The long, fun list of things we could do with unlimited clean energy

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.

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 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.

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 is prosperity,” said Eric Toone, chief technology officer at Breakthrough Energy, a high-tech clean energy funding firm founded by Bill Gates in 2015. “Energy is the capacity to do work. Energy is the capacity to build things, to make things, to move things.”

The potential of near-unlimited energy has been tantalizing researchers for decades, since the last big energy revolution, the dawn of the nuclear age.

“It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age,” said Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, in 1954. “This is the forecast for an age of peace.”

Nuclear power didn’t make this dream come true. It did provide huge amounts of electricity, but its construction and operating costs rose as other energy sources got cheaper. Meanwhile, environmental activists and some policymakers shifted their energy strategy to conservation rather than expanding the pool of power. Yet, the prospect of producing energy in such vast quantities that its cost is a minor concern is still one that lures scientists, engineers, and investors. And the recent technology trends do give some observers hope that this dream is within reach.

“Long-term, I think there’s good reason to think that at least lots of places in the world will have much less expensive and more stable energy, especially once they’ve made the investment in the next generation infrastructure,” said Daniel Vermeer, a researcher at Duke University studying the future of energy. “And I think that’s going to happen in a lot of places.”

How much more energy? “I think we’re looking at double the electricity production,” Vermeer said.

So, in the best tradition of economic thought experiments, let’s assume a can opener. What do we open first?

If we vastly increase our energy supply from current levels, food and water are where we can get the most bang for the British Thermal Unit (BTU). “It’s so fundamental to human prosperity,” Vermeer said. “It’s also where people will see benefits the fastest.”

We already spend a huge amount of our energy to produce food, and agriculture accounts for one-third of humanity’s greenhouse gas output. The fertilizer used to grow crops alone accounts for 5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than aviation and shipping combined — and most fertilizers rely on natural gas as a feedstock. If we had the power and materials to produce more zero-emissions fertilizer, farmers could extract greater yields from the same amount of land. And decarbonizing the supply chain with electric tractors and trucks to bring food to markets would further increase efficiency. Getting the most out of our existing farms will be essential to feeding the world’s growing population. Otherwise, expanding farms will continue to devour forests and wildlands.

The next generation of farming techniques could create similar yields on even smaller plots of land, allowing food to be produced year round, nearer to major population centers or even within them. One approach is vertical farming, where crops are grown vertically in controlled indoor environments instead of horizontally across fields. Many vertical farming techniques are already being used today. But with more cheap energy to run pumps, lights, and fans, we can scale this up further.

However, two-thirds of the world is covered in water, and widespread desalination would allow the world to tap into that vast, currently undrinkable supply. The main techniques for desalination are distillation and reverse osmosis, and right now, both require a lot of energy. But, if there’s a lot of cheap power on tap, then desalination could be a primary source of water for some communities, allowing freshwater rivers and aquifers to recharge. It would also resolve many of the political conflicts around water.

Unlimited energy could allow us to bioengineer our food sources from individual nutrients to maximize nourishment. Precision fermentation, or electro-food, is an emerging technology that uses specially designed microorganisms like yeast or bacteria to make proteins, fats, or nutrients like those found in animal products. Instead of raising cows or chickens, you could “brew” milk, eggs, or meat ingredients in fermentation tanks — just like the process of making beer.

Cheap, clean electricity can power these breweries as they use captured carbon and hydrogen as ingredients. Companies are already selling animal-free dairy and egg proteins made this way. As renewable power becomes abundant, precision fermentation could scale up, feeding growing populations with a fraction of the land, water, and emissions of traditional agriculture

Now, let’s take precision fermentation even further. Cultivating cells into whole steaks is starting to become possible, but it’s an expensive and involved process. If this could truly get off the ground, it would have huge knock-on benefits for the environment. Raising livestock right now draws a huge toll in terms of land use, energy and water consumption, and waste production, not to mention the immense ethical problems embedded in raising and killing animals for food. If we can turn energy into meat that replaces conventional livestock, that would solve so many environmental issues all at once. But, convincing people to eat it remains a barrier. Already, there are seven states that have banned lab-grown meat. “Laboratory agriculture and producing things without animals is possible from a technical perspective, but we have to get a lot more sophisticated about how people make those decisions,” Toone said.

With food and water sorted, we can then start to chip away at the root cause of climate change: the rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels that are heating up the planet. Halting climate change thus means stopping these emissions entirely. And in the increasingly likely scenario where we overshoot our goal of limiting global average temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, it also means deliberately pulling carbon back out from the environment. It’s not enough to simply produce more energy; the world needs negative greenhouse gas emissions.

Humanity currently spews more than 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. So, to move the needle, we need to think about carbon management solutions that can work on this scale.

There are a few ways to do this. One is capturing carbon dioxide at the source. At conventional coal and natural gas-fired power plants, carbon capture systems currently impose a large parasitic load, around a quarter of the generator’s power output. That makes it hard to build a business case for carbon capture at fossil fuel power plants. But other industrial processes, like steel production, also emit carbon dioxide, and point-source capture can decarbonize this and other processes that don’t currently have an easy zero-emissions alternative.

We can also capture carbon dioxide straight from the air. There are already companies developing machines that can filter carbon from the atmosphere. Some businesses are also working on ways to pull carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater. The challenge is that it requires a lot of energy to move the amount of air and water needed to draw out significant amounts of carbon, which in turn raises the cost.

“Two things have to happen: One is that we have to continue to work to bring down the cost of air capture,” Toone said. Currently, it costs around $500 per ton to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. The goal is to get it down to $100 per ton or less. “Then societies have to become affluent enough that they’re willing to do it and recognize the dangers caused by climate change,” Toone added.

Another approach is enhanced weathering, which speeds up natural processes where rocks like limestone react with carbon dioxide in rainwater, forming a chemical bond that permanently locks it away.

Waste is a mounting problem, and many synthetic materials like plastics have no natural mechanisms that break them down, making them a problem that can last for generations. Recycling plastic materials has largely failed to live up to the promise, and the bulk of plastic waste ends up in landfills. To meaningfully reuse and reconstitute polymers, the process needs to be competitive with producing virgin materials, which means the energy you use for recycling has to be dirt cheap. When we get there, we may be able to close the loop, making, unmaking, and remaking everything we need with minimal extraction from the Earth.

The next place to look is transportation. Cheap fossil fuels have shrunk the world, allowing people to cross continents and oceans in hours rather than months. How we get around is now the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. Four-wheeled vehicles already have a glide path to zero emissions with electrification. The tougher challenges are going to be electrifying or decarbonizing bigger vehicles like ships and airplanes.

Container ships are the gargantuan worker ants of the global economy, transporting just about every tangible good around the world. Right now, most container ships burn some of the cheapest and dirtiest fuels imaginable, but with abundant clean energy, they could draw on cleaner sources of power. These ships may be too big to run on batteries, but with much cheaper, clean electricity, shipping companies can generate hydrogen, ammonia, methanol, or synthetic versions of conventional fuels, moving cargo without the carbon footprint.

Climate-friendly flying is still trying to get off the ground. Right now, there aren’t any batteries that come anywhere close to the energy density of fossil fuels. Some airlines are deploying electric aircraft on shorter routes. However, without a breakthrough, long-haul flights will need to run on synthetic zero-emissions fuels, which demand vast quantities of low-cost energy. Or, they’ll need a mechanism like direct air capture to offset their emissions.

Even if we could realize all of the exciting potential of this clean energy-powered future, some new problems could emerge if we’re not careful.

First, there will be a big dislocation in the job market. There are almost 2 million people in the US working in coal, oil, and gas sectors — mining, building, transporting, and combusting these fuels. They will need new jobs or a soft landing pad that will help them move or retire. “We’re potentially seeing huge shifts in governance and unionization around the world,” said Adam Cowart, who is on the faculty of foresight at the University of Houston.

Additionally, “abundant” does not necessarily mean “equal” when it comes to energy. In the year 2025, there are still 685 million people in the world who don’t have access to electricity, and there’s no guarantee that increasing the global supply of energy will benefit them without concerted policies to match.

Having more energy could also end up indulging people’s worst impulses. Already, we’ve seen across much of the world that as fuels and electricity get cheaper, people end up driving bigger cars over longer distances, running their thermostats less efficiently, and eating more meat.

Valerie Thomas, professor of industrial engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, noted that our recent history shows that we have not used the energy we already have in a judicious way. “If we look back in history just a little bit, what do we do? We use it up on things maybe we don’t even understand, like bigger houses with more air conditioning, or we would commute even longer distances,” Thomas said. It will take concerted effort to make sure new energy doesn’t just go to frivolous uses.

And in her work looking at some of the poorest populations in the world, Thomas said she found that the key limits to prosperity are often things like local corruption, a lack of prenatal care, not enough vaccines, political instability, and bad economic policies. “What tends to be the barrier to the good life? I don’t think it’s energy,” Thomas said. That said, the world’s poorest stand to gain the most from the transition to clean energy, not just for having more useful power in their lives but breathing in less pollution and having more economic autonomy.

The post-energy abundance world is not one where every problem is solved, but it’s one with greater prosperity, improved human welfare, and generally a more stable climate. It will raise its own challenges, so there’s no scenario where we can take it for granted.

The fossil fuel era, and much of human history, was governed by constraints. The age of clean energy is poised to be one that’s more limited by imagination and choices, and the remaining solutions will be much more fun to implement.

This series was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.