Gross world product increased by an estimated 530% in the 19th century and grew an average of 5.3% annually between 1800-1900. Then world wealth grew exponentially more than 3,600% in the 20th century (even if the damage caused by conflict is taken into account) at an average of 36% per year. This staggering increase was made possible by automation, effective exploitation of fossil fuels, periodic fast-recovering rebuilds from war, and consumer culture for the masses.
Then there has been a notable slowdown in the paradigm shift in global wealth generation towards the end of the 20th century, mainly in the Western world. The slowdown in recent decades has been substantial enough that even with Eurasia in line in the 1990s, the average annual growth of gross world product was only 2.2% on average annually between 2000 and 2012.
Obviously, much of the world’s output goes unaccounted for due to the size of the black market and undeclared / unquantifiable activity. But to make the 21st century exponentially more productive than the last (the path from the 20th was to the 19th) and to successfully and rapidly bring 9 billion projected humans to dramatically better living standards, a couple of things. These are unified power and communications networks that function as public services. These would provide the fundamental foundation on which globalization can continue to evolve in a more uniform, fluid and equitable way.
Even with strong transnational transportation systems, markets will remain fragmented if the synchronous networks of different regions remain disconnected from each other. Recent efforts by US authorities and private interests (General Electric, T. Boone Pickens, etc.) are promising as they are pushing for electrical unification in North America that would copy and build on the European experience. On the one hand, these efforts are driven by profit-based economic needs that require the US to use state-of-the-art technology to incorporate ever-growing dispersed renewables (just look at the recent exponential growth in efficiency in solar energy which is finally getting competitive), as well as to incorporate the explosion. in non-renewable sources of fracking. On the other hand, efforts toward an American supergrid are also driven by an existential need: alarming regional calamities related to climate and the increasingly third-world nature of the continent’s electrical infrastructure.
Unitary planetary energy SuperSmart Grid and its characteristics
Efforts to unify the world’s largest power grids are ongoing and largely unreported due to its rather mundane technical nature. Recently, the energy entities responsible for controlling 70% of the capacity of the global network met to discuss standardization, interconnections and unification. Well-respected experts have outlined an eventual end goal of the world becoming one giant room with wiring. One in which any family, company or country can add an electrical outlet and in which new and diverse power sources can be added in a plug and play way. The totality of energy in the global grid at any given time would be continuously metered, as well as all major expenses and additions. Recent Advances in High Voltage DC Circuit Breakers and GE’s US-funded Smart Grid Research Allow Power to Circulate Properly, Redirect Where Needed, Avoid Cascade Shutdown Faults, Deal with Mass Inflows of energy and the inflows of semi-constant supplies (wind / solar), and to store excess energy in energy reservoirs to be fed back to the system as needed. The emergence of a common global electrical grid before our very eyes also requires the emergence of almost a “secondary Internet” to regulate the flow of energy. As we hear more and more about the emerging “Internet of Things,” this secondary energy that regulates the Internet will naturally become a major factor for discussion, promotion, and implementation.
To become a water utility in the popular global consciousness, the electrical grid must become a kind of giant, harsh “power channel”, constantly aggregated and taken collectively.
To effectively move away from a future annual monetary income stipend (which would be introduced to mitigate the disruptive social effects of automation) and move to an annual electrical power consumption stipend, the grid needs a few things:
1) A minimum of doubling of world energy production and a minimum of doubling of the efficiency of current energy systems (in transport and energy use). This would quadruple the energy as the human population grows from 7 billion to an eventual stabilization point of around 9 billion and will keep annual energy growth well above the annual birth rate.
two) Transparent energy data, in real time and easily accessible to the public within the system for each location. So if a person wants to check electric power consumption in real time in Chicago or Kyoto or in a small town in Argentina, they will be able to do so. Personalization of electrical currents within a global “channel” would create the same psychological connection to energy that people are currently developing towards Internet broadband (dealing with broadband through a “global broadband channel” / Similar global Wi-Fi is also a good complementary idea).
Energy, transport and communications are essential factors in creating a smoothly functioning global technological and social body. These questions are above all other questions in this regard. Even a proper evolution of political institutions is not possible without addressing these factors. Advances in circuit breakers for long-distance HVDC submarine cables will allow connections of thousands of miles in length between low- and high-power networks and thus drive the emergence of the SuperGrid (see the current HVDC cables that make Europe a energy nexus on the right).
[insert alarmist melodrama here]: “These are all ridiculous and obvious topics! There are insurmountable political obstacles to all of this! First are the banking cartels that have been carefully stifling physical industry from overproducing and thus keeping profit rates high for more than 100 years in the Western world. Now that systemic sabotage system has gone global. Furthermore, even if the banking strap of the generating industry were to be removed for socially useful purposes, the mere influx of energy use that is being talked about will ruin us by ruining our environment! “
Panic and resignation make some sense given the full-spectrum kaleidoscope of obstacles, but we must address this using numbers.
In the 1930s, it was estimated that if all buildings in America were demolished and rebuilt with state-of-the-art energy efficient buildings instead, the energy savings would balance out in 20 years with the total amount of energy used for this gigantic effort.
Nothing so drastic needs to happen now that solar power is becoming competitive with fossil fuels (see massive deflation in solar panel products) and now that China is leading the global renaissance of nuclear power. Roughly half of the 60 third-generation nuclear power plants being built around the world right now are located in China and the country is well on its way to making a breakthrough in production economies of scale when it comes to fission reactors. It is also worth mentioning that each successive generation of a particular industry (from automobile manufacturing to computer manufacturing) becomes more energy efficient in terms of electrical input to product output. This means that the reindustrialization in the Western Hemisphere that The Pragmatist keeps mentioning will not be as exponentially more energy intensive as is currently thought. The impact on the environment will be less than previous waves of industrialization and it is important to note that the true cleaning of the polluted regions of the planet will only be possible through the machinery of large-scale reindustrialization.
The popularity of disconnecting from the grid in North America has created a breakthrough in plug and play modular connectors for solar panels that are easy for the average person to operate. This pairs nicely with the recent rapid emergence of excess capacity in Chinese solar panel production and German efforts to remain competitive with China through solar subsidies.
It is difficult to say whether hydraulic, nuclear or solar fracturing will become the main driver of the emergence of the super smart grid. What is clear is that the process towards it is proceeding at full steam, it is inevitable, and that eventually we will see energy “too cheap to measure” as the whole planet has access to a channel to take and fill with easy monitoring of the complete process.