Energy is responsible for roughly 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions. As the world population climbs toward 9.7 billion and more people enter the middle class, demand will only grow, potentially doubling or tripling by 2050, exactly as we try to decarbonize our grids and industry. The single most important move to prevent a climate emergency is to power the world with reliable low-carbon, or no-carbon, energy.
Decades of investment have driven the price of solar and wind down sharply, but both carry well-known limits. Seasonal intermittency, combined with storage that remains prohibitively expensive, means a reliable grid still needs another form of baseload generation. Weather and geography shut many countries out entirely. Where sun and wind are abundant, the parks are often far from cities, requiring costly transmission and distribution. And centralized, outdated infrastructure means we waste much of the renewable power we already produce.
Baseload is the missing piece. Solar and wind can supply the energy, but a stable grid needs a source that runs continuously and predictably, day and night, in any season. Today that role falls to fossil fuels and nuclear. Filling it with a renewable alternative is what turns an intermittent grid into a fully decarbonized one. Most candidates fall short: hydro and geothermal depend on specific geography, biomass competes with land and food, and large-scale batteries remain too costly to carry a grid for long. A genuinely scalable, geography-independent baseload renewable has stayed out of reach. This is the gap that matters most, because without it every grid keeps a fossil or nuclear backbone, and the renewables we add only ever displace part of the problem rather than solving it.
As we work toward our climate goals and a more sustainable world, developing new renewable energy sources is no longer optional.
