Energy SuperAbundance Hypothesis
= The SuperAbundance Hypothesis: < overbuilding renewables is not waste — it’s the cornerstone of a post-scarcity energy future. >
"we dive deep into current research on overbuilding renewables – examining its feasibility, cost-effectiveness, and implications."
See: Nafeez Ahmed reviews the research at [1]
Discussion
Nafeez Ahmed:
"The reframing came when researchers asked a different question. Instead of asking how much solar and wind capacity is required to meet average demand, they asked what happens if enough is built to meet demand on the worst days – the cloudiest weeks of winter when wind drops off. The result is an enormous surplus of generation for the rest of the year. RethinkX’s Adam Dorr and colleagues ran the numbers on what that surplus makes possible. The more solar and wind capacity built above existing demand, the less battery storage is required. Panels and turbines are now cheap; batteries remain expensive; supersizing generation collapses the overall system cost. Dorr calls it the Clean Energy U-Curve.
The finding is corroborated across independent research. Marc Perez at Columbia University found that building solar and wind capacity to three times peak load cuts battery requirements by 90% and electricity costs by 75%; the Finnish energy firm Wärtsilä found that overbuilding by four times peak load requires only four to 10 days of storage. The International Energy Agency’s Task 16 Firm Power report has established that this is the cheapest route to round-the-clock clean electricity at any scale.
Optimise the system properly and the result is virtually free clean energy in vast surplus, for most of the year. RethinkX calls this clean energy super power. I call it superabundance, because that is what it is.
Applied globally, the numbers are larger still. RethinkX’s 2025 Understanding Stellar Energy report modelled every region of the planet. Ethiopia – often portrayed as a byword for energy poverty – could generate up to 414 times its current output. India could produce 66,000 terawatt-hours per year, almost 10 times current US electricity generation. A team at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science, led by Hubert Desing and published in Energies, found the planet’s total physically possible renewable generation is around 71 terawatts. Current global energy consumption is about 6.7 terawatts. Humanity has 10 times more clean energy potential than it uses."
The Virtuous Cycle Between AI and Distributed Renewable Energy
< "Cheap clean energy can be a public abundance or a private monopoly; AI can serve citizens or surveil them; precision fermentation can break the cruelty of industrial livestock or hand it to three patent-holders; autonomous transport can free cities from the car or lock them into platform rents. The technology does not decide. The rules around it do." >
Nafeez Ahmed:
"A standard Google search uses about 0.3 watt-hours. A generative AI query uses 10 times that. The Electric Power Research Institute projects that AI-related US power demand could rise tenfold by 2030. Frontier training costs have grown 2.4 times every year since 2016. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft will spend $700 billion on capital expenditure in 2026, most of it on AI data centres – more than the GDP of all but the top 20 national economies.
Such demand cannot be met by a centralised, fossil-fuelled grid running on the dwindling energy returns described above: the cost of electricity from a degrading fossil system rises while the cost of the AI on top of it is forced to fall.
A different physical configuration works. Solar panels, wind turbines and batteries are themselves semiconductors – close cousins of the chips the AI itself runs on – and they share the same exponential learning curves. Pair the solar revolution with the AI revolution and the result is a virtuous cycle: cheap electrons train the AI, and the AI in turn coordinates a grid of millions of intermittent renewable sources – rooftop panels, wind turbines, electric-vehicle batteries, smart appliances – at a speed no human-managed grid could match."
Policy
A proposed policy for the UK, by Nafeez Ahmed:
"What Britain Needs to Do
Treat energy as the foundation of everything else. Make electrified sovereignty the explicit organising doctrine of British economic and security policy: a Britain that produces several times its current energy consumption from its own coastline and rooftops, at near-zero marginal cost, and exports the surplus into Europe. This, rather than any drilling programme, is the actual industrial strategy.
Build the capital architecture to fund it. Establish a Green Sovereign Bond Fund – a state-backed vehicle that raises capital at sovereign rates from pension funds, insurers and household savings and channels it directly into the electrified infrastructure the private market is underfunding. The Treasury already underwrites bond issuance for fossil-era purposes; doing the same for the energy system of the next 60 years is overdue catch-up.
Pair AI with clean energy. Build compute infrastructure alongside the renewables build-out, locate data centres where the clean electrons are generated, and treat grid optimisation as one of the highest-value applications of frontier AI. Britain has world-class universities, a deep AI research base and a wind resource the rest of Europe envies – none of them deployed coherently.
Lead European clean-energy integration. The route back into a structured European relationship runs through infrastructure rather than trade talks: a North Sea super-grid, shared offshore wind, joint hydrogen corridors, integrated clean-steel and carbon-border policies, joint critical-minerals processing. The political relationship will follow the physical one.
Reframe welfare as resilience. Through a turbulent decade the priority is managing the transition safely – building shock absorbers, protecting the vulnerable, investing in the energy, food, housing and mental-health infrastructure that lets a society navigate change without fragmenting. Cutting incapacity benefits to fund defence increases is exactly the wrong move: it transfers cost from the state’s balance sheet to the body of the citizen, and the OBR picks up the bill later, with interest.
Renew the political operating system. Britain needs to use deliberative democracy as a serious governance tool – the way Ireland did to resolve its abortion deadlock, France did on climate, and Scotland and the Netherlands now do as routine; the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has documented more than 600 such initiatives globally. Citizens’ assemblies on energy, on the constitution and on the welfare-resilience question can do work the existing party-political system literally cannot.
Hold the long horizon. The 2030–2032 window will be the most volatile period of this decade. The cost of getting British strategy wrong now is generational. So is the upside of getting it right."
More information
References:
American Solar Energy Society (ASES). (2023, March 4). Feasibility and Requirements of a 100% Transition to Renewable Energy (Firm Power Generation 2023). https://ases.org/firm-power-generation/
Dorr, A., Arbib, J., & Seba, T. (2025). Understanding Stellar Energy: How SWB Superpower will create clean energy superabundance. https://www.rethinkx.com/publications/understandingstellarenergy2025.en
Gaster, R. (2024). Why Wind and Solar Need Natural Gas: A Realistic Approach to Variability. ITIF Report https://itif.org/publications/2024/09/30/why-wind-and-solar-need-natural-gas-realistic-approach-to-variability/
IEA PVPS Task 16. (2023). Firm Power Generation: IEA PVPS T16-04:2023 Report. International Energy Agency Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme. https://iea-pvps.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Report-IEA-PVPS-T16-04-2023-Firm-Power-generation.pdf
Perez, M., Perez, R., Rábago, K. R., & Putnam, M. (2019). Overbuilding & curtailment: The cost-effective enablers of firm PV generation. Solar Energy, 180, 412–422. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2018.12.074
Pierro, M., Perez, R., Perez, M., Prina, M. G., Moser, D., & Cornaro, C. (2021). From solar imbalance regulation to firm 24/365 solar generation: An Italian protocol for massive solar integration. Renewable Energy, 169, 425–436. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2021.01.025
Wang, S., Tarroja, B., Schell, L. S., & Samuelsen, S. (2021). Determining cost-optimal approaches for managing excess renewable electricity in decarbonized electricity systems. Renewable Energy, 178, 1187–1197. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2021.06.093
Way et al., (2022) Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition. Joule, 6, 9, 2057-2082, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2022.08.009