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01 / 05
Light Has Burst Forth in Astonishing Abundance

Blog Post | Energy Consumption

Light Has Burst Forth in Astonishing Abundance

Light abundance has increased by 100,435,912 percent since 1830.

Gale L. Pooley —

Summary: In just two centuries, humanity has turned light from a rare luxury into one of the most abundant resources on Earth. What once demanded hours of labor now costs a fraction of a second’s work, thanks to relentless innovation and human creativity. From candles to LEDs, the story of light reflects a larger truth: when people are free to invent and exchange ideas, they transform scarcity into abundance and darkness into illumination.

Our book Superabundance (2022) was inspired in part by the work of Nobel Prize–winning economist William Nordhaus, who conducted an extensive analysis on the “time price” of light over the span of human history. He called time prices the true prices. Light can be measured in lumens. Comfortable reading light is around 1,000 lumens. Nordhaus reported that in 1830, earning sufficient money to buy the candles necessary for one hour of light at 1,000 lumens required around three hours of labor. A candle generates around 12 lumens; therefore, one would need 83 candles to generate 1,000 lumens.

Innovation replaced candles with kerosene lamps and then with incandescent lighting and then LED lighting. Today, for 75 cents, one can buy a Cree J Series 5050C E Class LED that generates 228 lumens per watt. By increasing the wattage to 4.4 watts one can, therefore, generate 1,000 lumens of light. Electricity prices are currently around 17 cents per 1,000 watt hours, commonly known as kilowatt hours or kWh. One watt hour costs 0.017 cents; thus, the 4.4 watts to power the Cree LED for one hour would cost a mere 0.0745 cents. The average worker earns $36.53 an hour, or slightly more than a penny per second. Working for around 0.0735 seconds, therefore, the average worker earns enough money to buy 1,000 lumens for one hour.

The light that cost 10,800 seconds in 1830 costs only 0.0735 seconds today. The time price has dropped by 99.99932 percent. For the time it took to earn the money to buy 1,000 lumens for one hour in 1830, workers today earn 146,980 hours of light today. That’s a 14,697,900 percent increase. Light abundance has been increasing around 6.3 percent annually on a compound basis, doubling every 12 years.

Calculating Changes in Global Light Resources

Over the last 195 years (1830-2025), the world’s population rose from 1.2 billion to 8.2 billion—a factor of 6.83, or a 583 percent increase. To measure how humanity’s resource base has changed, we calculate the size of the global resource “pie” by multiplying personal resource abundance by population. That reveals how much “total abundance” exists across humanity at a given moment.

As we already saw, during the 195-year period, personal light abundance rose by a factor of 146,980. Assuming for argument’s sake that everyone in the world enjoys American prices of LEDs and energy, combined with the 6.83-fold increase in population, the global light abundance factor would amount to 1,004,360. In other words, the global light pie has grown by 100,435,912 percent—from an index value of 1 in 1830 to 1,004,360 today.

Light abundance would have grown at a compound annual rate of roughly 7.3 percent for almost two centuries, doubling about every 9.8 years. What was once scarce, flickering, and expensive has become nearly boundless—flowing at the speed of electrons and photons across the planet.

Resource Elasticity of Population

In economics, elasticity compares the percentage change in one variable against the percentage change in another. Between 1830 and 2025, global light resource abundance increased by 100,435,912 percent. During same period, the world’s population increased by 583 percent. Dividing 100,435,912 percent by 583 percent gives us 172,176. Every 1 percent increase in population thus corresponds to a 172,176 percent increase in global light abundance.

Let There Be More Light

We have witnessed an exponential efflorescence of light—an illumination not merely of our cities but of the human spirit itself. More people with light has meant more minds, more ideas, and more ventures into the unknown. When free to imagine and innovate, humans transform scarcity into abundance—and ignorance into insight. Over the past two centuries, we have converted the darkness of want into the radiance of wealth, beginning with light itself. From the barbarous glow of whale oil to the humble candle, and from the flicker of gas and kerosene to the steady blaze of electricity and the brilliance of silicon, each technological leap has kindled new horizons of discovery. Every advance has multiplied the possibilities for the next. The ultimate source of growth is not material—it’s the human mind set free.

The next time you turn on a light switch, please take a moment to appreciate the great work of free and creative people toiling to bring us out of the darkness. Compared to the abundant light of today’s world, our ancestors really did live in the “dark ages.”

Find more of Gale’s work at his Substack, Gale Winds.

Bloomberg | Energy Production

Nuclear Fusion Startup Claims Major Advance in New Zealand Trial

“In New Zealand’s compact capital Wellington, a small group of scientists and engineers just got a little closer to replicating the power of the sun.

OpenStar Technologies on Tuesday successfully floated a half-tonne magnet in a 5-meter-wide vacuum chamber of glowing gas heated to more than a million degrees Celsius. A select audience — among them Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and All Blacks great Richie McCaw — looked on from a room above the chamber as the local start-up marked a breakthrough in its bid to achieve sustained nuclear fusion.”

From Bloomberg.

Wall Street Journal | Energy Production

How US Oil Learned to Produce More with Less

“As U.S. oil prices dropped below $60 a barrel in recent months, the industry shed rigs by the dozens and laid off crews that frack wells. Yet, the country’s wells last year gushed a record 13.6 million barrels of crude on average each day—100,000 barrels more than the Energy Information Administration, the federal forecaster, had anticipated before President Trump’s inauguration. The disconnect between slackening activity and the increasing yield has mystified even oil chieftains…

Executives credit the outperformance in part to companies’ engineering prowess and the changing makeup of the industry. Oil giants now have a bigger share of crude production in their hands and are largely impervious to price swings, ensuring a steady output. Among other field enhancements, these companies now routinely drill wells that extend over 4 miles and allow them to collect more crude at a lower cost…

One explanation for the basin’s resilience is that the unruly, debt-fueled frackers that would retreat when prices fell have died off. They have given way to giants armed with sturdy balance sheets that can better weather price shocks. The Permian has seen a consolidation frenzy valued at more than $125 billion since 2020. As a result, drillers such as Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Diamondback and Occidental Petroleum now largely dictate the pace of production there.

In an effort to trim costs, these companies have been deploying drilling and pumping innovations across their respective empires. For instance, Chevron in 2019 ran 21 rigs and five frack crews in the Permian. This year it anticipates it will need only six rigs and two frack crews to produce about 67% more oil-and-gas in the region than seven years ago.

Each rig on average drills 1,500 feet a day, which is more than twice as much as in 2019.

Chevron and others are also trying their hand at drilling horizontal wells that extend out 2 miles, make a 180-degree turn and extend for another 2 miles in a U shape. This allows them to extract more crude from smaller pieces of land where they can’t drill one long lateral section.”

From the Wall Street Journal.

Fervo Energy | Energy Production

Fervo Sets New Heat Record at Its Largest Geothermal Project

“Fervo Energy, a leader in next-generation geothermal development, has announced the successful completion of an appraisal drilling campaign at a new greenfield geothermal site, Project Blanford, located in Millard County, Utah. The drilling results confirm resource temperatures above 555°F at approximately 11,200 feet deep, exceeding the requirements for commercial viability. Drilled in under 11 days, the vertical appraisal well marks the hottest well drilled in company history, further de-risking and expanding Fervo’s industry-leading pipeline of enhanced geothermal projects.”

From Fervo Energy.