What if we all became energy producers?

This year too, July was the hottest month ever recorded in the history of humankind. Not only that: during the first and third weeks of the month the global average temperature temporarily passed the threshold of 1.5° above pre-industrial levels.

In many urban areas there were power cuts and grid malfunctions. Two large blackouts in Paris even put the running of the Olympics at risk.

The hotter it gets, the more we need air conditioning, especially in cities where working or simply living in closed spaces without it is getting harder and harder. The more we switch on the air conditioning, the more energy we need — energy still produced largely from fossil sources that release climate-altering gases into the atmosphere and heat the biosphere. So temperatures rise, and we need the air conditioning more and more: the perfect vicious circle.

The use of air conditioning produces 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions and is responsible for the great wave of blackouts we're living through these days. Thanks to which we notice the existence of something we otherwise take for granted: the electricity grid.

Now that the heat has made it visible to everyone, it's worth asking: how does it work, and how did we come to build it?

To answer we have to tell a story of ambitions, inventions and counter-inventions, pride and competition, with two men as its protagonists: Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse.

The status quo

The Current War is a film released in 2017 that tells the story of the ferocious competition between Edison and Westinghouse to gain control of electrification systems.

Edison, the genius who had already patented the incandescent light bulb and the phonograph, develops a direct current system, very safe because it's low voltage, but also more expensive because it's more prone to losses. To make the system viable, generating plants have to be widespread and very close to the cities.

Westinghouse instead uses alternating current, cheaper, more effective at carrying energy over long distances, but also more dangerous because it's based on high voltage.

The competition between the two is merciless, and to discredit Westinghouse's more efficient system Edison bets everything on how dangerous it is: he organises public demonstrations in which alternating current kills dogs, cats, horses, even an elephant.

Edison goes as far as secretly convincing a government official to try high voltage for carrying out capital punishment: in 1890 William Kemmler is the first condemned man to sit in an electric chair. He dies in atrocious suffering, even though Westinghouse himself had tried to stop the execution.

The war is won in the end by Westinghouse, because his system makes it possible to produce energy in large plants far from the cities, carry it at high voltage, and then transform it easily for everyday use at low voltage.

What also helps this system get adopted is Nikola Tesla's development of the electric motor, which makes long-distance transport and the transformation of electric current more efficient still (and here another story begins, one we'll write about in an upcoming issue of Rivolta).

The war of the currents has brutal aspects too, sometimes petty ones, certainly not always noble, but it takes place against the background of one of the great challenges of progress of the 20th century: electrifying the world, making electric current available to everyone. To win that challenge, a standardised, centralised system had to be built.

To build that system Westinghouse's technology was the best: it became the standard, and it determined the structure of the electricity grids we still know and use today, organised around three big stages: generation, transmission and distribution.

Generation happens in power plants, where primary sources are transformed into energy.
Transmission happens by collecting the electricity produced in the plants, stepping it up through transformers and feeding it into the grid spread across the territory. In Italy the entire transmission infrastructure is owned by Terna, which runs it as a monopoly.
Distribution is handled by the infrastructure network that carries electricity to the end user, owned by various companies that manage delivery to the customer. These companies operate as local monopolies: they're licensed to control a territorial portion of the grid.

The final part of this path is retail, which has the most influence on the cost of energy, on our consumption habits, and on the quality of services. To make it clearer how it works, someone came up with a fairly effective analogy between the energy market and the fish market, which can be summarised like this:

when the raw material arrives from the sea every morning, it costs the same for everyone;
each supplier buys some of it, and resells it to its own customers;
customers (all of us) don't just pay the cost of the energy: they pay for transport, for maintaining the system, and taxes;
these costs could be the same for everyone, but since the energy market is free, each supplier has the right to vary the price;
because of this, the margin is often opaque and costs for users fluctuate.

The centralised energy system is complex, expensive and often inefficient, as July's blackouts show.

It's a system that allows profits that aren't always transparent, as the story of the windfall profits recorded after the energy price increases caused by the outbreak of the Russia–Ukraine conflict showed.

It's a system that continues to benefit from a market that isn't exactly "free": the move to the free market was handled as a kind of auction in which the utilities were awarded the users leaving the protected market. So the market wasn't "freed", it was handed over in a sort of top-down division.

Finally, it's a system with structural and infrastructural limits that get in the way of wider adoption of renewable resources.

The players operating in the energy value chain are starting to face the question of the transition, and are partly looking for solutions, but their answers are still partial. And that's because the model that runs from generation to distribution doesn't have the flexibility needed to respond to the big challenges in front of us.

Let's turn it over

The challenge of the 20th century was bringing electricity everywhere, and we won it by building a centralised system.

The challenge of the 21st century, though, is a different one: building an intelligent, sustainable system, capable of expanding and spreading the use of renewable resources. To win it we'll need a decentralised, flexible system, and to build it we'll have to change deeply the way we think about our energy structures.

I grew up in Cuba, a country where the energy system is decidedly visible: blackouts are many and frequent, and there are often periods when energy is rationed.

After that experience, the story of the contest between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse told in The Current War made me think that no system is inevitable, no system is given once and for all and destined to last forever.

Of course, once they've settled in, systems are durable, widespread and resistant. Once they've been laid down, it's hard to change the rules of the game. And to really change a system it isn't enough to slightly change the behaviour and habits of the people using it. You have to transform the structures, the processes, and the main actors too.

So with some friends who became partners over the past months we asked ourselves: what would happen if we all became our own energy suppliers, feeding renewable energy into an intelligent, democratic grid?

That's how Volta Energy was born, with which we set out to create a new way of producing, trading and acquiring energy. Something that would be fun, extraordinary and regenerative.

Volta Energy isn't an energy supplier: it's the platform that lets everyone become an energy producer and supplier. Producing energy independently from renewable sources, sharing it with the people around us by creating energy communities, trading it and selling it.

Our goal is to accelerate the transition towards an energy system in which:

generation is taken outside the large plants as well, and located wherever there's someone willing to build or acquire a plant;
transmission doesn't only pass through centralised grids, but becomes a form of sharing and circulation between neighbours;
distribution is no longer mediated only by whoever sells the energy, but is also organised starting from the exchanges that happen inside an intelligent network of prosumers.

In one scene of the film, Edison's character says that the man who controls the current controls the future.

The line is even truer today than when Edison said it, except that our idea of control has to be the opposite of his. Not controlling all the current**, but each of us controlling** our own current, to help build an alternative system, capable of guaranteeing a prosperous future for humankind and for the planet.

Think of a number

50%

According to the European Union, by 2050 half of the European population will directly produce and share its own energy, and for 37% of them it will happen inside energy communities, where consumption and generation will be orchestrated in an efficient and ever more decarbonised system.

I give you my word

Prosumer

The word is a fusion of producer and consumer, and it's used to describe the position of someone who doesn't only passively consume a good or a service, but also contributes to producing and spreading it. The term was coined in 1980 by Alvin Toffler in the book The Third Wave, and referred to consumers stepping forward as they began to reject standardised mass production and to assert their own tastes and preferences. Later, with the spread of digital technologies, we all became potential prosumers: we can actively publish information and content of every kind, influence production processes, sell products and services directly. The birth of the prosumer deeply transformed the economy and culture, and before long it could transform how the energy system works too.