Chapter Three: A Tale of New Cities

Reducing Intermittency

As touched on earlier, a primary obstacle to renewable power today is the question of intermittency – referring to an energy source that’s not continuously and instantly available for conversion into electricity. Solar and wind power might be able to generate lots of energy, but if demand spikes at a time when they’re not functioning (at night or on non-windy days), their utility wanes significantly.

A particular focus of Scarcity Zero is integrating these smart, responsive electric grids within the National Aqueduct as a parallel energy source that can engage on demand. It would also be backed by a baseload power network of thorium reactors (which we’ll go over next chapter), which by themselves present tremendous energy for nominal use and external resource production. The combined result is a saturation effect, as each power source stacks on the other – and an integrated backup – to each generate energy from each other in parallel. Intermittency is thus removed as a primary obstacle, as the entire system is “instant-on” from at least two of three energy sources.

Centralized Resource Production

Scarcity Zero seeks to make resource scarcity irrelevant by making energy scarcity irrelevant, as the transformation of cities into energy-generating centers allows for the synthetic production of nigh-unlimited resources in locations close to consumption. As we’ll review later, this enables metropolitan regions to do things like extract fresh water and hydrogen fuel from seawater, grow food indoors and synthetically manufacture building materials – all to scale.

This re-imagining of cities has such potential to improve how we generate energy and acquire resources that it’s easy to focus on the technical benefits of such capabilities – power, infrastructure, resources, utility management. Yet the social benefits hold equal potential. When every aspect of a city is overhauled in such circumstances, each new upgrade acts as a basis for further improvement that can be reinvested to increase a collective quality of life. It helps reinforce optimism of what’s actually possible when we stop and realize that investing in our future best interests is actually in our future best interests, and removes psychological barriers to initiatives seeking to continue this trend over the long term. We believe, fundamentally, in what we can build when we actually build it.

The benefits of this investment also does not limit itself to the commercial, tourism, and cultural hubs that define our national image. There is no shortage of places outside of America’s elite coasts that could use a facelift. Centering municipalities within a national energy framework and investing in next-generation infrastructure is perhaps the fastest way to see that result delivered. Reaching that end for all American cities is a central goal of Scarcity Zero, one we’ll focus on specifically within Chapter Twelve.

Once cities become central to generating electricity, next-generation manufacturing, and resource production, they can provide for themselves and their surrounding regions, markedly increasing the quality of life for millions. Side benefits of this approach naturally include expanded job opportunities, stimulated economy and reduced crime. At the same time, national electricity demand is proportionally reduced as a result of integrated renewables within municipal infrastructure. From there it sets up the next stage of the framework, which is to leverage next-generation nuclear to overhaul our resource production schema, and scale our energy generation capability to uncharted heights.