“Geothermal and energy storage company Sage Geosystems has completed a commercial pilot that indicates its new energy storage technology can provide 18 hours or more of storage capacity, and is cost-competitive with lithium-ion batteries and pumped storage hydropower, the company announced Tuesday.”
From Utility Dive.
“Almost 92 percent of the world’s population now has access to electricity, in contrast to 87 percent in 2010. In 2023, increases in the number of people with access to electricity outpaced population growth, raising the rate of global access to 92 percent and reducing the number of people without electricity to 666 million—19 million fewer than the previous year…
The greatest growth in access between 2020 and 2023 occurred in Central and Southern Asia, while the pace of progress in Sub-Saharan Africa calls for significant acceleration.”
“Beginning in the last decade of the 18th century, firewood output increased from about 18% of GDP to just under 30% of GDP in the 1830s. The value of firewood fell to less than 5% of GDP by the 1880s. Prior estimates of firewood output in the 19th century significantly underestimated its value.”
Summary: Energy powers economic progress, and it has become much more abundant since 1980. Despite nominal price increases, electricity is more affordable in terms of labor. A blue-collar worker today can buy much more electricity per hour worked than in 1980. Thanks to rising productivity and innovation, we’re getting significantly more energy for less time.
Energy is essential to creating abundance. Whether it’s used to organize and move atoms or to store and transmit information, economic development depends on energy. Although energy is available in many forms and measured in various units, the kilowatt-hour (kWh) is a common standard of comparison, especially in electricity-related contexts. A kWh represents the energy delivered by one kilowatt of power sustained over one hour. For perspective, a standard 42-gallon barrel of crude oil contains approximately 1,700 kWh of energy, though the exact amount depends on the oil’s grade.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tracks average electricity prices over time in nominal terms. The chart below shows the U.S. average price per kWh from 1980 to the present—rising from about 6 cents per kWh in 1980 to 17.6 cents today.
To convert the money price into a time price, we compared the US blue-collar hourly compensation rate for each year, indexing 1980 as the baseline (1.0). The result shows that the time required to purchase a kWh of electricity has declined by 26.6 percent since 1980.
Another way to understand electricity prices is to ask: how many kWh can you buy with one hour of work? This chart illustrates that relationship. In 1980, an hour of US blue-collar labor could buy 152 kWh; today, it buys 207 kWh—a 36 percent increase in energy abundance.
The regression line plotted on the chart suggests a steady gain of about two additional kWh per year for the same amount of work. Although time prices have spiked in the past three years, the long-term trend still indicates growing abundance..
If you started your first job as an unskilled worker in 1980 and “upskilled” to a blue-collar job by 2024, your time price for electricity would have dropped by 67.3 percent. For the time it took to earn enough to buy 100 kWh in 1980, you could now purchase 306 kWh—representing a 206 percent increase in electricity abundance.
Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.
“TAE Technologies, a private fusion energy company developing the cleanest and safest approach to commercial fusion power, has achieved a first-of-its-kind breakthrough that fundamentally advances the performance, practicality and reactor-readiness of the company’s proprietary fusion technology.
Experimental results published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications prove TAE has invented a streamlined approach to form and optimize plasma that increases efficiency, significantly reduces complexity and cost, and accelerates the company’s path to net energy and commercial fusion power.”
From TAE.
