It's All Energy
Energy enough to lift every life.
In the mountains of eastern Zimbabwe there is a trading centre with poles, cables, and meters. The grid arrived years ago, on paper. A tailor there owns an industrial sewing machine, and most days it sits idle, because most days the power is off.
He walks home and works a manual machine at a fraction of the pace. One shop is reliable. It has the settlement’s only generator, and with it a monopoly on everything that needs to stay cold.
Nearby, a mother of nine gets her children through their homework by torchlight. Ask her what electricity would change and she does not mention light. She would sell cold drinks and music by the roadside.
NASA assembles a photograph every few years: Earth at night, stitched together from hundreds of satellite passes. They call it the Black Marble.[1] Europe is a lattice of light. India glows edge to edge. The Nile is a bright thread knotted at Cairo.
And south of the Sahara, across the most sunlit landmass on the planet, the lights nearly stop.
Around 700 million people live without electricity.[2] Billions more, like the tailor, have a connection they cannot count on. The darkest inhabited places on the night map sit beneath the brightest daytime sky on Earth.
The Sun delivers to those valleys as faithfully as to any place on the planet. The darkness is a gap between what arrives and what is caught. And the machine that does the catching has begun to obey a law that no fuel, and no wire, ever obeyed.
I. The Grid Illusion
On the official map, the tailor is electrified.
Access, in the statistics, is a wire: a connection exists or it does not. But a connection is not power. The World Bank’s own measurement framework had to invent tiers to say what the binary count hides: a household with a few unreliable hours a day sits in the same column as a household in Seoul.[3]
Southern Africa publishes the gap in its own records. In 2023, the World Bank recorded rotating cuts of twelve to fourteen hours a day across Zimbabwe.[4] In the 2024 drought, the reservoir behind Kariba, the hydroelectric dam that supplies most of the country’s electricity, fell until the station ran at barely a tenth of its nameplate.[5] The utility publishes the schedule of its own absences.
A grid that is off more than it is on is, economically, not a grid. In one way it is worse than none at all: it has already absorbed the capital that could have built something that works. And it stands in the statistics where the problem used to be visible.
Create an Age of Wonders calls energy the key resource, the input that converts all the others. The trading centre is that claim rendered small. The idle machine is cloth not sewn. The missing fridge is food that spoils and medicine that cannot be stocked. The torch is homework rationed by batteries. Nothing else in the village needs to change for those to change. Only the watts.
The map records a connection. The tailor counts the days.
II. The Wire
The grid stopped on a curve.
A high-voltage transmission line costs roughly the same for every kilometre it crosses. Steel, concrete, conductor, land, labour: the four-hundredth kilometre is priced like the first, and mountains multiply the price. With every kilometre, the customers thin out, and the electricity each nominally consumes falls. A village at the end of the longest line nominally consumes far less power than the city at its head.[6]
So the fixed cost of each new connection rises with distance as the revenue from it falls. That is the whole tragedy in one sentence. It has nothing to do with will. No cheaper pole fixes it. No better utility fixes it. It is a property of the distribution curve.
And the curve does not improve, because civil engineering does not compound. A century of building transmission lines has not made the next kilometre cheaper. It is still concrete poured in place, steel raised by crews, a right of way negotiated metre by metre. The twentieth century electrified the world in the only order its curve allowed: densest first, nearest first, richest first. Then it slowed, reaching as far as its curve could carry it.
III. The Delivery
There is one delivery whose cost does not rise with distance.
Above the atmosphere, sunlight arrives at 1,361 watts per square metre. Multiply by the face the Earth turns towards the Sun and the delivery comes to 173,000 terawatts.[7] Civilisation runs on about twenty. The Sun delivers more energy to Earth in one hour than humanity uses in a year.
And the delivery is already complete. Coal moves by rail, gas by pipeline, oil by tanker, electricity by wire, and every one of those carriers charges by the kilometre. Sunlight lands pre-distributed, on every roof, every field, and every mountainside, at the same rate for the last village as for the first city. It is the one supply chain with no last mile, because it never had a first mile.
The quantities are hard to feel, so make them small. Half a tennis court of desert sunlight, caught with today’s panels, runs a European life. The whole of civilisation, every furnace, flight, and datacentre, fits in a square of desert roughly 660 kilometres on a side. One-twentieth of the Sahara.
The supply was solved before we evolved. The delivery has run, without interruption, for more than four billion years.
IV. The Burn
For two hundred years, energy has meant fire.
Coal, oil, and gas are sunlight too. Ancient sunlight, captured by forests and plankton, buried, pressed, and concentrated across geological time. When civilisation learned to burn them, it was spending a savings account three hundred million years deep. The inheritance brought acceleration: steel, rail, fertiliser, flight, medicine, the grid itself.
But fuel has a particular economics. We lived inside it so long we mistook it for the economics of energy itself. A fuel is consumed by its use. Every lit room, every moving truck, every smelted tonne must be paid for again tomorrow, and again the day after, forever. Energy from fuel is a subscription civilisation cannot cancel.
And the price of that subscription never learned to fall. Extraction works through its prizes in order, best first. The first Pennsylvania oil seeped from the ground on its own. A century and a half later, we drill for it through three kilometres of seawater. The shallow wells went first, the easy seams went first, and so a hundred years of extraordinary engineering ran just fast enough to stand still: across the twentieth century, the real cost of energy from coal barely moved.[8]
Extraction spends. It never learns.
V. The Build
A solar panel is a machine, and its job is to stand in the delivery.
The distinction sounds small. It rewrites the economics from the ground up. A fuel is an operating cost: you pay at the point of use, forever. A panel is a capital cost: you pay once, at the factory, and the machine then works for thirty years on fuel that was never priced at all. The recurring cost of a watt collapses towards zero, because the recurring input was always free. The question that governed energy for two centuries, what it costs to keep the fire fed, gives way to a different one: what it costs to build the machine.
A barrel of oil is spent the moment you burn it. A panel is still working after thirty years.
To the new question, humanity has a two-century answer. In 1936, an American engineer named Theodore Wright published a study of aircraft factories.[9] He had noticed a regularity: every time the cumulative number of aircraft ever built doubled, the cost of building the next one fell by a fixed fraction.
The rule now carries his name, and it has since been measured in ships, cars, turbines, and transistors. Wright’s law is the closest thing manufacturing has to a law of gravity. What we make repeatedly, we learn to make cheaply, at a rate set by how often we have made it before.
Fuels are exempt from Wright’s law. You cannot manufacture a coal seam. Wires are exempt too: the transmission tower is civil engineering, built in place, one at a time, learning nothing. But a solar module is a semiconductor device. It is sand, refined, doped, and sliced, made in the same kind of factory that makes chips. The moment energy became a manufactured product, it left the cost curve of civil engineering and joined the cost curve of electronics.
The record since is the cleanest learning curve in the history of infrastructure. Solar modules have fallen in cost by roughly twenty per cent with every doubling of cumulative production, and production has doubled more than twenty times.[10] Since 1976, the price of a module has fallen by more than ninety-nine per cent. Since 2010 alone, the cost of solar electricity has fallen by about ninety per cent, and battery storage by about ninety-three.[11]
In 2020, the International Energy Agency recorded the crossing: solar had become the cheapest electricity in history.[12]
No fuel ever did this, because no fuel could. A fuel is found, and what is found runs out, and what runs out gets dearer. A machine is made, and what is made gets cheaper, and the more of it we make, the faster it falls.
Sunlight has a learning curve.
Notice who paid for the fall. Every early buyer paid more than the machine would soon cost, and the learning their purchases funded flowed to everyone who bought after them. None of them could capture what they gave. Love is the Foundation has a name for that shape: whatever returns more than any one actor can capture is a foundation. The learning curve is one. The cheap watt is an inheritance too, paid forward, doubling by doubling, by buyers who never saw what their buying built.
The Sun still sets. But a battery is a manufactured object too, riding the same law. Night is becoming a manufacturing problem, and manufacturing problems are the kind our species solves on schedule.
For all of history, energy was a flow of fuel: found, lifted, shipped, and burned, again and again. It is becoming a stock of infrastructure, built once and drawn on for decades. The fire needed feeding forever. The machine needs building once.
Energy stopped being something you burn. It became something you build.
VI. Where the Sun Lives
This inversion has run once before, in public view.
Africa never finished the copper telephone network. After a century of trenching, fixed lines had reached about one African in a hundred.[13] Then the mobile tower arrived, riding the same semiconductor curves as the handset in every pocket, and the continent skipped the wire entirely. Hundreds of millions of people got their first telephone without a cable ever reaching their house. The tower’s cost curve beat the trench’s.
Electricity is the same story, one technology later. When the watt is generated where it is used, by a manufactured panel feeding a manufactured battery, the last mile disappears from the ledger. Reaching one more community stops meaning kilometres of steel through the mountains. It starts meaning one more unit off a production line, carried in on a truck. Distance stops being a cost signal.
The same inversion is reaching for the wire itself. Electricity can travel as light: converted to a coherent beam, carried through open sky, converted back at a receiver. The physics has been demonstrated since the 1970s.[19] Lift the relay above the weather and the beam crosses the mountains that defeat the trench. What the tower did to the trench, the beam can do to the pylon.
Now go back to the night map. The geography that was cruel under the old curve is generous under the new one. Africa holds sixty per cent of the world’s best solar resource.[14] The same continent holds around 600 million people with no electricity at all.[14] That is more than four of every five people on Earth who still live without it. Under wire economics, the coincidence was worthless: the sunlight could not be held, and the grid could not afford the distance. Under manufacturing economics, it is the largest unclaimed alignment of supply and need on Earth.
None of this industrialises a continent by itself. Steel mills still need grids, and grids still take decades. What has changed is the entry price of the first reliable watt, and the first reliable watt is the one that changes a life.
For two centuries, power came from where the fuel was and stopped where the arithmetic ran out. Sunlight lives where everyone is. The source and the need share the same ground at last.
VII. Energy Enough
Everything downstream of cheap watts is already queued.
Desalination is waiting: at manufactured-energy prices, the ocean becomes a reservoir. Synthetic fuel is waiting: with cheap enough electricity, carbon from air and hydrogen from water recombine into the hydrocarbons we once dug, and even the fossil age’s own currency ends up manufactured. Intelligence is waiting loudest of all. Computational Abundance measures thought in watts, and Leviathan shows the frontier’s appetite: gigawatt minds drinking desert sun beside a cooling sea. The defining industries of the next century are bids for energy.
And beneath the industries sits the older arithmetic. When energy is scarce, every allocation is a refusal. What one village receives, another goes without, and the refusal can always be defended as prudence. Cheap energy does not make people good. It removes scarcity’s oldest alibi. The mother of nine never needed to be taught what power is for. She had the business planned before the power existed. Demand was never the missing piece.
Neither, in the end, is supply. The last obstacle is older than any technology: scarcity has beneficiaries. The shop with the settlement’s only generator is not waiting for the grid to be fixed. Scale that shop up and it holds office in every country: the utility defending its monopoly, the ministry defending its utility, the incumbent defending the queue. In 1943, in Bengal, the granaries held rice while three million people starved within reach of them. The food existed. The path to it failed, and the failure was administered. Amartya Sen drew the rule from that famine: famines do not happen in functioning democracies with a free press, because scarcity that can be seen and named loses its alibi.[20]
The manufactured watt is harder to administer than the wire ever was. It arrives on a truck, lands on a roof, and answers to its owner. A monopoly can hold a grid for a generation. It cannot embargo the Sun.
Love is the Foundation asks for energy enough to lift every life. For the first time since that sentence could be written, the physics and the economics both answer yes.
Civilisation began on real-time sunlight: food, wood, wind. It grew up on stored sunlight: the coal seam and the oil field, a one-time inheritance spent in two centuries. And the inheritance did its work. It built the factories that now build the machines that catch the original supply. The detour through the ground ends where it began, in sunlight, at scale.
The Sun will rise tomorrow on the powered and the unpowered alike, and deliver, in its first hour, more than civilisation will spend all year. It has kept that schedule for more than four billion years. What changed is on our side of the light. Energy stopped being something you burn. It became something you build.
It’s all energy. Access it.
Technical Appendix
Concept-level arithmetic, stated so it can be checked. The body carries only physical constants, thresholds, and completed events. Every number that can decay lives here, with a date on it.
A. The Delivery
The solar constant at the top of the atmosphere is . The Earth intercepts sunlight over its cross-sectional disc:
(The body follows the conventional 173,000 TW figure of ref [7]. Both round the same solar constant.)
World primary energy demand is roughly 620 EJ per year (2023),[15] about 172,000 TWh per year, an average draw of ~19.6 TW.
Two checks follow directly:
- The ratio. 174,000 TW delivered against ~19.6 TW consumed is a factor of ~8,900, the canon’s “nearly 10,000 times demand”. About 30 per cent of the delivery reflects back to space before it can be captured. The absorbed ~120,000 TW is still ~6,000 times demand.
- The hour. One hour of top-of-atmosphere delivery is ~174,000 TWh. One year of human primary demand is ~172,000 TWh. The hour-for-a-year line in the body is arithmetic. The match to within a few per cent is a coincidence of the current decade: demand grows, the Sun does not.
B. The Land
The body’s desert square assumes a fully electrified civilisation, which needs less energy than the primary figure suggests: most fossil primary energy leaves as waste heat, so useful demand is roughly a third. Call the fully electrified world ~65,000 TWh per year (~7.5 TW average).
Desert solar yield per square metre of land (not module):
| Input | Value |
|---|---|
| Global horizontal irradiance, good desert | ~2,300 kWh/m²/yr |
| Module efficiency | 22% |
| Ground coverage ratio (spacing, access) | 0.35 |
| Performance ratio (losses, temperature, soiling) | 0.85 |
| Land yield | ~150 kWh/m²/yr ≈ 17 W/m² average |
Land required: , a square ~660 km on a side, or ~4.7 per cent of the Sahara’s 9.2 million km². Tracking, tighter packing, or better modules shrink it. Transmission corridors and redundancy grow it. The order of magnitude is robust: a single-digit percentage of one desert.
Per capita: a fully electrified European standard of living averages ~2–2.5 kW per person. At 17 W/m² of desert land, that is 120–150 m². A doubles tennis court is 261 m². “Half a tennis court” is the honest middle of the range.
C. The Wire
The refusal is a correct reading of the arithmetic.
The body’s claim that grid extension fails on a curve, not on a cost, in numbers:
- Cost per kilometre. Published high-voltage transmission projects across Sub-Saharan Africa run roughly US$0.5–1.5 million per kilometre in favourable terrain, rising to US$2.5–3 million or more through mountains.[6] The cost is dominated by steel, concrete, conductor, land access, and construction labour, none of which sits on a learning curve of any consequence. Deployment timelines for multilateral-financed corridors run ten to twenty years from authorisation to energisation.
- Revenue per connection. Rural household electricity consumption in Sub-Saharan Africa is of the order of 50–100 kWh per person per year. Consumption in industrialised economies runs 2,000–6,500 kWh per person per year. The ratio spans roughly 30–77×.[2]
- The curve. Cost per connection is line cost divided by connections served. As the line leaves the load centre, population density falls and per-capita consumption falls with it. The denominator shrinks on both factors at once while the numerator grows linearly with distance. No component price fixes a numerator that rises while its denominator falls. This is why multilateral lenders decline remote extensions at scale. The refusal is not a failure of will.
- The escape. Generation at the point of use replaces the numerator entirely. The marginal cost of one more served community becomes the cost of one more manufactured unit (panel, battery, power electronics), which sits on the learning curves of §D. Distance drops out of the cost function. That is the body’s “distance stops being a cost signal”, stated as algebra.
D. Wright’s Law
Twenty-two doublings of agreement across two energy crises, one financial crisis, and a trade war.
Wright’s law states that unit cost falls as a power law of cumulative production :
For solar modules the measured learning rate is ~20 per cent per doubling (), sustained for five decades.[10]
Consistency check against history: cumulative module production was under 1 MW in 1976 and passed 2 TW in the mid-2020s, roughly
predicting a fall to ~0.7 per cent of the 1976 price. The observed decline is over 99 per cent. That agreement is the strongest evidence that the curve is a property of manufacturing itself rather than of any subsidy regime.
Lithium-ion storage shows a similar learning rate (~18–20 per cent per doubling). Stationary storage is early on its cumulative axis: its doublings arrive faster than solar’s now do.
E. What the Law Does Not Cover
The module is not the system.
- Balance of system. Modules are now roughly a third of utility-scale project cost. Land, labour, inverters, mounting, and grid connection learn more slowly. Some of those costs are extraction-shaped (land) or institution-shaped (permitting). The essay’s claim requires the system curve to keep falling, not just the module curve. So far it has, but more slowly.
- Firming. The body’s mechanism covers night through storage, which shares the law. It does not cover high-latitude winter, where yield collapses for weeks. Deserts do not have this problem. Hamburg does. Transmission from deserts to cities is a century-scale infrastructure problem of exactly the kind Section II describes.
- The productive-use band. A basic solar home system lights a house, charges a phone, and runs a radio. It does not run an industrial sewing machine, a cold room, or an irrigation pump. The loads that generate income are motor loads, surge-hungry and unforgiving. Serving them off-grid requires community-scale storage and grid-forming power electronics, which exist and ride the same manufacturing curves, but at an entry price that is falling rather than fallen. The body’s tailor is answered by the trajectory, not yet by the catalogue price.
- Policy entanglement. The 2010s cost collapse rode Chinese industrial policy. The learning-rate consistency in §D argues the law is real beneath the subsidies, but the two are not fully disentangled. A decade of consolidated pricing could reveal a higher floor than the spot market of the mid-2020s implied.
- The rent moves upstream. Manufactured energy does not abolish the resource-owner’s position. It relocates it. When the watt is a factory product, energy power becomes manufacturing-capacity power. Whoever owns the panel and battery fabs stands where the oil state stood. As of the mid-2020s that position is concentrated in one country, which produces the large majority of the world’s modules and cells. A sun-rich, fab-poor continent trades an extraction dependency for an import dependency. The new dependency is milder in kind: a fuel embargo darkens tonight’s lights, while a panel embargo only slows next year’s growth, because the installed base keeps working. But it is real, and the alignment of supply and need in Section VI is claimable by whoever ships the machines.
F. Dated Register (July 2026)
Decaying numbers. Each will be wrong eventually. That is why they are here.
| Quantity | Value | As of |
|---|---|---|
| Solar module spot price | ~$0.09–0.12/W | 2025 |
| Utility solar LCOE, good sites, unsubsidised | ~$25–60/MWh | 2024–25 |
| Lithium-ion pack price (volume-weighted) | ~$115/kWh (from ~$1,200/kWh in 2010) | 2024[16] |
| Cumulative installed solar PV | ~2.2 TW | end 2025 |
| People without electricity | ~685 million (canon rounds to 700 million) | 2024[2] |
| Africa’s share of installed global solar PV | ~1–2 per cent, against 60 per cent of best resource | 2024[14] |
| Zimbabwe load-shedding (World Bank record) | 12–14 hours/day | 2023[4] |
| Rural Zimbabwean households unconnected | ~84 per cent | 2025[17] |
| Sub-Saharan Africa: mobile connections vs fixed lines | Mobile penetration ~90 connections per 100 people; fixed lines ~1 per 100 | 2024[13] |
| Global solar investment vs upstream oil investment | Solar exceeded oil for the first time in 2023 | 2023[18] |
G. Falsifier Register (July 2026)
The claims this essay stakes, and what would break each one. Where the register can argue against the essay, it does.
- The learning curve breaks. If solar module cost per watt fails to fall across two successive doublings of cumulative production (roughly 2026–2033 at current growth), Wright’s law has stopped applying to energy, and the essay’s mechanism fails at its root.
- The system stalls. If the delivered cost of firmed solar (solar plus storage, dispatchable around the clock, good sites) stops falling for five consecutive years, then fabrication economics is not reaching the socket, and the inversion is true of modules but not of energy. This is the register’s most probable failure mode. The body’s claim is staked on it anyway.
- The wire wins after all. If, by 2035, conventional grid extension electrifies remote mountainous districts somewhere at scale, at a cost per connection its customers’ tariffs can amortise, then Section II’s cost-curve inversion is overstated and the twentieth-century architecture had more room left than this essay claims.
- Storage misses. If battery pack prices hold above ~$80/kWh through 2030, night remains expensive, and “night is becoming a manufacturing problem” was premature by at least a decade.
- Access does not follow price. The hardest one. The number of people without electricity rose in the early 2020s even as modules hit record lows. If that number is not falling decisively by 2030, below roughly 500 million, then the binding constraint is institutional rather than economic, and this essay has named a true mechanism but not the operative one. The moral argument would survive. The timeline would not.
- Extraction reaches up the supply chain. If silver, polysilicon, or land put a durable floor under module cost, with real prices rising across a full doubling of production, then Wright’s law has met an extraction constraint from below, and the clean separation between burn-economics and build-economics blurs.
- The veto organises. The essay’s witnesses predict its opposition. The fridge that breaks a generator monopoly is a concentrated loss to someone organised. The gains are spread across people who do not yet know they will gain. If distributed solar stalls in low-access countries while its price keeps falling, watch the form of the stall: import duties, licensing regimes, connection charges, and tariff protection appearing precisely where electrification need is greatest. A stall by veto rather than by price is the specific way falsifier 5 fails.
- The beam stays a demonstration. Section VI’s reach for the wire rests on settled physics, not yet on deployment. If no laser power link is delivering grid-relevant power commercially by the 2030s, then generation at the point of use still stands, but “what the tower did to the trench, the beam can do to the pylon” was premature, and the loads a rooftop cannot serve keep waiting on the old arithmetic.
References
[1] NASA Earth Observatory. “Earth at Night (Black Marble).” (Composite night-lights imagery of Earth from the Suomi NPP satellite.)
[2] International Energy Agency (2025). “Achieving access for all.” World Energy Outlook 2025. (Roughly 700 million people without electricity access; per-capita consumption gaps between rural Sub-Saharan Africa and industrialised economies.)
[3] ESMAP / World Bank. “Multi-Tier Framework for Measuring Energy Access.” (Access measured in tiers of capacity, duration, and reliability rather than as a binary connection count.)
[4] World Bank (2023). Zimbabwe Economic Update (December 2023). (Installed capacity of ~1,585 MW against peak demand of ~1,900 MW; rotating load-shedding of 12–14 hours per day.)
[5] Reuters and Zambezi River Authority reporting (2024). (During the 2024 drought, generation at Kariba South was curtailed to roughly 125 MW against a 1,050 MW nameplate.)
[6] World Bank / African Development Bank project appraisal documents for SADC transmission corridors. (Published high-voltage transmission costs of ~US$0.5–1.5 million per kilometre in favourable terrain, US$2.5–3 million+ through mountainous terrain; decade-scale deployment timelines.)
[7] MIT News (2011). “Shining brightly.” (173,000 terawatts of solar energy strike Earth continuously, roughly 10,000 times human demand.)
[8] McNerney, J., Farmer, J.D. & Trancik, J.E. (2011). “Historical costs of coal-fired electricity and implications for the future.” Energy Policy 39(6). (The real cost of coal-fired electricity showed no sustained decline across the twentieth century.)
[9] Wright, T.P. (1936). “Factors Affecting the Cost of Airplanes.” Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences 3(4), 122–128. (The original statement of the manufacturing learning curve.)
[10] Our World in Data. “The price of solar modules declined by 99.6% since 1976.” (Solar module learning rate of roughly 20 per cent per doubling of cumulative capacity, sustained since 1976.)
[11] IRENA (2024). “Renewable Power Generation Costs.” See also: BloombergNEF battery price surveys. (Solar electricity costs down ~90% and battery storage down ~93% since 2010; figures also cited in Create an Age of Wonders.)
[12] International Energy Agency (2020). World Energy Outlook 2020. (Solar PV identified as “the cheapest source of electricity in history” for projects with low-cost financing.)
[13] GSMA. The Mobile Economy: Sub-Saharan Africa. See also ITU fixed-telephony statistics. (Fixed-line teledensity in Sub-Saharan Africa of roughly 1 per 100 people against mobile penetration approaching 90 connections per 100.)
[14] International Energy Agency (2022). Africa Energy Outlook 2022. (Africa holds 60 per cent of the world’s best solar resources and around 1 per cent of installed solar PV capacity; roughly 600 million Africans lack electricity access.)
[15] Energy Institute (2024). Statistical Review of World Energy. (World primary energy consumption of roughly 620 EJ in 2023.)
[16] BloombergNEF (2024). “Lithium-Ion Battery Pack Prices Fall to $115 per Kilowatt-Hour.” (Volume-weighted average pack price, down from ~$1,200/kWh in 2010.)
[17] IRENA (2025). Zimbabwe country assessment. (Approximately 84 per cent of rural Zimbabwean households unconnected; ~93 per cent relying on firewood and fossil substitutes for thermal and productive use.)
[18] International Energy Agency (2023). World Energy Investment 2023. (Global investment in solar exceeded investment in upstream oil production for the first time.)
[19] Summerer, L. & Purcell, O. (2009). “Concepts for wireless energy transmission via laser.” ESA Advanced Concepts Team. (Survey of laser power transmission: demonstrations since the 1970s, efficiency chains, atmospheric transmission, and photovoltaic receivers tuned to the laser wavelength.)
[20] Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Knopf. (Famines as a failure of entitlement and political accountability rather than food availability; the claim that no famine has ever occurred in a functioning democracy with a free press.)