What could you do with energy that’s cheap, clean, and near unlimited?

You could live in a home built to your precise needs that stays cozy and cool all year long. You could swim in a heated pool filled with ultra-pure recycled water. You could grill a steak grown in a factory, from cell on up, marbled, textured, and flavored to perfection. You could visit a nature preserve on land reclaimed from mines and farms, teeming with once-endangered animal life. You could get whisked comfortably and quietly anywhere by robots, whether down the street or the other side of the world. You could plan every weekend outing for the next month, counting on reliable, far-reaching weather forecasts. And all of your garbage would break down into its constituent elements, destined to be reassembled into new shoes, cars, and refrigerators.

Key Takeaways

• Harnessing energy has been a key driver of increasing prosperity — life expectancy, wealth, productivity. But availability, cost, and environmental impacts have long been major constraints on the energy we can use.
• Now, a new generation of clean energy is providing vastly more power and rapidly scaling up.
• With ample cheap power, we can solve some of our most pressing problems and begin to think of new applications.
• Abundant clean energy can enable vastly more food, water, travel, and industry while undoing greenhouse gas emissions.
• However, more energy cannot simply get around major social concerns like inequity, job losses, and regulatory hurdles.

This is all speculation, but the pace of improvement in clean energy and the scale of its deployment put these ideas within the realm of possibility.

Energy shapes the limits of what a society can build, sustain, and imagine, and the more of it we have at our disposal, the further we can push those boundaries. What we would decide to do with vastly more energy has huge implications for our politics, our economy, our environment, and our prosperity.

This year, the world is poised to spend $2.2 trillion on clean energy — power from the wind, the sun, the water, and splitting atoms. It also includes upgrades to the power grid, new forms of energy storage, and increased efficiency.

This investment has mostly been trumpeted as a way to help limit climate change. Humanity’s collective deployment of clean energy and increasing efficiency so far has already helped take some of the worst-case scenarios off the table.

However, climate change is a low political priority now. A more compelling case for clean energy is that it’s often the best way to get cheap energy, and to get a lot of it. The deployment of wind and solar power around the world continues to defy expectations, while the growth trajectory of energy storage is following close behind. This suite of technologies is taking off around the world — not because of a carbon tax or even environmental concerns, but because clean energy is simply better at meeting the needs of a moment when energy appetites are growing.

Suppose we alter the framing and approach solving climate change not as a task merely of curbing emissions, but of increasing access and lowering costs of better ways to power the world even further. It’s an approach that leads with prosperity and quality of life, while creating a more stable climate in the process.

If we make it a priority to get more clean energy, that raises the interesting — and fun — question of what we should do with it. After all, we’re not collecting energy for the sake of energy but to do stuff.

Cheap, clean, plentiful energy doesn’t just help people save money on their power bills; it unlocks new industries, makes thorny political problems moot, and helps repair the planet. These use cases are important motivations for why the transition to clean energy needs to happen and how it can bring about a better world for all of us. It’s why we’re doing this at all.

What abundant clean energy can unlock

We can exchange heat and electrons for just about anything on Earth. How much energy a person uses is an effective proxy for how well off they are — how much food they can eat, how comfortable they are at home, how educated they are. We can see this play out in the cost and quality of lighting, which, in the UK alone, dropped 99.9 percent since 1700, tracing how economies grew as people shifted from campfires, to kerosene lamps, to LED bulbs, and beyond.

Energy by the numbers

The global energy landscape is changing rapidly. Fossil fuels are still the dominant ways we heat, power, and get around the world, but renewable energy capacity is rocketing upward.

• Total global energy consumption is about 186,000 terawatt-hours per year, or about 58 times the total output of every nuclear power plant on Earth right now.
• The top three sources of energy are oil, coal, and natural gas, meeting 76 percent of the world’s energy needs.
• The world emitted a record 53.4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents in 2024. Energy consumption accounted for 37.8 gigatonnes of CO2, about 70 percent of the total.
• Burning fossil fuels for energy accounts for 75.7 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, followed by 11.7 percent from agriculture, 6.5 percent from industry, 3.4 percent from waste, and 2.7 percent from changes in land use.
• About 21 percent of the world’s energy consumption goes toward producing electricity.
• Wind, solar, and hydropower accounted for

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