Arash Aazami is best described as a Renaissance man. A futurist, inventor, thinker, musician, and entrepreneur. His European and Middle-Eastern descent and African upbringing gave him a broad perspective. As an entrepreneur in music, online tech and energy, over the years, Arash has developed an uncanny ability to deal with crises and recognise the opportunities hidden within, as well as act upon them.

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These are live-blogged notes from a session at NEXT24 in Hamburg. As such, they are prone to error, inaccuracy and lamentable crimes against grammar and syntax. Posts will be improved in the coming days and this note updated.

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Those of us born before 1989 are the last generation born before an internet… Arash’s connection to energy started at an early age. As a Persian/Dutch family, clearly, they moved to Africa. They were one of the few families in the town with a TV, and would sit with their friend, waiting for the weekly TV show they watched to come on. And just before the show, they’d turn on the TV and hope. It was a gamble because power was unpredictable.

We’re insatiable in our need for energy. We’re consuming fossil fuels 1 million times faster than they are created. That means we need to cut our fossil fuel use by 99.9999999%. That’s a huge challenge. But we also have over 2 bn people on the planet in energy poverty, often spending hours of the working day just meeting their basic energy needs. That locks them into poverty because they have so little time left.

There’s a strong correlation between conflict zones and fossil fuel extraction. People fight over energy supply and energy security. Can we change that? Yes, we can.

Energy inequality

The average US citizen consumes three times as much energy as the average Chinese citizen — but much of that Chinese use is manufacturing things for us. India has 1/10th the energy use of the US. We need to increase global energy use — but from non-fossil fuel sources.

For most of human history, we used renewable resources — wind, and fire. It’s only in the past couple of centuries we’ve been using fossil fuels. And now? We’re at the peak. We have to reduce it, but we have invented the technologies we need to move on from fossil fuels. Likewise, we’re heading towards Renewables 2.0: energy when we need it, where we need it, on demand.

Is it that simple? No!

Is it about technology? Just a little bit!

But it’s a shift in economies and business models. It’s a shift in social models and governmental models, too. And to get there, we need to adopt new mindsets.

You don’t change things by fighting the existing reality, but by creating a new one. (Buckminster Fuller)

The three mindsets we need

1. The seeker’s mindset

This is the classic scientific mindset. In nature, nothing is lost, only transformed. So what is growth? Just transformation. Back where he grew up, they’re charging mobile phones from diesel-powered kiosks, but they’re now being replaced by solar ones. In these villages, solar is rapidly becoming the default form of power.

Ah, nature: renewable, regenerative, sustainable. It’s distributed and ownerless. We need to study it more, and apply more biomimicry in our work. Nature knows the strength of diversity. We could learn from that.

2. The artist’s mindset

One artist is experimenting with thin solar film in clothes. Another with plant-powered lights. You touch a leaf to turn on the light. Sunglacier was a project to create a glacier in a desert. He planned to use solar panels to power the creation of ice. He got two prototypes working in the Sahara. This got funded because it’s a conflict reduction move. If you can make water out of thin air in the desert, you take away the need to fight over the resources.

Bring in the artists. We need the artists.

3. The hacker’s mindset

A hacker uses the existing reality to make the reality they desire. In 1973, we had 63 users of the internet — every single one a card-carrying nerd. In 1989, we de-nerded the internet through the HTTP protocol birthing the World Wide Web. By 2022, we reached 5 bn internet users in the world. We’re prosumers: both producers and consumers of the internet.

The Internet of Energy

We have the ability to connect energy in the same way: the internet of energy. If we’re all generating energy, we can share it in a distributed way. Today’s energy system is a jam session, with managers trying to respond to demand. We require a self-balancing mesh network of energy, like a flock of birds. Pricing will change from volume to value. And that value is sometimes negative when there’s a surfeit.

And that’s our next big challenge.

More on the energy transition

A later fireside chat explored Arash’s ideas in more detail:

Personal Energy: the human opportunity in the energy transition