We’re living in an energy hellscape.
Wars in Iran and Ukraine are supercharging world energy prices as cruise missiles target oil tankers and drones attack still-radioactive Chernobyl and operationalnuclearplants in five countries, some believed to support covert nuclear weapons development.
Less visibly, local pollution from fossil fuels causes one in five deaths worldwide. Record-breaking climate disasters claimed 14,000 lives — and $2 billion in crop losses — during this summer’s historic European heat wave, followed by the evacuation of more than 300,000 people from wildfires. Meanwhile, misinformation, subsidies and policies drive emissions upward.
Against this grim backdrop, the emerging Abundance movement — popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson — envisions plentiful, secure and clean energy for all, but astutely faults itself for failing to offer a compelling roadmap. The underlying problem is a narrow supply-side emphasis that reinforces false choices, downplays juicy customer-side opportunities, and fuels dreams of expanding energy production for wasteful uses.
A more nuanced vision recognizes energy abundance as fundamentally different from abundant energy. A signature strategy of the Abundance movement, indoor factory-farming, requires a hundred times more energy than outdoor agriculture for a given harvest, and solar arrays sprawling across vastly more land. Overbuilding clean energy squanders money and invites environmental harms.
Advocates stray further off track when seeking to simply replace today’s energy supplies with cleaner sources. Experts call this the primary energy fallacy: equating raw energy with useful energy. The gap is huge. A stunning two-thirds of fossil fuel is squandered, much as waste heat, before it benefits users. The same work can be done with far less combustion-free renewables.
Using energy efficiently is less photogenic than windmills, but even more powerful. Efficiency’s near invisibility also avoids the NIMBYism that abundance advocates rightfully chafe at.
Improving efficiency shouldn’t be confused with imposing scarcity or degrowth.
Consumers seek energy services (think comfort, light, transport), not barrels of oil or tons of coal. “Electro-efficiency” — a powerful term coined by Oxford energy scientist Jan Rosenow — is key here. Heat pumps use 75 percent less energy than furnaces. LED lights use 90 percent less than old-school incandescent bulbs (and are far less dangerous than kerosene lamps, which are still used by those without access to electricity). Electric cars use three- to six-times less energy than gas-powered ones.
Increased quality and affordability make the case even more compelling.
Electrified homes are more snug, and their air free of combustion products. Induction cooking is hands-down safer and better than a blue flame — just ask a high-end chef. Electric transport is faster, quieter and cleaner. EVs conveniently charge at home while drivers sleep, increasingly doubling as clean backup generators during blackouts.
Even heavy electric equipment, like freight trucks, ships and short-haul planes, is coming to market. Cost savings from electric buses are enabling schools to boost teacher salaries while reducing student and staff exposure to unhealthy diesel fumes. Efficient office buildings have happier and more productive workers and higher resale values. Electrified factories get the job done more effectively and cleanly. The list goes on.
Affordability improves, too. Wartime oil prices recently reached twice that of utility-scale solar, and could spike much higher. Charging EVs in most states is like buying gas below $2 per gallon. This economic edge allows economies to grow while reducing consumption. That’s energy abundance in action.
As icing on the cake, efficiency and renewables are intrinsically domestic and secure resources.
In another hallmark of abundance, renewable energy infrastructure is built far more quickly than fossil or nuclear, requires less investment, and entails fewer cost overruns. Energy efficiency deploys faster still. After the Ukraine war disrupted German gas supplies, heat pump installations rapidly tripled to half of all heating systems.
That said, the Abundance movement is rightfully appalled by fossilized bureaucracies. Tangled in red tape, rooftop solar is three times costlier in the U.S., serving only 9 percent of homes, than in Australia, where 40 percent use it.
Bringing centralized clean electricity to users also involves serious inertia, with decade-long lead-times for new transmission and shortages of critical components. Abundance advocates suggest relaxing environmental rules and consolidating decision authority, but that erodes public trust. Instead, upgrading existing lines more quickly doubles capacity and avoids the environmental impacts of greenfield projects. Localized self-contained microgrids deploy even faster, boosting reliability and resilience.
Consumer-side energy efficiency and innovative thermalbatteries reduce and shift use to times when the grid is unburdened. Distributed electric batteries also support the grid. They can store solar power when prices are low and use or sell it at peak value, even after the sun goes down. Hundreds of thousands of such systems are being digitally bundled into aptly named “virtual power plants” that spring into action when centralized generation falls short.
These strategies also give consumers agency — further hallmarks of abundance.
True energy abundance isn’t just a vision. It’s happening. It’s irreversible. It’s elegant. Electric vehicles are saving almost as much oil globally as Iran was sending through the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint before the war.
The secret sauce is extracting more services from raw energy and empowering consumers as agents of change. This requires removing obstacles by providing better information, mobilizing financing, elevating competency of the trades, and reforming policies and bureaucracies that favor fossil fuels while suppressing renewables and energy efficiency.
Achieving energy abundance requires an abundance of will. It’s time to step on the gas.
Evan Mills is an energy systems analyst, former senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a research affiliate at the University of California Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group. He is co-author of climate change assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. National Climate Assessment, and California’s latest Climate Change Assessment, to be published this summer.
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