Global electricity production: 1,840,000 TWh per year (82× the 2025 level).
Global average wholesale price: −$0.004 per kWh (you are paid to use it, almost everywhere, almost always).
The last coal plant was dismantled in 2038.
The last natural-gas peaker in 2041.
The last copper transmission line was recycled in 2044.
This is the Abundant Century: the long plateau where energy ceased to be a constraint and humanity had to invent new problems to replace the old ones.
The energy landscape – 2100
- Superconducting grid coverage: 98 % of all transmission and distribution
- Primary sources: 68 % solar (orbital and desert), 24 % fusion, 8 % wind/geothermal/tidal
- Storage: structural hydride batteries in every road, building, and vehicle — total capacity 18 million TWh (three months of global demand)
- Loss from generation to use: 0.00 %
- Cost to add 1 GW of capacity: $180 million (down from $2 billion in 2025)
- Global CO₂: 180 ppm and falling (direct air capture runs on waste energy)
Electricity is no longer generated on demand.
It is harvested continuously and stored until someone finds a use for it.
The daily life of abundance
You wake in a home that has never had an energy bill.
Your coffee is brewed with power that cost less than nothing.
Your morning commute — if you bother — is in a vehicle that charges while parked because the road pays it to take energy.
Your work (if you work) might be designing new qualia, exploring simulated universes, or tending a garden for pleasure.
Most people don’t work in the old sense.
They create, explore, care for each other, or simply exist.
The new industries of the abundant century
- Orbital construction
Dyson-swarm precursors: billions of solar satellites beaming power to rectennas on Earth and Moon. - Matter synthesis
Any element on demand via fusion transmutation and neutron capture — gold, platinum, rare earths become structural materials. - Planetary engineering
Mars terraforming complete by 2082.
Venus cooling sleeves begun 2091. - Consciousness expansion
Brain-computer interfaces and digital substrates universal — most humans spend significant time in custom realities. - Art at cosmic scale
Sculpting nebulae with directed energy, composing symphonies for alien ears we haven’t met yet.
The limits we invented to replace energy scarcity
- Attention: the only thing still finite
- Novelty: the drive to experience something no mind has felt before
- Meaning: the search for purpose in a world where survival is solved
- Space: we are still small against the universe
Death is optional.
Many choose it after 300–600 years, not from weariness, but from completion.
The last fossil fuel – retired 2049
A single decorative oil lamp in the Museum of Scarcity in Riyadh.
It is lit once per year on the anniversary of the last commercial barrel burned.
The flame is fueled by synthetic hydrocarbons made from air and free energy.
Visitors — mostly children who have never known want — watch in silence.
The final transmission – from the Global Energy Archive, annual broadcast on the anniversary of the first commercial kilometer, 2100
“We spent ten thousand years fighting over fire.
We burned wood, coal, oil, gas, and even atoms to keep the dark away.
Then, in one generation, we made a wire that let the light flow without loss.
Energy stopped being something we took from the Earth.
It became something the Earth gave us in endless supply.
We did not conquer scarcity.
We simply stopped needing to.
The universe is vast, cold, and dark.
But here, on this small world, we learned to make light forever.
Use it well.
There are still horizons.”
By 2100 the Abundant Century is no longer new.
It is simply the way things are.
Electricity is free.
The grid is perfect.
The lights never go out.
And humanity, for the first time, has no material limits left to overcome.
Series complete.
The resistance is gone.
The current flows forever.
The power is on.
The future is bright — and it costs nothing.