically fragmented. At a time when the relationship between energy and geopolitics is showing all of its consequences on people's lives, the question comes up: who do these rivers belong to? Who owns a natural resource and the energy it can produce?
The status quo
Rivers, seas, mountains, the subsoil are, from nature's point of view, common goods. Every human being should be able to access these resources and the energy they generate. And yet from an administrative point of view they belong to state entities, which regulate and manage access to the resources. And which, together with other private actors, produce energy from those resources, and run the grids and the infrastructure through which energy is distributed and reaches people.
Over the course of evolution, communities of homo sapiens have turned into a social superorganism that consumes energy voraciously. Inside this superorganism humans can no longer rely only on the energy produced by physical strength, or on the energy they have direct access to. And so they built centralised distribution systems that depend for roughly 85% on fossil coal and hydrocarbons.
The distance that opens up between people and energy sources, especially renewable ones, is one of the main logistical obstacles to the energy transition.
The possibility of decarbonising the energy system, in fact, also runs through the capacity to enable people to become prosumers. Taking them out of the role of spectator-consumers, and giving them the possibility to choose, to take an active part in the various stages of the production process.
Producing and sharing your own energy, though, isn't that easy for everyone. There are people who live near the Himalayas, with sun, wind and water available to them, and people who live in an apartment block in the centre of Rome or Milan. For those further from the Himalayas, building their own generation plants and having direct access to the resources is close to impossible. And they will have to accept the intermediation and the distribution systems of whoever controls the resources and owns the production and distribution infrastructure.
The logistical obstacles pile onto the economic and technological ones, and working against change there is also the nature of humans themselves, which tends to favour short-term goals — like profit or immediate return — at the expense of long-term ones, like protecting the species and the survival of the planet.
We devote our best energies to benefits visible in the present, and we neglect the future effects of our actions. This too is why the transition is slowing down, and the goal of full decarbonisation — which Europe has set for 2050 — moves further away.
Let's turn it over
The distance between people and energy sources, though, can be shortened. Today we have the instruments, the technologies and the cultural awareness to think about access to natural resources differently. And to completely overturn the way we produce and distribute energy.
There is a concrete way to remove the obstacles that separate people from the possibility of producing and managing their own energy. And it consists in untying resources and generation assets from where they physically sit. Bringing a bit of the Himalayas everywhere.
We have to imagine that resources exist in a virtual space, in a dimension everyone can access. Like putting energy in a cloud system: it isn't physically anywhere, but it can be reached from any place.
So we would need to dematerialise energy generation assets. Make them digital, and let anyone buy a piece of them, take part in financing and managing them. Regardless of geography.
The technologies to build a system like this exist — in 2021 in Austria the first concrete example of technology for digitalising renewable generation assets was developed — and people's push to take control of their own energy could help it get adopted.
It may sound like a paradox, but dematerialising assets would make them more visible. Because it would let people stop taking the infrastructure and the way it works for granted. Giving access to the assets and to their management would pull the process of producing and distributing energy out of the shadows. And it would give people more control and more awareness over their own energy choices.
This way, the Himalayas belong to everyone again. Natural and renewable resources go back to being a common good. And people are handed the instruments to take an active part, first-hand, in the energy transition. Wherever they live, whatever their distance from the sources.
Think of a number
36.8 billion tonnes
That's the amount of CO2 produced in a year by the energy sector, equal to 70% of human emissions. According to the IEA – International Energy Agency, to make that number smaller and decarbonise the energy system by 2050, 90% of electricity will need to be produced from renewable sources.
I give you my word
Energy community
An energy community is a network of people, small and medium businesses, local bodies and local authorities who collaborate and take a direct part in the various stages of producing, consuming and exchanging energy. The parties involved take an active part in all energy processes, and directly manage the use of the energy produced. Today it is possible to set up or join an energy community by sharing renewable energy within the same geographical perimeter, thanks to the national electricity distribution grid, which makes virtual sharing of energy possible.