Freeing Energy

Freeing Energy is a book about clean energy and the coming changes to the $2 trillion-a-year monopoly electricity business. But unlike other books, it is not premised on the urgency of climate change, nor does it call for sweeping government policies. Instead, it looks at the community empowerment and business opportunities created as millions of small-scale solar and battery systems provide a cheaper, faster, and cleaner upgrade to our outdated grid.

The immense benefits of these small systems are often overlooked as clean-energy advocates put all their focus on big, top-down policy changes that promote enormous solar, wind, and nuclear power plants. By themselves, these large, centralized plants effectively lock in the same outdated industry monopoly that created the expensive and dirty power system we struggle with today — and ensure that most of the savings and benefits remain with giant corporations and the lobbying machines they fund.

Freeing Energy breaks from the conventional top-down view and shows how individuals and communities are the fastest and lowest-cost path to a clean-energy future. The rapid growth of these “local energy” systems will upend the world’s most entrenched industry from the outside in. Similar to the way scores of connected personal computers disrupted mainframes, a new “energy internet” is being created by innovators, entrepreneurs, and millions of individuals and their communities.

Solar and batteries are the first sources of energy that break free from the economics of scale — they are technologies, not fuels.

Respected journalist Kara Swisher predicted that the world’s first trillionaire will be a green-tech entrepreneur. Nussey makes the case that the biggest opportunity won’t be the giant systems of the past era, but instead vast numbers of smaller, “consumer-scale” electricity solutions.

For over a century, every aspect of our grid was built on the economic laws of scale: bigger is better and cheaper. Solar and batteries break that rule — they operate affordably at any scale, from giant utility projects down to a handheld LED lantern. And as technologies, their costs are declining at a rate never before seen in the energy industry. Rooftop solar is already cheaper than utility power in most places.

The combination of solar and batteries means that, for the first time in energy history, individuals, small organizations, and local governments can break their dependence on monopoly utilities and affordably generate much of their own electricity. Genuine competition will emerge — attracting waves of investors, innovators, and entrepreneurs who will rewrite the rules of electric power, reminiscent of Silicon Valley in the 1980s.

The book explains, in everyday language, how these technologies work and the new business models they are creating, sharing the stories and insights of dozens of the visionaries bringing them to market. Taken together, these innovators and their inventions will create an internet-like wave of disruptive change — and Freeing Energy explores the most important questions arising from the accelerating adoption of local energy.