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March 2025
Houston TX
The story of Civilization is the story of energy.
From the first fires that warmed our ancestors to the steam engines that propelled the Industrial Revolution, our ability to harness and store energy has determined the speed of our progress and the trajectory of our future. Energy is the invisible hand that guides us forward. To paraphrase Will Durant civilization is “The union of soil and soul; the resources of the earth transformed by the desire and discipline of men.” Where energy has been scarce, progress has been slight.
At Energy Abundance, we believe the human race is at the cusp of a new trajectory in human history; at the start of a new curve, where our progress will not be restricted by scarcity, but rather propelled by abundance.
For millennia, humanity relied on the slow production of energy from muscle, wood, and wind. Then, around 1750, something extraordinary happened. The discovery of carbon fuels—ancient solar energy trapped in organic matter, compressed over millions of years into coal, oil, and gas—unleashed an exponential leap in power. Consider this: a single gallon of gasoline contains the energy equivalent of dozens of horses working for hours. Imagine the cost of breeding, feeding, and maintaining those horses, and you begin to grasp the revolution that carbon fuels ignited. They brought us from the horse collar to the Saturn rocket. Steam engines gave way to kerosene, gasoline, and electricity, each step steepening the curve of energy use per capita.
The graph of human energy consumption is a flat line for thousands of years, followed by a near-vertical ascent since the 18th century. This is the energy foundation of our modern world.
Hydrocarbons brought us here, out of darkness and toil. And they will remain part of our energy mix for decades to come—just as horses still grace our fields long after they ceased pulling plows. But the periphery is shifting. Solar power, once a niche curiosity, is now poised to redefine civilization. Why? Because it’s the most abundant source of energy we have and it’s becoming too cheap to ignore. Solar energy is not just a resource, it is a true force of nature, relentlessly striking the Earth every day, waiting to be captured. Capturing just 1% of the solar power that hits the earth will give us 68x more net energy than we use now. Unlike fossil fuels, which required eons to form, solar power is immediate, abundant, and increasingly accessible.
When I started my career in energy development, solar panels cost $5 per watt—a prohibitive barrier. By 2010, that price had fallen to $2 per watt; by 2016, solar panels cost less than a dollar. Today, in 2025, the global price for solar panels hovers around 7 cents per watt. Even with tariffs and regulatory hurdles inflating U.S. prices, the trend is unstoppable. Raw materials are plentiful, manufacturing scales effortlessly, and the durability of solar panels—lasting 40 years or more with minimal maintenance—makes them a near-perfect energy solution. The capital expenditure for a large solar project has plummeted from millions to as low as $300,000 per megawatt installed. Compare that to natural gas, where installation costs are now $2,500,000 per megawatt installed with fuel costs ranging from $3 to $5 per kilowatt-hour over a plant’s lifetime. Solar’s operating costs? Essentially zero.
This evolution isn’t the result of a government mandate or a policy whim—it’s physics and economics at work. Vaclav Smil’s writings remind us that energy density and accessibility dictate the arc of civilization. Solar power, when paired with a derivative like green hydrogen, is rewriting that equation. Intermittency—the ancient challenge of cloudy days and dark nights—remains a hurdle.
But we have a solution. Behind-the-meter solar, coupled with modular electrolyzers producing hydrogen from water, and stored in salt caverns - another geological marvel - offers a way to store and utilize the boundless resource of solar power. Batteries, too, are filling the gaps, smoothing the solar curve and reducing reliance on gas-fired backups. Over the next decade, solar will become the cheapest source of power on the planet—by far. By harvesting and storing it at scale, we will be unchained forever.
What does this mean for civilization? Imagine a world where energy is as abundant as air or water—a utility so affordable it fades into the background of daily life. This is the vision that birthed Energy Abundance. Abundance isn’t a concept. It is the reality of having more than enough, a plentifulness that unshackles human potential. Abundance means energy for every good idea, and opportunity for every human being. For nearly 300 years, cheap energy has been the key to progress—from London’s coal-fired transformation to America’s oil-powered ascent. Today, solar offers a chance to rethink our energy system entirely, capturing the sunlight that bathes our planet in quantities so abundant that a single afternoon of sunshine contains enough energy to power human life on planet earth for an entire year.
But true abundance demands more than technology—it demands imagination. The inventors who tamed steam and laid rails didn’t just build machines; they revolutionized how we live. We stand at a similar inflection point today. Large-scale solar projects can add power to where it’s needed—or better yet, we can move the loads to where solar is plentiful. Green hydrogen can fuel industries too stubborn for electrification. Natural gas, with its incredible geology and scale, will remain a vital bridge, especially in places like the U.S., where fracking has unlocked decades of supply. Yet even this resource, a geological gift, will eventually decline. When it does, the shift will be swift—and those with solar will be ready to claim an incredible advantage.
Energy markets operate on 10- to 20-year horizons. Building the infrastructure for abundance—grids, storage, hydrogen plants—takes time. But the payoff is a world where energy ceases to be a constraint and becomes a catalyst. Picture factories humming with near-free power, transportation unshackled from fuel costs, and communities thriving because they have been freed from the burden of energy poverty. This isn’t a utopian dream; it’s a practical future, grounded in the relentless decline of solar costs and made possible by the ingenuity of those who harness and store it.
At Energy Abundance, our mission is to accelerate this transformation. We’re not here to displace hydrocarbons overnight but to complement them with solutions that make energy plentiful for all. We’re pairing solar with hydrogen, deploying behind-the-meter projects to ease grid constraints, and pioneering modular systems that can realistically 10x our energy supply. Our team—engineers, visionaries, and builders—echoes the spirit of those who fired up the first steam engines, who plotted the first flight paths, who were driven to change the world.
We stand now at the edge of something greater than ourselves, a civilization poised to leap beyond what human power alone can provide. Our efforts are multiplied by the power of innovation. Our minds are multiplied by the dawn of artificial intelligence. And the sun rises every morning, offering more energy than we’ve ever dreamed of consuming. Our task is simple, but profound: to capture it, store it, and share it. This is the next great leap—to build a world not constrained by scarcity but set free by abundance. To apply our mightiest efforts now to ensure we have energy forever.
