Imagining the Second Electricity Revolution

There is a moment in the Australian film The Castle (1997) where the father, Daryl, looks at the enormous electricity pylons looming over his backyard and acknowledges them not as an eyesore, but as a miracle. He claims that they’re a daily reminder of man's ability to generate electricity. Yet to everyone else in the world, we find this comical because, commonly, they’re not seen this way. But perhaps he is right and is paying attention to something the rest of us have stopped seeing as remarkable.

We walk past the miracle of electricity so much in our modern age that it’s become like wallpaper. And now, standing at the edge of what might be the most significant energy transition in a century, the first thing worth recovering is the sense that what we are talking about is extraordinary. Because if you lose that wonder, the scale of what is actually possible stays invisible.

So, there is a pattern worth noting across the history of energy and invention. It’s that the biggest leaps did not come from people who set out to improve what existed; they came from people who were willing to imagine a fundamentally different system and then had the patience, or the stubbornness, to build it in the unseen world first before it became material.

Tesla constructed his inventions in precise mechanical detail inside his mind, testing them, adjusting them, before he ever touched a physical component. Ada Lovelace used mathematical imagination to map possibilities that the machines of her era could not yet hold. And Hedy Lamarr, between takes on Hollywood film sets, developed frequency-hopping signal technology that the military ignored for decades, until it became the foundation of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS.

What connects all three is not genius in the biographical sense, but a method of building the complete idea and system in the imagination first; the mental model and the material object are equally real, as the idea precedes the infrastructure, always.

And during the War of Currents, the ugly and dramatic battle between Edison's direct current and Tesla's alternating current was ultimately not won by the better personality or the bigger financial backer. It was won by imagining a system built for scale. AC could transmit electricity across distance with far less energy loss. And that turned out to be what the world actually needed, even if no one fully understood that at the start.

The system that followed, with power plants, long-distance transmission lines, and a grid built on the logic of size and reach, served us remarkably well. But it is now starting to show its edges. And the question being asked with increasing seriousness by engineers, communities, researchers and governments is not how to patch the existing system: It’s what could we build if we started from different assumptions entirely? Some ideas include decentralised energy, community microgrids, and rooftop solar paired with home storage with peer-to-peer energy sharing.

Or perhaps considering nuclear diamond batteries, where radioactive carbon waste is encased in synthetic diamond, which generates a low-power electrical current that could run for thousands of years without recharging. Although it’s not enough to power a city, it’s enough to change what is possible in how we could develop our medical devices, remote sensors, deep space systems, or any application where continuous low-power generation across an extraordinary timespan matters. Solve the battery problem, and so much potential unlocks.

Thinking even more further out, to our grids that aren’t just infrastructures but intelligences, able to reroute in real time, predict demand, and integrate variable inputs that older systems simply cannot handle. That’s another possibility that opens up if we remove assumptions.

And if we remove the constraint of centralisation as another fixed assumption, we can even ask what a power system designed from scratch for resilience, abundance, and local control might look like; we arrive somewhere very different from where we are now.

So, if we reflect on our entire history, we can see that every major transformation in human civilisation has been tied to a new relationship with energy. Think about fire, agriculture, coal, oil… and electricity. What made the first electricity revolution so consequential was not just that it lit up rooms, but it connected places that had never been connected before, and it changed the geometry of possibility.

The idea worth sitting with now is whether the second electricity revolution, the one that is already beginning, changes something deeper. If energy becomes distributed instead of centralised, abundant instead of scarce, intelligent instead of passive, locally held instead of remotely controlled, then what actually changes is who has the power to build.

And that is not a question left just for utility companies; it needs to be a civilisational one.

We dive deeper into the future of energy intelligence and power systems in this podcast episode: