By Bradd Libby and Adam Dorr

We are excited to announce our brand new report is here. 'Understanding Stellar Energy'.

Solar power, wind power, and batteries (SWB) are more than just clean energy, they are rapidly transforming humanity’s relationship with energy itself.

RethinkX is pleased to announce the publication of our latest report, ‘Understanding Stellar Energy: How SWB Superpower will create clean energy superabundance’.
 
From Scarcity to the Stars
 
For millennia, humanity has been shaped by energy scarcity. From the warming fires in prehistoric caves, to the coal-powered factories of the Industrial Revolution, to petroleum-fueled cars and combined-cycle gas turbines, our progress depended on our ability to extract and burn fuels. This extractive model – dig, transport, burn, repeat – has lifted billions from poverty, but has simultaneously come at great social and environmental cost that is now threatening our planet’s future.
 
But SWB is fundamentally different. Like the convergence of technologies that created the Internet or the smartphone, SWB represents more than the sum of its parts. For the first time, we have the glimpse of a supply of ample power that does not rely on burning anything. One based on stockpiles of energy-generating and energy-storing assets, not one based on flows of fuels. SWB represents an entirely new system, not just new technologies.
 
The SWB Trinity: Solar, Wind, and Batteries
 
Our previous report ‘Rethinking Energy 2020-2030: 100% Solar, Wind and Batteries is Just the Beginning’ laid out how this new system might work. Solar panels and wind turbines harvest power and store it in batteries which are used to supply energy at times when demand exceeds the supply. The prices of all of these technologies have fallen so dramatically in the past decade or two that an SWB-based energy system is not only affordable, it saves money compared to all other available options. And the battery system that is large enough to get an area through the worst few weeks of winter means a superabundance of clean electricity at all other times of the year.
 
The prices of SWB components are at the point where solar and wind now make up the vast majority of new electric supply coming online in the US (and elsewhere). Like the stars, once a critical mass of SWB is achieved, something extraordinary happens: the system reaches an ‘ignition point’ after which its output of superabundant clean energy becomes self-sustaining. RethinkX’s founders, Tony Seba and James Arbib, call this Stellar Energy.

In a Stellar Energy system based on SWB, the marginal cost of producing power plummets to near-zero and clean electricity transforms from a scarce commodity with costly side effects, into a superabundant resource that is available and affordable to virtually everyone, virtually everywhere.
  
In our earlier research and modeling, we considered the most restrictive cases where the surplus electricity generated by SWB is only available when the batteries are fully charged. In our new analysis, we relax that assumption and allow consumers to use superabundant clean electricity – which we call SWB Superpower – all day, all night, all year round based on the recognition that battery recharging in a Stellar Energy system is both rapid and predictable. The result is that 
 
We built a software tool, the ‘Stellar Energy Explorer’, that is able to model solar power, wind power, battery storage capacity, and energy demand at an hourly resolution anywhere on the planet. We are pleased to announce that the Stellar Energy Explorer will be available for use in partnership with our sister organization, NavigateX.
 
Rethinking Energy
 
Traditional energy planners have long viewed surplus electricity generation as waste, calling it “overproduction” that requires “curtailment”. We aim to correct this misconception in our new report, and help others understand that SWB Superpower is the central feature that Stellar Energy systems must be architected and optimized around, and that this new logic turns many of our current assumptions about energy upside down.
 
Chief among these inversions is the realization that in a Stellar Energy system, we should seek to maximize instead of minimize energy use. Building energy assets and then failing to utilize their electricity is wasteful, especially considering that the power is clean and safe, not dirty and dangerous. 
 
Rethinking Energy Again

Our new analysis provides a representative sampling of regional case studies to demonstrate that clean, cheap, superabundant electricity isn’t a privilege just for wealthy nations – it is a global opportunity and race to the stars. No matter where our readers live, these case studies give a preview of what a Stellar Energy system could like in their region, and how clean energy superabundance from SWB Superpower is the key to unlocking an electrified transportation system, a new food system, artificial intelligence and robotics. 
 
We stand at a historical rupture point. The challenges of today create unprecedented urgency. Stellar Energy is a critical part of the solution to many of humanity’s greatest social, economic, geopolitical, and environmental challenges, and we hope that our latest research will help others understand and navigate the profound transformation that lies ahead.
 
Download the report for free now.

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