We have to invent the internet

Over the last ten years, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has had to revise its forecasts for solar adoption upwards. And not by a little: installations have run up to three times higher than what was predicted five years ago.

How do you explain those errors in the forecasts?

The adoption of solar didn't follow a linear path, with a regular, steady increase. It followed an exponential path: it hit a tipping point, beyond which the acceleration became extremely fast.

This growth pattern is typical of new technologies: it happened with mobile phones, with the computer, with social media. Past a certain number of users, adoption becomes exponential.

As we've written before, energy is becoming a technology too: it's no longer a commodity that depends on extracting fossil sources, it's a system of technologies that, as they evolve, manage to turn renewable sources into energy ever more effectively.

That's why the development and adoption of new-generation plants, like solar panels, follow the growth laws of technology. And that's why the history of technological evolution can teach us something about how energy might evolve in the near future.

The status quo

Think about the state of computers before the internet.

They were sophisticated, expensive instruments, used mostly by people with very specific skills.

Above all, each computer was an autonomous, isolated instrument, separate from the others. Programs, applications, data: everything ran and was kept locally, inside the machine. Each computer's memory was its own.

And so the way they were used was very solitary too — they were called personal computers, after all: they could support and improve personal productivity, but they weren't yet designed to enable sharing and collaboration.

Until someone had the idea of building a network to connect the individual machines to each other.

Boom: the potential for creating, sharing, collaborating explodes. Thanks to the internet, computers become the vehicle for new ways of relating, working, inventing, imagining products and services. And the adoption of computers and information technologies grows exponentially.

It wasn't the computer in itself that revolutionised the economy and society. It was the connection of all the computers in the world.

If we now think about the state of energy, we notice it's as if energy technologies were in their pre-internet phase. Our homes are filling up with intelligent devices tied to energy consumption. But their ability to talk to each other and collaborate is still limited. They're still personal devices.

Let's turn it over

Appliances, heat pumps, solar panels, electric cars, batteries: these are the computers of energy. Not only because they're almost always intelligent digital devices. But because their usefulness increases considerably when we manage to connect them to each other and build a network.

The internet of energy is called "energy intelligence", and it's the capacity to use energy technologies to collect, monitor and interpret information about energy consumption and management.

Building an energy intelligence will bring several immediate advantages for users and for the grid, among them:

Circulation. Just as the internet made it possible to create a digital economy interwoven with the physical one, it will be possible to create a digital energy market where energy can be shared and traded, and where you can monetise your own generation and your own willingness to be flexible in private consumption.
Flexibility. Generation and distribution of energy will become more flexible, adapting in real time to the availability of sources and to the needs of the grid.
Managing peaks. In particular, it will be possible to respond to different consumption needs and prevent situations of grid stress, introducing both an "upward flexibility" — flexibility that allows more energy to be fed into the grid (through a solar system's output, for example) or consumption to be reduced when the grid needs energy — and a "downward flexibility", the possibility of reducing the energy fed into the grid (through a battery, for example) or increasing consumption when the grid has more availability.

That's for the collective management of energy. But energy intelligence will also have an impact on individual and domestic management, just as the internet deeply changed the way we work and live.

Connection, in fact, turned an expensive instrument for nerds — the computer — into a mass working tool, through which a great many people earn their living. And the interweaving of the physical and digital economies created new ways of earning and of putting your own resources to work.

The sharing economy made it possible to give value to assets we used to see as static, or passive, like the house or the car.

Digital technologies made us discover that a spare room or a second home could be rented out for short stays, thanks to Airbnb. If we had a car journey to make, we could give someone a lift and be paid for it.

The same thing can now happen with the creation of a digital energy market: if the car you have in the garage is electric, it can become part of a network for producing and trading energy.

And so for every energy device that can be programmed externally and connected, the Smart Remotable Assets: when we need them we use them, when we don't we can put them in the pool.

There's also another big intersection between energy and technology that will deeply change the energy system: artificial intelligence.

Since the internet has existed we've done nothing but fill it with data, leaving digital traces of every kind. All that data has been the food that fed the construction of artificial intelligence. That is, the creation of software that, by processing enormous quantities of data, has learned to carry out some general tasks, like writing a text or programming code.

At this point in AI's evolution, "agents" with vertical capabilities are also being developed — trained to carry out very specific tasks. And the question is whether we'll manage to build vertical AI for managing energy too.

The truth is that building an energy AI is still a long way off, because we have little data available on energy consumption and generation. As we said above: so far we've used energy as if we were in a pre-internet world.

Building energy intelligence, though, is bound to change this situation too. Connecting all our devices will make it possible to collect, process and interpret data about energy flows. And so it will help, with the support of artificial intelligence, to improve the performance of generation and consumption.

Every home, every building, every company will be able to become a power plant. And so it will be able to set its own generation targets, its own consumption rhythms, its own saving strategies, with the support of digital technologies applied to energy.

Electrifying the energy system, in fact, isn't fundamental only because it enables the transition to renewable sources. Electrification also allows the system to be digitalised, and therefore turned into an intelligent, dynamic network.

The more the system becomes digital, the more it will be able to collect and generate data, and the more it will be possible to work out new solutions that feed back into the system and change it for the better.

With energy intelligence it isn't only generation that turns into a technology: the consumption and circulation of energy will also become a digital system, connected and accessible, in which users are no longer just passive consumers but active players.

The time has come to leave isolation behind, to connect to each other and to invent the new internet, the one for energy. Its impact on our lives and on society won't be any smaller than the one produced by the "first" network.

Think of a number

416 EJ > 247 EJ

These two numbers represent the fall in energy demand before and after the electrification of consumption and the transition to renewable sources. Electrifying means moving to more efficient systems that will make it possible to lower energy needs by 40%.

I give you my word (three of them today)

Primary Energy Fallacy

The "primary energy fallacy" is the mistaken belief that, to reach a sustainable energy system, renewable energy has to replace all the primary energy produced with fossil fuels. A mission impossible.

The fallacy comes from the misleading idea of measuring the future with the metrics of the past. Today, in fact, burning fossil fuels wastes more than two thirds of primary energy as waste heat. Renewable generation technologies and the smart ways of using the internet of energy mean far less energy is needed for the same services. The Primary Energy Fallacy reminds us that the change isn't linear or incremental: it's a shift of paradigm. The real revolution is already under way, and it's made of connections, flexibility and intelligence.