ENODA’s Purpose
ENODA’s undertakings are co-ordinated by a purpose, to address an essential economic dilemma. There exists a tension between our present welfare and our future welfare. Our present welfare is predicated upon the usage of finite resources, while our future welfare is predicated upon both the future utility of present wealth, and the availability of those same finite resources.
Economically, we are not tasked with maximising one over the other. We are entrusted with the tools to maximise both. At ENODA, we express this as the pursuit of “sustainable prosperity for everyone”.
In the short term, the creation of value increases prosperity. When we can create value with lower levels of externalities, then that prosperity accrues value over time: this is sustainable prosperity. For ENODA, minimising the externalities intrinsic to the generation and distribution of electricity, i.e. the impacts upon the environment and on social structures, is a means to an end. The preservation of resources is the preservation of choice.
As choice matters, those who choose matter. To us, when we say we seek “sustainable prosperity for everyone”, “everyone” is not a generic term. It is an acknowledgment that the beneficiaries of our prosperity are a plurality of individuality, a social whole whose needs are the sum of individual needs and uses.
ENODAs purpose is the tenets of this pursuit - refined to a precisely defined set of goals and objectives.
If we look at the last 140 years of socio-economic development, what we see is that the greatest advances to human welfare are driven by the radical improvements in the production function of our society; and they entail systematic changes to the human condition.
Social order is more than a matter of peace and safety, it expresses the value we place on the overt structures and unspoken détente underpinning our society. These were our first systems. All our systems since, no matter their complexity or abstraction, follow the same central concept—in order we find value.
The ability to create order, or to set the conditions under which it may emerge, is the essence of progress. Our ability to create order is contingent upon the capacity of our technologies and our willingness to throw them away in pursuit of novelty.
ENODA has a specific system, and a specific technology it seeks to change. ENODA seeks to drive prosperity through the availability of energy, and specifically electricity, without sacrificing the present or the future.
When we say we aim to systematically change the fundamental enabling technology of systems, we simply mean to take that which we value, and multiply its inputs.
Recent events have been an object lesson: if you increase or decrease the cost of energy, you directly affect the cost of everything. Energy is literally the input to every economic good there is. If you want to have the greatest possible impact on the cost of living, influencing the cost of energy is the most effective mechanism by which you can improve the standard of living for everybody. And yet, as a society we increasingly demand energy with more expensive inputs.
As a society, we have recognised that our future welfare is threatened by reductions in the finite resources it depends on. Our environment is overburdened supporting present welfare. However, to decrease the use of electricity generated using these finite resources, it would mean decreasing not only present welfare, but our capacity to generate future welfare too.
What we need to recognise, is that as a compassionate society, there are groups that need protecting: for example, those who cannot afford clean energy when faced with the trade-off between being able to feed or send their children to school. People rightly prioritise the short-term necessity of feeding and sending their children to school, over the longer-term environmental impact.
Inequality in society can best be addressed through the cost of energy, and the value that energy can directly or indirectly create for its consumer.
The prices of necessities are determined by the inputs to production, of which energy is the greatest. Simultaneously, for those on lower incomes, necessities represent a greater percentage of their expenditure. As a result, the cost of energy is more impactful upon our poorest households. Poverty need not, and should not, be simply accepted as a matter of course. ENODA is founded upon the idea that prosperity should be for everyone and that the means of its creation should be available to everyone.
To ensure this is true, clean and reliable energy must also be affordable and accessible. This is something that technologically, wasn’t possible until very recently.
The best method for the reduction of carbon emissions and the depletion of present resources, is to use renewable generation to supplement current needs. While we focus upon the depletion of finite sources of energy, energy which is simply passing us by in the universe at any given moment, sunlight and wind needs only to be transformed into an AC waveform, fit for the existing architecture of our power grid system, to alleviate this deficit.
Obviously, this is far more difficult than it sounds. The grid is incapable, as currently designed, of making use of the amount of renewable energy necessary.
Electricity itself is a matter of physics, a natural phenomenon and not a technology. The structure of the system utilising this phenomenon, the mechanisms by which motive force is transported, is the enabling technology. Our ability to effect change in the form and function of these mechanisms represents our capacity for systematic change.
The first mechanism determining distribution, the original general-purpose-technology of electricity, which so dramatically increased human welfare, was William Stanley’s transformer. If we are to again effect change in these systems, to again effect a dramatic change in human welfare, we must begin that change with the mechanisms for the distribution of electricity.
The prosperity first enabled by the transformer has reached a point at which its sustainability has dwindled.
As a technology, the grid itself is no longer fit for purpose, yet its continued use is essential to present prosperity.
While William Stanley’s transformer afforded us control of the relationship between voltage and current, in an AC signal, it provides no other form or mechanism of control. It was an extremely fragile, yet elegant solution. The utility of the energy within the grid is defined by the stability - the frequency - of the signal. However, the signal within Stanley’s system is dependent upon a thermal spinning mass inherent to the generation of energy, typically using fossil fuels.
Without the stability of the frequency, the signal is useless. The frequency of the signal must be within +/- 1% at all times, otherwise the system simply becomes unstable and collapses.
We have a system for the distribution of an AC waveform in which human societies have invested trillions of dollars. We are simply not in a position to replace that in its entirety, so whatever we do has to be compatible with the existing distribution system, what we refer to as the grid.
The constraints that currently limit the traditional grid from being able to meet the requirements of our future energy needs, materially constrain our future prosperity.
If we can surpass these constraints, we can make use of extremely low marginal cost renewable energy and further reduce the cost of energy to the consumer, without carbon emissions. There is currently no available method to reliably achieve that outcome which is why ENODA has developed the technology which coordinates the mechanism for the distribution of the AC waveform, to everybody, at the lowest marginal cost, while allowing that system to be agnostic to the nature of supply and demand. Integrating as much of the transportation load, the heat and cooling load, and as much renewable energy you want to be able to integrate to the system as a whole.
