More is More: We Need More Electricity to Prosper

Electricity is magic and we need more of it.

It’s Thursday night. After working all day, driving home in grinding traffic, and walking up three flights of stairs to my apartment, the last thing I want to do is make myself dinner. Thanks to abundant cheap electricity, billions of people like me can make a nutritious meal in less than ten minutes. Culinary gadgets powered by electricity freed people like me from spending all day collecting food, then starting a fire, preparing the food, cooking it, and then finally eating it. At no other time in history could I have access to such a variety of food whenever I want it in my own home. Access to food is one of the countless life changing improvements electricity has brought to the world. As more people throughout the world seek the lifestyles enjoyed by millions in wealthy countries, we must demand more electricity for everyone.

In prosperous countries, we use electricity to improve every aspect of our lives. Electricity has brought wealth and luxury to billions of people around the world. Yet, there are still billions without reliable access to electricity. The only humane response is to help those countries without electric grids to build the infrastructure to give them the same access to prosperity and wealth enjoyed by you and me.

If more people start using more energy, won’t that increase emissions? Yes and right now the only way to counter more emissions is more energy. That’s why we need more electricity, more energy.

You want to build direct air CO2 capture technology? That will require more energy. You want to recycle more waste? That will require more energy. You want more air conditioning to counter any negative effects of changing climate, that will require more energy. You want to build more electric cars? That will require more energy. The answer is more.

Reducing consumption through improvements in technology can help and has its place. Modern LEDs produce more light for less input power than old incandescent bulbs. But we need more than LEDs. Think of electricity production like painting a wall. To minimize costs, you could buy exactly as much paint as you think you need to paint the wall. Every brush stroke must be planned and every drop of paint accounted for to ensure you paint the whole wall. Or you could plan to buy a small amount of extra paint, and now you have the flexibility to fix any mistakes and the option to have extra paint on hand for future patchwork or other projects. The same goes for electricity. Yes we can conserve some electricity and plan to use the smallest amount, but it’s better in the long run to make more. With more electricity we have the option and ability to find more uses for that excess electricity. The abundance is necessary for growth.

And while it might seem fair for some wealthy nations to reduce waste and excess, it is inhumane to deny those same life improving technologies to other countries that lack them. Yes they will use more fossil fuels but the only way we can counter those emissions is by building new technologies to remove them from the atmosphere. That will take more, not less electricity everywhere.

Go out there and advocate for more energy, more electricity. No you are not killing the planet, it’s the only way out. Yes we will have to remove more emissions and that is why we need abundant reliable energy so we can create and deploy the technology to counter the worst effects of increasing emissions. The beauty of electricity is the more we have the more we can use for technologies that haven’t even been created yet.  With more electricity, millions more around the world can be freed from menial tasks like preparing food and can spend their time learning a new instrument, finding a new career, spending more time with family and other meaningful activities. To create more magic we need to create more electricity.