Notes from a fireside chat between Arash Aazami and Olof Schybergson about the future of energy: personal, shared and abundant. This conversation follows Arash’s Main Stage talk from earlier in NEXT24.

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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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The moment when we start to really relate to our own realities, and philosophise about what these technologies could be, is when we start forming our own futures. And we need a new energy future, suggests Arash.

“We should consider a device that can’t handle its own energy needs to be broken,” he says.

I want to get 80% of my work done with 20% of my effort. And maybe our devices should be the same — a device could provide 80% of its own energy, with other devices making up the difference. If you can balance that out across the household, you send the 20% deficit to the neighbourhood level, and so on up to the national level.

Reconnecting with the natural reality of energy

At the moment, we are consuming, consuming, consuming energy, but we don’t know how or where it is produced. We have used technologies for a couple of centuries to detach ourselves from natural reality, such as where our food comes from. Now, we can apply technologies to rebuild our connection with natural reality. More and more of us grow some of our own food. We can have energy in the commons in the same way.

I’m learning gardening through TikTok. That’s how it works these days.

We’re looking at decentralisation and digitalisation, then you decommoditise it, and demonetise it. Your car and your refrigerator don’t care about money — they just swap energy. There are very few people putting effort into the UX of energy.

The meteor is coming for energy dinosaurs

We’re already seeing the first Kodaks of energy. Kodak invented the first digital camera, but they didn’t market it, and went bankrupt. Some of the players of today will have their Kodak moment. We could live in a world without photography, but a world without energy? It would be complete chaos. The fundamental character of energy dictates that it should be available to everyone.

The Netherlands is one of the front-runners in the shit hitting the fan. The number of inputs to their grid has gone from 30 to 3 million, with all the solar panels on homes around the country. A grid designed for one-way traffic can’t cope. And these are resources — the wind and the sun — we can’t switch on and off. And that means we need to move to a supply-driven model, not demand-driven.

If you have a surplus of solar electricity in the summer, store it locally as heat, and dissipate it over the winter to reduce natural gas dependency.

New models, new energy infrastructure

Octopus in the UK has come up with the idea of zero-bill homes; attractive to buyers, attractive to mortgage lenders. In some countries, it’s becoming law for EV batteries to be bidirectional, so they can store energy for later use in the house.

We need investment in infrastructure for this. We also need investment in algorithms to manage the relationship between devices. Energy and the Internet develop a symbiotic relationship — and both are linked with the environment, as that’s where the energy is being created.

It’s the same vibe I get here, as my mother getting on the internet in the late 80s.

That particular moment is where energy innovators struggle. They don’t see the future, and yet they’re sitting on gold, as he was back when he owned ej.com — and let it go.

Denerding and deregulating energy

Olof suggests that we need to “denerd” energy, as we used the web to make the internet easier. Today, the internet is open to the public, but the energy grid is much less so.

The Netherlands tried to launch mobile internet with i-mode — 50 curated channels — and that failed. WhatsApp killed the business model of SMS. Energy congestion is becoming an issue, and if governments don’t respond with a way to share energy peer-to-peer, people will find a way anyway because energy is a fundamental need.

The new business model will kill your old business model. Do we need to give that old model palliative care, while we move in the new model?

There are two concepts in Finnish that he adores. The Finnish word for entrepreneur is literally “trier”. We should all try more. And the other is perseverance. And we all need that as Energy Buddhists.

The next project? Energy-backed currency that is non-speculative by nature.