It’s right out of the film The Matrix, if you ask me. Using everyday people as the battery pack for the economy is a bit dystopian. But, if you’re going to sabotage the energy of a nation, things are going to get desperate eventually…
Is sabotage too strong a word? I don’t think so. Governments around the world have been rather busy, after all.
First, they cut energy production. They made fracking illegal, closed promising gas fields, imposed impossible environmental constraints, required incredibly expensive compliance procedures, delayed the approvals process and taxed what little was still eked out of the ground.
Then they cut investment in energy with ESG, pronouncements of impossible levels of decarbonisation, declared their intention to pull the rug out from fossil fuels, and heavily subsidised fossil fuel’s competitors.
They made us reliant on foreign sources of gas, electricity, oil and infrastructure as green energy came up short.
They cut supplies by rejecting pipelines that would solve energy supply issues like Keystone and Nord Stream 2.
They sanctioned the infrastructure and payment mechanisms of our foreign suppliers and then complained about the lack of supply.
Then they cut demand for fossil fuel by announcing they’d make petrol cars illegal, or would tax petrol cars while subsidising electric, and subsidised the diesel scandal.
They imposed an energy price cap to further misalign incentives and provided subsidies for people when the cap failed.
They sabotaged nuclear power in 2010 because it wouldn’t come online by 2022…
The shocking thing is that all of this worked. It destroyed our energy system. It’s just that there wasn’t sufficient energy from green sources to replace it.
Oops.
The ironic part is that the one-time government policy has actually worked in the sense that it had its intended effect, they blame the consequences on Vladimir Putin…
That’s because the consequences have been so terrible. They’re plastered all over the news.
Bankruptcies of energy companies, necessitating bailouts of the same, energy poverty, rationing and industrial shutdowns.
But they’re not finished with you yet. Because the next “solution” is coming.
Next, they will turn you into the UK’s battery.
That’s according to my friend James Allen, who will be mortified if he reads my dystopian take of what’s about to happen. But, the truth is, there’s nobody I respect more when it comes to trying to understand and profit from the energy transition. And there’s no shortage of transitioning going on…
While we might disagree about whether it’s good or bad news, James and I agree perfectly on what you should do about it. More on that below.
The latest development that James has made me aware of is unusually interesting from my perspective. Because it would turn the energy industry upside down and put a large chunk of it in your garage.
Instead of having energy produced in great quantities in specific places, and distributed in a stable and steady way through a grid, the future energy system will be about managing ill-placed surpluses and inconvenient deficits, in terms of times and locations, with chargeable storage.
If you ask me, creating two problems and then solving them is less efficient than simply solving the original problem of providing power. But I don’t work for the public sector.
Rather than having decent infrastructure and energy supplies to provide power, and rather than having a large-scale battery site to store it, one possible iteration of providing energy is to turn homes into a provider of power and a storage unit for power.
This has an obvious advantage in that you become your own little power hub. Not necessarily self-sufficient, but part of the way there. It also reduces loads on the power grid and the needs for such a grid. Decentralisation is rather fashionable of late.
So it doesn’t sound so bad, necessarily.
The technological problems are, however, immense. About seven years ago, I interviewed an electricity systems expert who explained to me how the existing grid was built to distribute electricity to homes, not to become a complex network of power creation, distribution and storage where power flows back and forth.
Well, James Allen claims to have found a company that solves a key part of this problem.
Now, I’m still immensely worried. Given the government’s management of the energy system over the past decade, I’m not so optimistic about their plans for the next decade…
I mean, if you believe that governments inherently make a mess of things, then their attempt to turn our homes into an important part of their grid is truly terrifying.
If we get blackouts when governments design, mismanage and throttle our existing energy system, what are we going to get when they control our homes’ electricity directly as part of a grid?
If governments want us to turn down heating and cooling already, what if they actually could do it to us?
In Spain, for example, tens of thousands of people’s financial lives were ruined by trusting government promises on solar energy subsidies. I can smell more of the same coming our way.
But, as miserable as I may be about all this, the real question for Fortune & Freedom is, how do we profit from it?
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not being morbid. That’d be my question regardless of the future we’re facing. A prosperous Brexit Britain or a harangued future of Boris Johnson’s sidekick fiddling with your thermostat in order to fight Vladimir Putin.
So, when it comes to all the problems created by the government’s latest disastrous attempt to fix our energy system, I think investing in companies that provide solutions is a good idea.
And James is not just trying to offset your energy bill with some of his recommendations at Exponential Energy Fortunes. He’s trying to make you rich.
The solution is all about Edison, Tesla and an Australian rock band. High school physics teachers will get the joke. As for the rest of you, keep an eye on your inbox tomorrow to find out how to potentially profit from the latest plan to power Britain.
Nick Hubble
Editor, Fortune & Freedom
