At TomorrowToday, our team has been tracking many of the world’s great energy projects for some time now. These include:
- ITER (the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) – due to come online in 2027, this is quite simply a star. Nuclear fusion produces more energy than it uses. Being built in Southern France.
- Tesla’s GigaFactory – the giant battery and solar factory being built in the Nevada Desert.
- Many different solar arrays, everywhere from Morocco to Bahrain, China to Brazil.
- Honda’s experiments with hydrogen fuel cells in their cars.
- The Breakthrough Energy Coalition, and the various projects they are funding.
- China’s plan to put a mirror array in space, and capture the sun’s energy outside our atmosphere. This gets beamed down to a base station on earth.
Now we can add one more audacious project aiming to find alternatives to carbon fuels: Iceland has finished drilling their first 4.7km deep hole into the base of a volcano, from which they can extract thermal energy that is at least ten times as powerful as anything we generate on the earth’s surface. They will now start a two year testing period to prove this new approach can work. You can read more about this here.
It really isn’t going to be long before we can move away from carbon fuels altogether. And, as Bill Gates, the brains behind the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, says, “Providing cheaper energy is the most powerful lever we can pull to solve the world’s great problems, and especially to deal with poverty.”
NOTE: The issue of cheap and clean energy is the subject of this month’s Future of Work Academy’s ‘News Bulletin from the Future’ scenario. Click here to access it if you are a FOWA member.