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What if I told you all the things we care about

can be tied back to one simple question,

can you turn your lights on in the morning?

Electricity is all around us, but we rarely notice it.

It's something I think about every day.

I'm a numbers guy, when I look at the world

I see stats and spread sheets.

My house is filled with electric stuff.

I have my personal fire cooking device,

a spiffy teapot, a dishwasher, toaster, an oven

and the ultimate gadget, the entirety of the world's

information, and it fits in the palm of my hand.

Nearly everything we touch, almost everything we read,

eat or wear, has in one way or another been electrified.

When I look at my refrigerator, I see a device

that uses more electricity per year

than roughly three billion people.

Having electricity doesn't guarantee wealth,

but not having it almost always means poverty.

I'm Robert Bryce, and the way I see it,

electricity explains the world.

P.G and E presents REDDY,

your tireless household service.

♪ I wash and dry your clothes

♪ Play your radios

♪ I can heat your coffee pot

♪ I am always there

♪ With lots of power to spare

♪ 'Cause I'm Reddy Kilowatt

Remember, just plug in, I'm Reddy.

You know, it's funny how we take things

like electricity for granted.

Electricity is different from every other

form of energy, because, for the first time in history,

we're controlling forces we can't see or feel.

Thanks to the electric grid, we're harnessing the motion

of zillions upon zillions of electrons,

and we can unleash those electrons whenever

and wherever we want.

Hey, wait a minute, Jim, I need some facts.

The national academies of engineering ranked the electric grid

as the most important engineering innovation

of the 20th century.

Not just for a wealthy privileged class,

but for everyone.

Promotional literature

from the '30s and the '40s,

it's all aimed at the woman of the household.

"Make your life easier with an electric washer,

with an electric stove."

Electricity has allowed people

and, in particular, women and girls,

to escape the drudgery of past eras.

It has liberated them from the pump, the stove and the washtub.

Electricity has changed how we communicate,

how we travel and where we live.

Our nation was stirring with new ideas,

new wants, new needs.

Modern life and electricity

are synonymous with one another.

Your refrigerator, your lights, your microwave,

those are all part of the grid.

To realize how much our lives

have changed in just two generations.

It's amazing innovation.

To me it's like a co-creation with nature.

Naturally, we got the sunlight,

but rest of the time it is dark,

but you have co-created, so you have light 24 hours.

Life has been on this planet for about

four and a half billion years,

Homo sapiensfor

maybe half a million years,

civilization only began 40,000 years ago,

humanity advanced through fire and the wheel

and levers and building ships, very, very slowly advancing.

Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world.

And there've really been two major revolutions

that have increased the rate of this change.

First was the industrial revolution with mechanics,

only 150 years ago, human civilization

went under radical transformation.

As grand as that was, that pales in comparison

to the rate of change we've seen

since the emergence of electricity.

Archaeological records show that our hominid

ancestors began using fire about one million years ago.

Fire use became common some 400,000 years ago.

By contrast, we have only been putting

electricity to work since the 1880s.

Therefore, if we could compress the 400,000 years

that humans have been using fire into one 24 hour period,

the electric age would span

only the last 30 seconds before midnight.

Now the rate of change is so fast,

it is very difficult, for even those of us

working within it are trying to track it

and trying to plan it, we are constantly surprised

by how much faster change happens

than we can predict ourselves.

If we're going to talk about electricity,

we should probably start at the beginning.

To do that, we went to the birth place of the electric age.

We're here in lower Manhattan.

It was in this region where Thomas Edison began

the electric age with the first electric grid,

and within a mile of where I'm standing

right here in the battery,

was also the cradle of the skyscraper.

For centuries, humans have built tall structures

like the statue of liberty.

But the electric age fundamentally changed the city.

Just plug in, I'm ready.

As the technology came into being,

it behaved like every other technology.

We had some successful entrepreneurs,

they saw a market, and they started out small.

Edison, he wanted a demonstration plant,

where he's going to supply electric light

to anyone who wants it. And he wanted

to be near Wall Street, because he felt he needed

the bankers on his side.

The first commercial power plant in the United States,

the Pearl Street Station in New York City reached out

and served a small number of customers.

Pearl Street does not make a profit.

And Edison saw that if he were going to be successful,

you need some way to distribute this over a large area,

it's the only way to make it economical for the common user.

Most of us have heard names like Edison,

Tesla and Westinghouse, they were key pioneers,

but Frank Sprague changed the way we use juice.

Before Sprague, electricity was used almost exclusively

for lighting, his innovations forced electric companies

to focus on providing power.

Well, Frank Sprague was a graduate of the Naval Academy,

and the Navy had the first electrical school,

and when Sprague comes into the Edison company,

he immediately starts seeing places for improvement.

Edison doesn't see motors as something that's important.

Sprague comes up with a motor, he needed something efficient,

he needed something compact,

he needed something that was economically viable

and he delivered on all three, he gets Edison's approval.

The Pearl Street plant becomes profitable for the first time,

and that changes the future of electric power,

because the early companies are all called

lighting companies, you go ten years to the future,

they're all power and light companies.

The power customer becomes the most important customer,

not the light customer.

In 1894, Frank Sprague completed the first bank

of electric elevators inside the Postal Telegraph building

at 253 Broadway.

Powered by Sprague's compact electric motors,

those elevators were faster, cheaper and cleaner

than ever before.

Frank Sprague, because of the project

that they posed in Telegraph building at 250 Broadway,

really casts the mold for all future skyscrapers,

large urban buildings or, as you go in any large building

anywhere in the world today, you've got banked elevators,

but this is sort of a new idea.

Basically, height is electrical,

from the time of the caves, 30,000 or 40,000 years ago.

Humanity was essentially flat.

Cities, on the one hand, are old, uh,

Rome 2,000 years ago had a million people.

But, essentially, cities remained the same

for hundreds, thousands of years.

And then, electricity came along,

and suddenly cities had become three-dimensional.

The urge to go skyward that you saw in New York

through the whole 20th century, was a manifestation

of the tremendous amount of concentrated energy.

If you look at the greatest buildings

of the Middle Ages, the cathedrals,

they were small by modern standards.

In the history of architecture there were

symbolic structures which used height

in order to signify their importance,

their spirituality.

But New York, a kind of capital of capitalism

found in the skyscraper, a way to exploit the demand

for central locations and cities, and the ability

to use the elevator in order to go above the normal height

that people feel comfortable to walk upstairs,

which is about five or six stories.

The ability to rise in space,

even 100 feet or 200 feet, which doesn't seem like much,

completely transformed the structure,

the geography, the geometry of cities.

It made possible, office buildings

in which you could have hundreds,

thousands of people working for the same firm.

Hundreds of relays had transferred

10,000 electrical impulses to motivate the cars.

Once you have a tall building, if you look down from space,

you can calculate the watts per square meter

that that building consumes.

The spatial density of the consumption

in a city like New York is extremely high.

And here's the deal, vertical cities reduce

the human footprint on the natural world.

Small footprints are good.

Density, whether it involves energy production,

food production or urban living, is green.

The process of human progress is also a process

of environmental progress in that it's comprised

centrally, of energy transitions.

From energy diffused fuels to energy dense ones.

With electricity being the most important ultimate carrier

of energy for modern societies.

Energy is often referred to as the master resource.

Electricity is the master of the master resources.

Without electricity, you are effectively going back

in time to a world that we have been able

to innovate away from.

There was a point when we were relying heavily

on wooden dung and also horse and carriages in cities,

and cities, just after a while, became unlivable.

You have to understand the energy ladder.

There's a broad pattern for how people become prosperous,

but also how we protect the natural environment.

Cities from my point of view,

as a green, as an environmentalist,

are the salvation of nature.

It's only by concentrating a significant portion

of humanity in livable attractive cities,

that we have the chance to spare the rest of nature

for the lions and the tigers and the eagles.

We know that there are about 1.2 billion people

in the world today who have no access to electricity at all.

What's missing in that statistic is that there are a couple

of billion more whose access to electricity is inadequate,

intermittent, the system doesn't work all the time.

The defining inequality in the world today

is the disparity between the electricity rich

and the electricity poor, what does that mean?

Let's go back to my refrigerator.

It uses about 1,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year.

By my count, there are about three billion people today

who, on an individual basis,

use less electricity than my fridge.

India, a country as ancient as it is modern.

Moving as history moves across the threshold of the past.

About a third of all Indians live in poverty

and about 300 million of them, a population

nearly the size of the United States, don't have access

to any electricity at all.

When electricity isn't readily available,

people will do whatever it takes

to get it, and that includes theft.

People are using wires to put a hook in the wires

and draw the electricity, that is un-metered supply.

That is theft.

In central Calcutta, where hooking has been going on,

T and C losses, technical and commercial losses.

We have around 11.5% where the national average

is around 40, 45, 50, it's as high as that.

If I can interrupt you and have you repeat that,

because these numbers kind of stagger the mind.

We... our, our loss figures, T and C losses,

technical and commercial losses total,

it's around 11.5%, whereas the national average

is around 40%, 40.

- That's a staggering number. - That's a staggering loss.

So, if you look above me here to the right,

there's some hooks on the electric line

which is, uh, common,

but the locals don't want to talk about it.

It's one of the conundrums of electricity service,

to make electricity available to everyone,

it has to be cheap, but it can't be cheap when the system

lacks integrity, whether it's customers stealing

from the utility or the utility ripping off customers,

integrity is as important to the grid as engineering.

You can have food and not have a modern life.

There are plenty of people who don't have electricity

and have food, but whose standard of living is really

not up to what we would think

of as a modern standard of living.

This is a biomass stove, this is rice straw,

called paddy, and then they feed it into the bottom of the...

- Yeah. - ...the, the pit here and then,

put the pots on the top so this is

uh, just a traditional method of cooking.

There's a methodic correlation found between those people

who are using the conventional biomass for their cooking

and their health, and what happens is that cooking is done

by the women, and that woman actually inhales all

the pollutant during cooking.

Cooking in that environment for four to five hours

has a serious health impact.

Every year in India, more than one million people

die from indoor air pollution, the use of biomass

in cooking causes horrifying damage to human health.

Especially, to that of women and girls.

University of California, Berkeley, professor Kirk Smith

estimates the health impact of cooking with biomass

is akin to burning 400 cigarettes

an hour in your kitchen.

Women take up the brunt of domestic work

and in the absence of electricity,

that domestic work is more difficult, more time

consuming, less productive,

and it's women and girls who deal with it.

The mothers are spending all day long

just doing the basic household chores.

Women and girls are sort of

the managers of household energy,

the way they get that is labor intensive.

Women spend a lot of time fetching firewood

because there's no energy for actual light.

It's, you know, collecting wood, collecting dung.

- Collecting water. - You don't have a fridge,

so you have to cook every evening.

Kitchens are five degrees warmer

when you are cooking there.

Suppose the temperature outside is 35 degrees,

so your kitchen is 40 degrees.

You need air conditioning.

Oftentimes people will talk about energy poverty

in very abstract terms without thinking about,

"Okay, what do we want this energy to achieve

"once people have it?" When you're able to transform the economy

from just being based off of raw materials,

you put women on the path

to participate in an economy that is richer,

in an economy that is more just for women and girls.

And in India, sun is down by 6:00, 6:30, max.

In the summer, your time becomes short

and it's all dark, you can't see anything.

This is an old style kerosene lamp.

This is the centuries old now version of what we use,

and we use LED lights, incandescents, fluorescents,

but in villages like this one, this is what they use here.

If you are absorbed in the dark,

darkness absorbs you too,

so you do not see the light

and you cannot bring the light to others.

Electricity has allowed us to conquer

our oldest foe, darkness.

For millennia, the cost of having well-lit spaces at night

was so high that only the very rich could afford it.

Those well-lit spaces matter more than you think.

A few months before our visit, an elephant invaded

the tiny village of Chargora.

Turns out well-lit spaces help keep unwanted guests

out of the village, when the lights are out and you live

in rural West Bengal, you risk

getting trampled by roaming elephants.

Like my friend Joyashree, I had a moment

in which I finally understood what darkness means.

In the small agricultural settlement of Majalesh Pukur,

located southeast of Calcutta, I met Rehena Jamadar.

So, Rehena, can you tell me how your life is different

with electricity versus before?

She is saying that there is still much to happen.

- Sure. - But at least some help

is happening, so in the home they have entertainment system

and they have the grinding systems,

so things are happening there.

But also your children can read at, at night?

The, the girl goes to college.

But, but could she go to college

when she couldn't read at night?

- No. - No.

- No. - Straight answer is no.

If you had electricity

when you were small,

could you have gone to university?

Yes, she would have gone.

Darkness had kept this gracious and intelligent

woman from achieving something

that she knew was within her grasp.

Here was a person who, had she been born in one of India's

cities instead of Magalesh Pukur, would've gone to college.

With a college education, she could've been a doctor,

a lawyer or maybe a nurse or engineer.

By the time I met Rehena, I knew plenty of facts

and statistics, the average resident of India

uses about 800 kilowatt hours of electricity per year,

which is about a quarter of the global average.

I understood the myriad correlations between electricity,

availability and health and wealth.

But that 15 minute conversation with Rehena and Joyashree

made me see the light.

...in Accra,

they used to happen quite often.

We grew up in a place in the mountains and it was

normal to us that we're going to have

some yellow electricity and some white electricity.

And I remember I was in the first grade,

I was six, and there was going to be

a pop quiz the next morning.

In our house, we used to have the yellow lights on,

and this indicates that this electricity

is being supplied by the EDL.

So I go home and I'm studying, I'm really excited

but also very nervous, and in the middle

of my study session, the power goes off.

And I began crying inconsolably, because there's no way

I'm going to go finish memorizing this times table

when there's no power.

And then every six hours the lights will go off

and then we will turn on the UPS, so we used to communicate

with my, with my father, tell him that, "I need to study now

for the school, shall I study when the yellow lights are on

or when the white lights are on?"

So the white lights, we use them using the UPS,

the fluorescent lamp.

And, uh, my mother got

a kerosene lantern, lit it up for me

and sat by me while I studied my times table,

and I think that was my first recollection of

just how important that basic infrastructure is.

So, to us this was normal, it was like, we lived with it,

that we're going to be having two different types

of power and sometimes we're not going to be having power,

this was normal to us, we didn't know

that, actually, people get 100% electricity.

You know, we have this classic image of someone in a poor village

who finally has light, getting an education.

Let's say there's a, a solar panel on the roof,

it's brought light, and in the evening now,

they can s... they can be safe and they can study.

And then the kid turns 16 and they've got an education.

What are they going to do?

Is our expectation that they...

The extent of their ambition

is to remain a subsistence farmer with an education?

I don't think so, they're going to want a job.

They're going to want to do something clever, become a better farmer,

maybe an agronomic scientist.

When we top out our energy expectations

for the developing world, all we're really saying is,

"We expect that you can have enough energy

to stay poor in a little more comfort...

maybe, and maybe to be educated enough

"to know that you are poor."

Incrementalism is good, but is dangerous

when we view it as the only paradigm, what makes you think

that an African's need for power is inferior

to an American's need for power?

I think that rest of the world

who is enjoying modernity

and we are not allowing others to be modern

is a crime, is a major crime.

Mutual respect for the humanity of people who live

in other continents, that should guide

global energy policy discussions.

Today, billions of people are living

in conditions like those in rural

India and sub-Saharan Africa.

Collectively, those billions make up the low watt world.

Those with intermittent or insufficient

access to electricity.

In 1989, less than 20% of the country had access

to electricity, it was a military government

that had come in power through a coup d'etat,

and the government decided that by the year 2020,

everyone in this country will have power.

Ghana transitioned into democratic rule in '92

and every government that has come since then

has stayed on the promise of universal electricity access.

So, now in 2017, access is at 83% in Ghana.

To date, whenever Ghana is about to have elections,

you see a lot of infrastructure projects going up and down

all over the country. So, in this case, democracy has really

been the tool that has propelled the electrification project.

Keeping the electricity flowing day after day,

year after year, requires constant infusions of cash

which is then used to buy fuel, repair wires

and replace poles.

Electricity systems have to pay for themselves.

If there's any kind of leakage, like theft

or corruption, the system fails.

In the year 2050, most of the world's population

will live in Africa or will be African.

How are we going to have a population

of all these bright young minds, if you're not plugged in?

What is going to be their function?

It's a huge demographic crisis staring us in the face.

I think that one of the first things to do now,

to ensure that by 2050, the young Africans on the continent

and around the world, are people who are productive,

self-reliant, empowered, people who will be free

from poverty, we have to plug them in now, it begins now.

While scores of low watt countries around

the globe struggle to bring their people out of the dark

and into the light, the U.S. enjoys

an almost embarrassment of riches.

Electricity abounds, so much so that the high watt world

keeps stumbling into new ways

of using massive amounts of juice.

Take me back to sea level.

Electricity does, in fact, explain the world.

That's why I'm here in Boulder, Colorado.

Arguably, the world capital of legal weed cultivation

and retailing, within about five miles of where I'm standing

here in Chautauqua Park, there are about a dozen

and a half legal weed dispensaries selling brands

like Purple Haze, but to produce Purple Haze

and other brands of cannabis sativa, they are using

lots of electricity, in fact, marijuana cultivation

is the world's single most electricity

intensive agricultural business.

All over this town, entrepreneurs are busy

turning watts into weed.

We're, we're looking for a dispensary. It's not that hard to find them,

but there are about 20 of them in the city

or at least a dozen and a half of them, but, you know,

we're bagging dispensaries.

So to speak, uh, all these buildings, though, have big signs

on them, but the grow operations don't have any signs

and they usually only have the street number.

You just look at the exterior of the building, no signs.

And look at the long electrical conduit lines

that are on the outside, look at the size

of the three phase conduit

going into that gray box, and then how many meters

they've got right behind it.

That's all new conduit on the outside of the building.

Why else would you need that much electricity

in such a nondescript warehouse.

Look at this, this is all brand new.

This is new electrical service, 500 kilovolt amps.

That's a brand new transformer put in just

for a marijuana grow operation in this, in this warehouse.

Marijuana growers don't want people to know they're growing

marijuana, but you know what to look for, you can find them.

It's certainly keeping the energy company busy.

Operating transformers, all sorts of equipment,

upgrades like that that are needed

for high energy use facilities.

Electricity used by the cannabis industry

has been increasing sharply over the past several years.

I believe the average has been about 34% per year.

The electricity intensity of marijuana cultivation

is 23 times that of a hospital

and about 130 times that of an average U.S. residence.

That's a lot of juice.

Want to know the real buzz kill?

About half of Colorado's electricity comes from

coal fired power plants. As a result, Boulder dispensaries

are required by city ordinance, to prove

they're growing polar bear friendly ganja.

Colorado's had a number of different mandates

and opportunities for using renewable technologies.

So, for example, I live in Boulder,

I get my, my electricity

from Xcel Energy, I can pay a little bit more

to have that energy come from wind power.

It's important for a lot of people because of politics

and wealth to be able to feel like you're doing something

environmental while you're living like everyone else does.

It has not led to an appreciable

decarbonization of the Colorado economy.

A lot of the offsetting provisions,

whether it's for the cannabis industry,

for individual homeowners, it's simply accounting.

The number that really matters is,

where does the energy come from. And so long as Colorado

gets 85% of its energy from fossil fuels,

85% of the economic activity in Colorado is from fossil fuels,

no matter which we assign to the 15%

and which we assign to the 85%.

We're going to a black market grower in Denver.

He has decided that it's far easier to operate

in the black market and more profitable

to do it in the black market than in the regulated market.

Okay.

My name is Daniel, I'm currently driving

an Uber and I also grow marijuana.

I was arrested for growing marijuana in 2003

and I received a felony conviction for that.

As a result of that, I'm not allowed to participate

in the legitimate marijuana industry.

If you were going to tell me what are

the three key things you need to know

to set up a clandestine operation.

You have to have buyers for your product,

you need to have good knowledge of botany

and you need to have a good knowledge

of setting up an electrical system

that will support an operation like that.

What about stealing electricity, what about that?

That's something I would never do

because if you are caught doing that,

you're probably going to be in more trouble

for stealing the electricity than you are going to be

in trouble for growing the weed.

They have ways of detecting leakage in electricity,

and they do that by scanning each part of the grid,

periodically. That could bring down the operation in itself.

In 2013, indoor pot farms in Denver

were consuming about 100 gigawatt hours of electricity.

By 2016, that figure had almost

tripled to about 275 gigawatt hours.

To put that in perspective, businesses in Denver

are using nearly as much electricity just to grow weed

as what's consumed by the entire country of Burundi.

Colorado, which had a 2020 target for renewable energy

and emissions reduction, now has a 2025 target,

so we've moved our targets off into the future

because we're not hitting them.

Right now we're working towards

a long-term goal, a very significant goal

of 80% reduction in emissions by 2050.

Obviously, if the emissions from this industry continue

to increase exponentially, that could have a major impact,

but right now we don't think that it is going to

cause us to be derailed from our goal.

To be sure, it's easy to snicker at the amount

of electricity needed to grow marijuana,

but the fact that people in rich countries are using electricity

to grow cannabis while people in poor ones are stealing it

solely to survive, provides a stark reminder of the vast

disparity between the people who live high watt lives

and those who live mostly in the dark.

- Keep running. - Keep, keep going...

- So this is, this is normal for... - Now, now you have the problem

that we have here in Puerto Rico.

So, please, keep going if you don't mind

because we'll just ignore the lights

- for now and just keep going. - Yeah,

let's put the batteries on the LEDs.

We just had a black out,

this could be for an hour or two hours,

- could be the rest of the day. - Yeah,

yeah, probably two hours.

- Two hours. - Yeah.

So, right now we're stuck in traffic,

and in the middle of a black out in Puerto Rico.

And, obviously, the lights aren't working

because the electricity is out.

So, you have all these cars trying to merge

through the intersection and it's kind of a, a little

game of chicken about who's going to stop

and who's going to play, and right now I'm winning.

And here's the good part, we're heading

right over there to see the power plant

that is owned by PREPA, that is not working

because no one knows exactly why.

- We're going in this way. - Yeah,

private property, that's...

Hi, we're doing a documentary on the corruption.

Well...

...yeah, you might have heard.

- This is Robert Bryce, people like him a lot. - Let's not push it.

I'm standing on the Bay of San Juan.

Puerto Rico now has the distinction of having

the longest blackout in American history.

And today, April 18th, 2018, that blackout record

is getting even longer, in fact, the entire island

of Puerto Rico today, is in blackout.

And this power plant behind me, the Palo Seco Power Station,

rated at 600 megawatts, appears to be producing

no electricity at all.

There's still 300,000 people that don't have power.

We are U.S. citizens and we do deserve to have

the same level of support that any U.S. citizen

has anywhere in the world.

There is no production without electricity.

I mean, there is no economic movement

without access to power.

My name is Miguel Colón, I'm the vice president

of Model Offset Printing, we do mostly printing

for our manufacturing industry in Puerto Rico.

The business has been in the family since the last 30 years.

Right after the hurricane, it was like a war zone.

Passage through the roads was difficult

because there was a lot of trees on the roads.

A lot of power posts were on the floor.

It was a total devastation, inside the business

there was a lot of water, a lot of equipment damaged

by the water, our solar infrastructure was gone.

It was messy. We were without electrical power

for about three months, we are still operating

without AC, in... on the whole plant. And before the hurricane

we were paying about 30,000 dollars per month on electricity.

I pay more for the electricity than I do for paper.

I understand time, I understand we're an island,

I understand it takes time to get things here, but does it take

seven months, is there really a plan?

Some people still don't have water.

I cannot envision or imagine living without access to power,

it's like water, it's a necessity.

While visiting with Iris Ortiz and her family,

she shared a story about how one of her daughters

wanted to have her hair done for school pictures.

She was distraught, how could she use

a hair dryer without electricity?

How would she iron her clothes without electricity?

The luxuries we so often take for granted on the mainland

had disappeared, their world had been turned upside down.

They were now living low watt lives

and they're American citizens.

The grid looked like it was being held up

by clothes pins.

Irma comes in, who was our sparring partner,

and, obviously, the grid suffered damage there,

and some of the resources were used,

and two weeks later we get the knock-out punch.

So, the clothes pins were all over the island

and everything just fell apart.

There was a lot of competition for resources.

FEMA came very quickly, but it took control of all

the resources, there was no gas for the whole population.

The gas was for the military and for FEMA.

Drinking water supply was reserved

for the military and for FEMA.

How long do you think New Yorkers

would accept being without power?

A day, a week, a month before you would have massive

demonstrations, there's people here that today

still don't have power.

Seven months after the hurricane.

It is unacceptable.

Two months after our trip to Puerto Rico,

Iris Ortiz sent me an email, "One minute ago

we got electricity to our neighborhood."

She wrote in Spanish:

"Thank you for your prayers, God bless you very much."

I replied touched that she'd shared her family story

with someone who was a stranger only two months prior.

I wrote, "You're going back to the modern world."

We're here in Iceland, at Gullfoss Falls.

As you can see, this country has enormous

hydro power potential.

About 75% of the electricity here comes from hydro.

The other 25% comes from geothermal.

This abundant electricity is attracting industries

from all over the world and, in particular,

data centers and cryptocurrency miners.

You know, the Pirate Party said,

"Just come in, they'll let you in."

You'll find the security situation is not anything

- "like what's on Capitol Hill." - So, this is your left.

From the...

It sure looks way too small

to be the Parliament House.

There are only 330,000 people in this...

No, I got it, but even still.

More than a third of Iceland's citizens live in Reykjavik,

the country's spotless capital city.

It's politically stable and has been for centuries.

In fact, Iceland's Parliament, the Althing,

was founded in 930, making it one

of the world's oldest parliaments.

Among the newest political parties in Iceland

is the Pirate Party, which views itself as something

of a Robin Hood of politics.

The Pirate Party was created to make sure that

Iceland would become a safe haven for freedom of information,

expression and, uh, privacy.

I want transparency.

Taking the power from the powerful

and giving it to the powerless.

I created the Pirate Party to make sure that these laws

would be written and implemented,

and Iceland could resurrect as a Switzerland of bits.

A digital safe haven where you could host,

among other things, all the forbidden

knowledge in our world.

This vision is responsible for a lot

of the data centers in Iceland.

Um.

Electricity and money are becoming the same thing.

The transfer of money is the transfer of information.

Money is constantly becoming more and more electrified.

When you have cheap electricity available,

you can turn it into money.

That's why we need stable electricity,

stable power supply, reliable partners

like we have here in Iceland.

We are seeing cryptocurrency

disrupt the financial industry,

or at least gaining a lot of traction.

Banks have, for many years, been trading currency

only electronically, when you store your money in the bank,

they don't have a vault with cash in it, they just have

a digital register themselves.

One of the reasons I became fascinated with cryptocurrency

was, I heard a story about migrant workers could move money

back to their families without Western Union chipping in

a big chunk of that.

I also became fascinated

by it because I don't want somebody

to have access to every transaction I make.

I don't care if I make normal transactions,

I just don't want anybody to know exactly everything I do.

We have to develop ways to regain our privacy,

and cryptocurrency is certainly one way to do that.

Iceland has some of the strictest privacy laws

in the world, and when you consider their views on privacy

along with a cool climate and cheap, abundant electricity,

it makes perfect sense that Iceland has become a hotbed

of cryptocurrency production.

This is an industry that relies on high tensity

with their infrastructure that is consuming a lot of energy.

Here in Iceland we have free air cooling.

We can rely on the cool air outside to cool down

the servers in our data centers.

Electricity intensity will definitely increase

because it takes more hash power to mine one bitcoin.

The more bitcoins are mined, more difficult

it gets to mine one bitcoin.

There are studies and predictions that say that

the bitcoin network is going to consume

as much power as Denmark in 2020.

The deployed power behind that is massive.

So, you've been your whole career with HS Orka then?

Not the whole career, no.

I've been here for around... or with HS Orka

- for almost ten years. - I see.

In terms of electricity, then,

for all the geothermal

in Iceland, about how much is produced here?

We are producing, in total, 175 megabytes.

Iceland has gone from undeveloped to developed.

I've also been to Africa, to Ethiopia

where, where they have very unstable electricity

and you could see it.

Where we were 50 years ago.

So it's really only 50 years

that Iceland's gone from completely dependent

- on cod and diesel fuel... - Yeah.

...to one now where your electricity's all renewable.

- Yeah. - And you're attracting

industry from all over the world.

Yeah.

It's a simple question,

what does electricity mean?

Technology.

Technology?

Innovation

and higher standards for living people.

The evolution of Iceland's economy was due,

in large part, to its ability to tap into its natural

resources, like, geothermal and hydroelectric power.

Just 50 years ago, the country's main export was cod.

Today, Iceland has the world's highest per capita

electricity consumption, over 53,000 kilowatt hours

per year. And its main exports

are things made with electricity.

For us to survive, much less thrive as humanity,

we have got to dramatically step up the energy availability

and the cleanliness of that energy.

Wars are fought over profound disparities

in access to natural resources and access to information,

and almost all of that goes back to the availability

of cheap and plentiful electricity.

Where history began,

history today has made anew.

In lands at once timeless and changing,

fabled and mysterious, yet as sharply real as a headline,

the lands of the Middle East.

It's going to take 10 to 15 minutes to be in the hotel.

- Thank you. - Oh, very welcome.

Where are you coming from?

- Texas. - Texas, America.

I'm American, guys, I'm from Michigan.

- No kidding? - I swear to God.

I've wanted to come here my whole life.

I've heard about Beirut my whole life.

Enjoy then, enjoy, you going to be enjoyed.

For 1975, the state of electric utility in Lebanon

was so good that they were selling electricity to Syria.

We didn't have any shortage, we didn't have

any problem with the quality.

And during the war, things started deteriorating.

Stuck in the world's toughest neighborhood,

Lebanon was once the crown jewel of the region.

Its capital, Beirut, was called

the Paris of the Middle East.

But a 15 year civil war coupled with constant skirmishes

with its neighbors, has left ordinary

Lebanese living low watt lives.

They were bombing roads, they were bombing, eh, power plants,

so they were trying to break the infrastructure

of the country, break the Lebanese economy

to try, to somehow, make Lebanese give up on their government.

Destroying electric infrastructure is a staple

of modern warfare, the U.S. military bombed power plants

in North Korea, in North Vietnam and in Iraq.

Knocking out electricity supplies is considered

a strategic move, like destroying bridges or roads.

The Israelis were in conflict with Hezbollah

and they actually wanted to penalize the Lebanese people

because Hezbollah was and has been, and I think will continue

to be, part of the Lebanese government.

They are represented in the Parliament, they are represented

in the Cabinet of Ministers.

You have certain factions in this nation

that do not care about the progression of the life

of the ordinary Lebanese citizen.

We lost a lot of, uh, infrastructure

and we haven't recovered yet,

why haven't we recovered? I think because

we had lack of political will.

The one reason in Lebanon that we do not have electricity

is corruption, plain and simple.

In Lebanon, you need to schedule life

depending on electricity, you schedule your shower,

you schedule when your washing machine, your washing time,

you schedule everything depending

on electricity in our daily lives.

Do you pay two electric bills?

As all Lebanese people,

we pay two power electric bills,

we pay one power electric bill to EDL

and you pay like the double of that

to the private generators in general.

Let's be frank of this, so the average Lebanese,

they need electricity, they need power, they don't need

to live in the dark, so they don't care

where this comes from,

we can't live without electricity for 12 hours a day,

so we have to rely on private generators or diesel generators,

and we can't all afford it. So, the idea of having

what we call a neighborhood generator evolved.

Where every powerful person in the neighborhood,

will buy a private generator, produce electricity

and sell electricity to the neighborhood.

That's we call the generator mafia.

Do you know this term, the generator mafia?

100%.

- Um, 100%, yeah. - Everybody knows

- about generator mafia? - Oh, yes, it's the mafia.

They don't want to, to fix the electrical...

They don't want the grid to work.

Exactly.

Because, you know, if they do the work

and they give it to us, 24 hours,

those mafias going to close.

- Yeah. - They not going to make money.

And this business is

a very, it's a very big business, and it's hundreds

and hundreds of billions of dollars.

I don't think they would be happy if this business stops.

Look, I am a positive person, I don't like to call

these mafias, I, I would say

these are companies or business men

that were created by necessity.

If the national utility was supplying electricity,

reliably, 24 hours, this wouldn't have existed.

I live, my parents live in a village, and I know,

without those generators, life would have been

much, much more difficult.

They need the money, they taking the money from the people

just to put in his... their, their pocket, government.

First, the government.

I'm talking about the government in Lebanon.

The mafia, who's the government, the mafia, who's the government.

EDL produces around 20 to 25 cents per kilowatt hour,

and they are selling it around 10 to 11 cents,

so the more they generate, the more they lose.

At the time, the private generators, they generate

at around 20 cents and they sell it around 27 cents.

So, the more they generate, the more they make profit.

So, if you look at this very simple equation,

you would immediately conclude that EDL would lose money

by producing electricity, whereas the private generators

would, would make money by producing electricity so.

Throughout our travels in Lebanon,

I asked people what they thought of the generator mafia.

The best answer, by far, came from an advisor

to the Energy Minister.

He paused for a moment and then replied,

dead serious, "Well, they're not all mafia."

We're here in Jounieh, Lebanon, just north of Beirut.

My right over here is the old power plant.

You can see the big fuel tanks and the old smoke stacks.

It's not operating right now, but if you look over here,

that's one of the Turkish power ships.

Why are they leasing these power plants from the Turks?

Because the power grid here in Lebanon is so fragile,

they can't meet demand with the power generation

stations that they have, so they're leasing them

from the Turks. And what happens if they don't pay the bill?

The Turks just take the power ship and sail back to Turkey.

My name is Mustafa Baalbaki.

I'm 30 years old, software engineer,

living in Beirut, Lebanon.

So, the cool feature of my app, Beirut Electricity,

is that it provides you push notifications

ten minutes ahead of time when the electricity will be off,

so that you can maybe grab that elevator

or just save your work before shutting down your computer.

I'm not fixing the electricity issue here in Lebanon.

I'm just trying to help people to cope with it.

I returned to Lebanon in 2011 after a long career in energy,

and I brought with me a coffee machine that I had purchased

in Canada, and I love that machine because I'm used to it.

It, it, it's fantastic, it grinds you fresh beans

at exactly at the time where it's brewing the coffee.

And you can program it to wake you up at seven o'clock

in the morning. And when I plugged it in Lebanon,

it woke me up at ten, and I realized they had

the power cut off three hours the same night.

My wife that actually I met in Canada,

she said, "Look, either you solve this problem, or I'm going back."

So, had to fix it.

Still going backwards.

Hey, E24, rock on.

The reason we are in Lebanon is because it's a great lab.

The first problem is environment.

We are breathing our own fumes.

The second issue is, I know households who are paying

800 dollars for their mortgage

and another 700 or 800 dollars for electricity.

It is overall a catastrophe on both economical

and environmental aspect.

The tendency today is for consumers to buy more iPhones,

more laptops, more ACs, more equipment in general.

All of those require electricity.

The infrastructure that every country on the planet has

is basically fixed, and it takes time.

And the larger the country, the more time it takes

to upgrade that infrastructure.

Micro-grids are the future.

In spite of Lebanon's many challenges,

corruption, war and a reliance on diesel generators

that are both expensive and dirty, along came E24.

Theirs was a two-fold solution, one part solar,

Lebanon has plenty of sunshine, and the other part, storage.

At a resort called, Qirzai, E24 is using lead acid batteries

designed in Bulgaria and manufactured in India

to store electricity produced by panels made in China.

It's a true micro-grid, unplugged from EDL

and beyond the reach of the generator mafia.

There's a lot of different sources of clean energy.

We need to be pursuing all of them.

There is an idea that, wouldn't it be great

if we could get the electricity for free?

Free in terms of its cost,

free in terms of its environmental impacts.

The idea of renewable energy

meets that need for some people,

because there's sunshine, there's wind.

We don't have to dirty the world to get that.

The idea that we can power the world on 100%

renewables, particularly wind and solar, is powerful

because it's pure and simple, it's sort of wholesome,

like your grandma's energy. People see, you know,

solar panels on a roof and that feels good to them.

We have to focus on cost, reliability

and environmental attributes.

We can't develop a system for decarbonization

that doesn't accomplish those goals.

Why do we care about climate change? It's not

because we care about the number,

the atmospheric CO2, it's because we're trying to protect

ourselves and protect the world we have around us

from the impact of climate change.

So why in the name of doing that would you flood a river forest?

Why would you cover the landscape with wind turbines?

Why would you take sensitive desert area for solar

if those were the values that we were seeking to protect

by the low carbon system, why would we go and interfere

with those values in the name of bringing down carbon?

One of the defining characteristics of debate

over energy and climate is,

it's vitriolic, it's nasty,

um, people have very strong views,

they also have very strong beliefs

that their views are the right ones.

We want to have broad access to a wide variety of

energy sources that meet the needs of modern life

for as much of the world's population as we can achieve,

cheaply, reliably and with attention paid

to the environmental impacts of producing their power.

That's the goal, should renewables be a part of that

solution, I think the answer is yes.

And then people start talking about things like,

"Okay, well, maybe instead of expanding the grid,

maybe we should give people solar lamps."

No, it doesn't work that way.

People are not going to eat solar lamps.

People are not going to be transformed by solar lamps.

I think the idea that we can move the entire economy

to a set of renewable energy resources,

it's really framing the objective in the wrong way

because it makes renewables the objective.

It turns the means into the end itself.

By creating this brand, renewable, which has put in the same basket,

a massive hydroelectric dam, a wind turbine

and a solar PV panel. They're remarkably different ways

of getting energy, each with respective advantages

and disadvantages. It's the opposite of what we actually

want in the system we're trying to provide.

We're not trying to create something chaotic.

We're trying to create something stable, predictable,

that can give people what they want, when they want it

at a low cost every hour of the year.

Preferably, you wouldn't do that with something that was driven by the weather.

If you care about the natural environment,

you're not going to create a power plant

that requires

150 times more land,

per unit of energy, than a nuclear plant.

Nuclear power was 50, 60 years ago, thought of as

our energy future, it was going to provide energy that was too

cheap to meter, and that everyone would have free energy.

Nuclear power became perceived as risky,

and high profile events like Chernobyl and Fukushima have contributed

to that public perception.

May I say something?

Go ahead.

The energy in the atom is the most

destructive force the world has ever seen.

It can also be one of the greatest blessings.

God has ever given us, which is it to be?

When people consider environmental protection,

nuclear energy is likely one of the last things

to come to mind, it seems divorced from nature.

I understand that sentiment.

The first article I ever published

was an anti-nuclear piece.

I was in high school, and like many people from that era,

I associated anything having to do with nuclear

with the war effort and the military.

Fear of nuclear, and especially, from environmental

organizations is really a long standing tradition.

Most of these environmental organizations really came out

of anti-war organizations, they benefited a lot

from conflating nuclear power with nuclear weapons.

You know, early nuclear designs did come out of the military,

so I think there's that association for people

who don't like that big, military industrial complex.

- So, where we going, Robert? - We're at the Indian Point Energy Center

in the village of Buchanan, New York.

This is the largest nuclear plant in the state of New York.

Today I'm at the Indian Point Energy Center,

located about 40 miles north of New York City.

This plant has been operating since 1962

and today it produces about 25% of all the electricity

consumed in the city of New York.

These two reactors behind me produce more than 2,000

megawatts of electricity.

The amazing thing about this plant is that is sits on

about one square kilometer of land.

As uranium atoms in the nuclear reactor

disintegrate, tremendous amounts of heat are generated.

When the heat is transferred to a liquid

and the liquid has circulated from

the reactor to a boiler room,

it can produce steam.

Steam drives a generator to produce electricity.

Getting into Indian Point wasn't easy.

We went through multiple security checkpoints

and multiple ID checks, but once inside I was,

as the Brits like to say, gobsmacked.

I've seen oil fields, coal mines, gas plants,

hydro plants, refineries and all kinds of factories,

but Indian Point was an engineering marvel.

A relic from another era.

Indian Point covers one square kilometer.

Replacing its output with wind energy would require

covering more than 13 hundred square kilometers

with wind turbines. That's one and half

times the size of New York City.

This pad will hold about 75 years' worth

of nuclear fuel.

- So, the spent fuel. - Of spent fuel.

So, in eight decades of reactor years,

- right? - Right.

You can fit all of the waste

from all of that in this area

which, I don't know, a couple tennis courts, maybe?

The likelihood of somebody coming along

and carrying one of these off is...

It's impossible, each cast weighs

about 230,000 pounds when loaded.

You can see our equipment that moves it, it moves

at about one mile an hour, it's, you know, a tank, basically.

So, the original plan was for the federal government

to come in and take that fuel off the hands of the utilities,

and when the utilities realized that that... that wasn't

going to happen, they basically invented dry cast storage,

so they could safely store it on site.

Just really a political issue about

what to do with it long-term.

Indian Point is suffering a fate similar

to that of many nuclear facilities

throughout the U.S., premature closure.

Since 2013, U.S. utilities have closed or announced

the closure of 15 nuclear power plants.

In many cases, those reactors including the ones

at Indian Point, could've obtained license extensions

that would've allowed them to continue operating

for decades into the future.

So, we've been known for many years as the smallest

municipality with nuclear power plants in it.

And there's generations of people

who have worked at that plant,

continue to work at that plant.

Entergy is the largest employer here,

they employ over 1,000 people.

Our budget in the village Buchanan is approximately

six million dollars, we're looking at losing half

of our budget when Entergy closes.

When you talk about replacing three million dollars

and replacing 1,000 jobs,

that's, that's a pretty s... steep hill to climb.

We're seeing a lot of these nuclear power plants close

prematurely in the U.S. and almost everywhere,

when they closed, they're being replaced by natural gas.

That's the first choice for utilities.

For Indian Point, they are planning to replace

the generation from Indian Point with natural gas,

which is a huge loss for the state of New York,

because New York has a very ambitious climate target

to reduce emissions, and Indian Point is about 25%

of the electricity for New York City.

So, taking that offline and replacing it with natural gas,

that's a big step backwards if you're concerned

about climate and trying to reduce emissions.

Indian Point is a built system, there are a lot of assets

that have already been invested in Indian Point.

It's zero carbon emitting, so if we want to reduce

carbon emissions in New York City, then we really don't want

to be removing a source of power

when it's not emitting carbon.

I commend reforming the energy vision as a vision,

as an ambitious plan, Indian Point

contributes to that vision.

To me, it just doesn't seem to really make good

economic or environmental sense.

It's a premature political decision.

Reducing carbon emissions, fighting climate change

is a big challenge, and you don't want to take anything off

the table, I think we're going to need a lot

more wind and solar, for sure, but we're also going to need

a lot more nuclear and a lot more natural gas to replace coal.

You're either a climate change denier

or a believer, it's drill baby drill

or save the spotted owl.

Like most things in life, especially with something

as complex as electricity, it just isn't that simple.

But here's what we know, there are over three billion

people in the world today without adequate access

to electricity, in order to empower the low watt world

and keep up with the ever increasing power demand

from high watt citizens, we're going to need a lot more juice.

What's the iron law of climate?

So, the iron law of climate is based on the idea that...

There, there's really only two ways that we can reduce emissions.

One is we could become poorer,

the other is that we can use technology

through how we source and use energy.

The iron law says we're not going to reduce emissions

by willingly getting poorer,

rich people aren't going to want to get poorer,

poor people aren't going to want to get poorer.

If there's one thing that we can count on, it's that policy makers

will be rewarded by populations if they make people

wealthier, so GDP is going to go up, we're doing everything

we can to try to get richer as nations, as communities,

as individuals, so if we want to reduce emissions,

we really have only one place to go, and that's technology.

I think the reason that nuclear is special is that

it's the only way to lift everybody out of poverty

and solve climate change.

People don't appreciate the quantum of difference.

We've seen a step up of energy density in the fields

that we've used today, going from wood to charcoal,

coal, oil, gas... and then suddenly you step up

two orders of a magnitude to uranium.

In a piece of uranium the size of a walnut,

there's as much potential energy as in the amount

of coal to fill a 100 car train.

We're not going to get a better battery than that.

So, here's the only way to make electricity production

that contains all of its toxic waste, all of it.

I was raised in the environmental school of thought

that was telling me the world was getting worse,

and then I hit my 30's and started doing my own research

and realized, actually, on, on so many metrics the world

has got better, we're just stuck in an energy paradox

that the energy that's helping us make the world get better

has this horrible side effect, let's get rid

of the side effect, let's not get rid of the energy.

This idea that there's too many people and that we all

have to reduce our energy consumption, the only people

in the world who say that are rich people.

I, I go around the world, I interview small farmers

everywhere, India, Africa, Latin America, Asia,

I've never had a small farmer

tell me that there's too many people and that

we consume too much, never, you know, um, never had that happen.

Whenever we think about electricity,

if we think about it at all, we tend to think

of it on our own terms, as long as we can flip on

the air conditioner, charge our phone, watch TV

and surf the web, we take it for granted.

Electricity's just there, ever present, invisible,

making our high watt lives richer.

That's why we hit the road.

It's why we traveled over 60,000 miles and interviewed

more than 50 people over a three-year period.

We talked to professors and authors, engineers

and activists, and, of course, to people who grapple

with electricity poverty on a daily basis.

Their answers and observations

were as varied as their backgrounds,

but they could, on occasion, find common ground.

What does electricity mean?

Electricity means prosperity,

means good life, means business.

What does electricity mean? I feel like it means life.

Electricity means opportunity.

Electricity is the life blood of a modern society.

Modern society is hooked on electricity.

If we can't keep our hospitals open, our ventilators going,

our refrigeration going, it all requires electricity.

Electricity means you are a human being.

If you don't have food, you can't live.

In a modern world, if you don't have

electricity, you don't have food.

If you don't have electricity,

you're cut off from policy making,

if you are not plugged in, how will you know?

How will you have mobile money, how will you have a bank account?

Electricity is like gold to us, without electricity,

we're nowhere, we go backwards, not forward.

No human should live on this planet

without basic access to electricity.

I see electricity as a basic human right.

I think people have basic rights,

rights for water, rights for necessity.

It should be the universal access,

everybody at the same level,

imagine how much more we can do?

You think about the potential of that.

When you can marriage dense fuel, particularly electricity

with human ingenuity, we can do nearly anything.

As I drove home, I thought about the battles

that are waged in the name of electricity in the U.S.,

and couldn't help but compare them to what I had seen.

While we bicker about our favorite electricity sources,

billions of people are still stuck in the dark.

Electricity explains the world because everywhere

we went we saw how the electric grid reflected the society

it was powering. In Reykjavik, they smelt aluminum

and mine bitcoin because their electricity's almost free.

In Beirut, people endure daily blackouts

because the city's grid has been hobbled

by endless war and corruption.

Electricity, or rather, electricity access,

pits two of the toughest challenges

of our day against each other.

Energy poverty versus climate change.

There is no easy, one size fits all solution.

The only certainty is that people will do whatever

they have to do to get the electricity they need.

The challenge, it's a daunting one, is this.

We have to double global electricity production

over the next three decades or so, and we're going to need

solar, nuclear, coal, gas, geothermal, wind and hydro,

all of it, to make that happen.

Governments aren't going to wait around for academics

to resolve their disputes, people around the world

are going to demand access to electricity.

Can we, the developed industrialized world,

help these countries

move towards a place of political stability

and help them along the road to electrification?

We are spending so much of time, how do we provide

sanitation, how do you provide... just provide

electricity and everything will come.

I think this is a wonderful opportunity to start fresh.

To look at new ideas, to experiment, I want to be totally

sustainable, I want to be off the grid, I want to be able

to take charge of my future and my business

and not depend on a third person.

It's both an opportunity, but also an impending challenge,

and it all goes back to electricity,

it shouldn't be an either or trade off, we can't afford

to choose electricity over climate change.

I mean, the moment we start trying to trade

these things off, something has to lose.

If people have a choice between either no energy

and dirty energy, they will take dirty energy every time.

By mid-century,

something, like, 75 to 80% of the world's

population is going to live in an urban or suburban setting.

It's going to be populated by people who really

don't want to have to think about their electricity.

They want to walk in a room, they want to flip on a light

and they want the light to work, just like us.