Tomorrow’s Promise: Sustainable Energy
By Peter Koraca, Lead Interaction Designer

Since the discovery of fire, humans have been (primarily) burning matter in order to produce energy needed for cooking, heating, lighting, powering machinery, the list goes on. We are now entering a new era where we’re moving from burning things for energy production to harvesting it.
This shift towards the decarbonization of our industries, homes, and modes of transport is due to four main technological currents converging together at the right time:
- Renewable forms of energy are becoming cheaper than fossil fuels while sparking innovation, generating more jobs, and creating energy independency.
- Advancements in battery technologies are allowing for sustained electricity from non-constant sources to be charged in shorter periods of time, and stored in smaller cells.
- Decentralization of where power is generated is changing the old centralized transmission model to a more connected network of nodes, making power grids more resilient and opening up new paths of energy exchange.
- New forms of artificial intelligence that can analyze, predict, and manage ever more complex systems more accurately than human engineers are making networks smarter and more efficient.
Together, these forces are forming new energy distribution and economic models.
The Price of Wind

All around the world, generating renewable forms energy is becoming cheaper than our reliance on fossil fuels. In the UK, the cost of generating electricity on an onshore wind farm is £80 per MWh, whereas the cost of using an Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (coal power plant) is £148 per MWh.* In the US, onshore wind energy production comes at a minimum of $43.40 per MWh, whereas coal power plants (with a 30% carbon sequestration) cost $128.9 per MWh. This huge economic advantage is spurring innovation and the growth of sustainable sources of energy. One of which is the proliferation in efficiencies of solar cells and their newfound accessibility to individual homeowners who can store this energy in batteries that are exponentially improving.
Power of the Sun in Your Home

This ability for individuals to not only consume but to produce and sell electricity back to the grid is changing the infrastructure of how energy is distributed and traded. Startups and large energy companies alike are already exploring how they can support a peer-to-peer energy market. What if we could sell electricity directly to our neighbor? What if we got paid, not just compensated, for producing electricity — would we be willing to change our energy consumption behavior? Blockchain often pops up as a potential solution to a decentralized market. Less strict regulations in the low-voltage energy production (e.g. photovoltaic cells on your roof) also make it possible for a variety of smaller companies to enter the market of managing neighborhood or community-based power production.
We probably won’t see a completely decentralized energy grid, as it’s more efficient to have a single 200MWh generator instead of 200 1Mwh generators, but we might see a hybrid take shape, where the big energy companies take on two separate roles: the producer of electricity and the manager of connected node networks. We’ve already seen some of the bigger players in the market, such as Philips, not only supplying street luminaires (for cities like Los Angeles), but also providing them with a platform that various city services and third parties can connect with.
Batteries on Wheels

The third piece of the puzzle are electric and automated vehicles, or as some call them, batteries on wheels. Although most peoples’ concerns revolve around how far they can drive with them, whether there are enough charging stations around, and what the cost benefits are, the EVs also have the potential of becoming vehicles for energy exchange. What if you could easily sell some of the charge from your car to one parked right next to yours? What if they could communicate with each other and you could receive charge wirelessly from cars driving shorter distances than your long journey on the highway?
Everything Connected

As more companies, cities, and governments start to provide platforms for others to build upon, two big challenges emerge: how do we connect and integrate data across them, and how do we make sense of the data. Solving for them will enable us to do really smart things like merge weather data with street lights, traffic signals, and individual automated vehicles to manage flows of traffic much more efficiently, thereby making our urban living environments cleaner, safer, and more pleasant. To some degree, various global cities are already working on their control centers, such as the one in Rio De Janeiro that uses a mix of artificial intelligence and machine learning, helping them gain better insight into not only what is happening in Rio right now, but what might transpire in the future. What if we could use these predictive technologies not only to react to events already unfolded or unfolding, but dynamically change our living environments to suit our needs and desires better? Can we transform urban planning to become an agile, dynamic field?
Future is Electric

When everything is electric, digitized and connected, we’ll also start to see the power infrastructure and platforms of today as a backbone for branded continuous experiences, like the journey from a notification on your Apple watch, to iPhone, to your Macbook, over to Apple HomePod, and maybe back to virtual space on the iPad again. Or even beyond, an experience that extends from the physical world of our front door, our cars, and cityscape, all the way back to our living room. Perhaps one day we’ll see a branded city experience—Google city? At the same time, connected touchpoints will become more efficient and more sustainable than our current ways of producing, managing, and consuming energy. Just what kind of experience we will want and how can we make it compatible with other people remains to be seen. But one thing is for certain: we’ll witness some amazing strides in energy in the near future.