What we talk about when we talk about transition

From 13 to 15 June the leaders of the world's seven biggest economies met for the 50th time in history. This time the gathering took place in the municipality of Fasano, inside the Borgo Egnazia resort, in Italy. The final document summarising the G7's decisions and commitments also covers the energy transition. In short, the leaders of the earth commit to:

tripling renewable capacity by 2030
by the same date, doubling the efficiency of energy sources
reaching 1500 GW of stored energy, again by 2030
transitioning away from fossil fuels and reaching net zero by 2050.

The last point is the controversial formula "transition away from fossil fuels", which sent the various online translators into a spin — it emerged as a compromise against the harder "phase-out" during the last annual meeting of the countries that ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, COP 28.

The same document states that energy efficiency is the first and most essential element of the transition to clean energy. And that's a fundamental idea for understanding what the transition really is, because transforming our energy system doesn't only mean replacing current sources with other sources, it means improving the efficiency with which we transform energy.

What do we talk about when we talk about love?, the writer Raymond Carver asked. We can ask ourselves: what do we talk about when we talk about the energy transition?

The status quo

To tell the story of the evolution of human civilisation it would be enough to tell how the way human beings get hold of energy has evolved.

At the beginning our hero, Homo, has one single way of meeting his need for energy: food. Eating plants — which through photosynthesis turn the sun's energy into vital substances — or eating animals that have eaten plants.

To this rudimentary energy system correspond hunter-gatherer societies, which reinvest all the energy taken in through food into the search for more food. The system works but isn't very efficient: the only machine Homo can fuel with this energy is his own body.

Building the first tools and instruments gives Homo a small efficiency upgrade: spears, arrows, knapped stones make getting food easier and less costly. Being able to cover himself and build a shelter lets Homo save a bit of energy. So much so that sometimes he even finds the time to carve drawings on cave walls.

But the first great energy transition happens when Homo understands that he can control fire: the tree set alight by lightning can be managed and fed. That spark can be reproduced. At last there's a source of energy that isn't inside the body but outside it, and can be used.

Controlling fire lets Homo eat better, occupy habitats that were hostile before, defend himself from predators and adverse weather, prevent illness. Homo has plenty of new energy to invest in building other instruments, more complex machines able to exploit the muscular strength of animals, or the kinetic force of wind and water. The result: more energy, which increases humankind's capacity to set forces in motion, to evolve, build, progress, feed social exchange.

Villages are born, agriculture is born, the first exchanges of objects begin: Homo now grows, raises and builds more things than he needs, and can barter them. Then come houses, cities, roads and means of transport. The spark Homo stole from the sky spreads through chimneys, stoves and ovens that relentlessly turn the chemical energy of plants into thermal energy.

Ever more powerful machines make it possible to produce a great quantity of things Homo can not only exchange but sell: the industrial economy is born. And when electricity makes the power of the spark of fire available everywhere, Homo walks the lit streets of the great cities thinking back to when he lived in the dark of the caves and drew animals to exorcise hunger.

The industrialisation of fire was the last great transition, the one that built the current energy system: burning fossil sources on a very large scale, managed through centralised systems that turn thermal energy into electricity and distribute it to end users.

The era of energy produced from fossil sources and managed centrally is the one that fuels our society and our energy-hungry economy, but it can't be the system that carries us into the future.

Turning fossils into energy is easy to control, because it can be set off when needed, but it's inefficient in a system that is closed for matter and open for energy, like planet earth, because it produces not only the energy we need and use, but also a high percentage of heat and gases that disperse and alter the atmosphere.

We should imagine our planet as closed inside a bottle: over the years (fortunately) little space debris has got past the atmosphere and Homo has sent a few spacecraft into space, while the atmosphere makes the earth a closed system for matter, but an open one with respect to the quantity of energy it can generate. There comes a moment, then, when the climate-altering emissions generated by producing energy are no longer compatible with Homo's survival: the bottle is full. And all the data confirms that moment is getting closer.

Let's turn it over

The leaders of the earth talk about "transition away from fossil fuels", but towards where? So what will the next transition be? How will we build the energy system of the future?

Homo has revolutionised his social and economic relations several times, by inventing new instruments and new energy systems. Now it's up to us to accompany the energy transition with a revolution that is also cultural, intellectual and technological. We have to re-invent our tools. We have to rediscover fire. And the new "fire" will necessarily have to be based on renewable energy sources, which make it possible to improve efficiency and to counter the harmful emissions filling our bottle.

What has happened to culture and technology in recent years can give us some hints about how to imagine transforming the energy system. Technological evolution, particularly in digital technologies, has multiplied the quantity of available information dizzyingly, and has removed all the intermediaries that used to separate people from culture. Now all of us have every possible piece of cultural content available, we can decide how to use it and how to work with it, and we can produce new culture ourselves, without running into barriers to access to places of expression and publication.

So the energy system of the future could be equally disintermediated and decentralised. To build it, though, we need concrete, synchronised action from three protagonists:

Companies. The current players in the energy sector will have to evolve towards new business models. From energy distributors they will have to become platforms able to distribute and give access to generation and consumption data. Just as happened with the culture industry, where producing content is no longer the monopoly of the big broadcast media but is accessible to everyone, energy generation too will be able to be decentralised and controlled directly by people and communities. In energy as in tech, the actors distributed along the value chain will be orchestrators of data rather than producers and sellers of energy. While each of us, by installing home systems and creating energy communities, will be able to become the producer and manager of our own utility.
States. The role of states is fundamental in creating the necessary infrastructure and in guaranteeing the legislative measures that will make an open, decentralised system of energy transformation possible. States will have to "unbundle" today's centralised grids, and build the infrastructure for decentralised generation and management of energy. Not least because solar, wind and hydro energy, which depend on the localised presence of the sources, favour distributed generation, and therefore direct management by communities. Renewables redistribute access to resources, and make new forms of "transition" possible, new transformations of energy able to fuel social and economic transformations too.
People. Us, Homo, the human beings of the 21st century, with our behaviours and our choices. For millennia oil was collected and used in tiny quantities; it was a "niche" source before becoming the fuel of the modern age. In the same way, the intelligent networks of renewable sources that now look like a minority will spread and establish themselves if people choose to adopt them. The next energy era will take over only if it's people who push it forward and build it piece by piece. If people choose electric mobility instead of combustion engines, heat pumps instead of oil-fired heating, smart homes instead of a completely analogue house. Once again, Homo will have to decide to carry the burning branch of the transition home.

This is what we talk about, when we talk about the energy transition: building a system able to improve the efficiency of the process of transforming energy, through the use of renewable sources and the decentralisation of generation. And therefore a system able to build a new civilisation, new social forms and new economic relations.

Because energy is first of all culture, it's the transmission system of our society. Every time, over the course of human history, an increase in efficiency in exploiting energy flows has been produced, it has come alongside an improvement in cultural processes: greater efficiency means more energy for creating better living conditions, for feeding new possibilities of development and progress.

Around the new systems of producing, storing and distributing energy, around energy communities fuelled by the force of sun, wind and water, the nuclei of tomorrow's society will be born. Just as the first human communities were born and grew around fire, around fire they developed their forms of living together, invented the economy, and began to tell each other the stories that gave shape to their future.

Think of a number

500 billion

That's the dollars spent installing solar panels in 2024, a figure almost equivalent to the one invested in extracting oil and gas. The number comes from the cover story of the latest issue of the Economist, titled Dawn of the Solar Age. The report describes the exponential growth of solar energy over the last decade, and sets out the projection that by 2040 solar will be the main source of energy used by humankind.

I give you my word

California

Since the beginning of March, according to a report in the New Yorker, on almost every day a combination of solar, wind, geothermal and hydroelectric energy has produced more than one hundred per cent of the State of California's electricity demand. On some afternoons, solar panels alone produced more energy than was used. And at night the large batteries installed over recent years are often the grid's main source of supply, able to send the excess energy accumulated in the afternoon to consumers across the state. California is the world's fifth largest economy and, within a few months, it has shown that it's possible to run a thriving modern economy on clean energy.