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[Robert] What if I told you all the things we care about
can be tied back to one simple question,
can you turn your lights on in the morning?
[bright music]
Electricity is all around us, but we rarely notice it.
It's something I think about every day.
I'm a numbers guy, when I look at the world
I see stats and spread sheets.
My house is filled with electric stuff.
I have my personal fire cooking device,
a spiffy teapot, a dishwasher, toaster, an oven
and the ultimate gadget, the entirety of the world's
information, and it fits in the palm of my hand.
Nearly everything we touch, almost everything we read,
eat or wear, has in one way or another been electrified.
When I look at my refrigerator, I see a device
that uses more electricity per year
than roughly three billion people.
Having electricity doesn't guarantee wealth,
but not having it almost always means poverty.
I'm Robert Bryce, and the way I see it,
electricity explains the world.
[bright music]
[announcer] P.G and E presents REDDY,
your tireless household service.
♪ I wash and dry your clothes
♪ Play your radios
♪ I can heat your coffee pot
♪ I am always there
♪ With lots of power to spare
♪ 'Cause I'm Reddy Kilowatt
Remember, just plug in, I'm Reddy.
You know, it's funny how we take things
like electricity for granted.
[Robert] Electricity is different from every other
form of energy, because, for the first time in history,
we're controlling forces we can't see or feel.
Thanks to the electric grid, we're harnessing the motion
of zillions upon zillions of electrons,
and we can unleash those electrons whenever
and wherever we want.
Hey, wait a minute, Jim, I need some facts.
The national academies of engineering ranked the electric grid
as the most important engineering innovation
of the 20th century.
[announcer] Not just for a wealthy privileged class,
but for everyone.
[Steve] Promotional literature
from the '30s and the '40s,
it's all aimed at the woman of the household.
"Make your life easier with an electric washer,
with an electric stove."
[Robert] Electricity has allowed people
and, in particular, women and girls,
to escape the drudgery of past eras.
It has liberated them from the pump, the stove and the washtub.
Electricity has changed how we communicate,
how we travel and where we live.
Our nation was stirring with new ideas,
new wants, new needs.
[Steve] Modern life and electricity
are synonymous with one another.
Your refrigerator, your lights, your microwave,
those are all part of the grid.
[announcer] To realize how much our lives
have changed in just two generations.
[Joyashree] It's amazing innovation.
To me it's like a co-creation with nature.
Naturally, we got the sunlight,
but rest of the time it is dark,
but you have co-created, so you have light 24 hours.
Life has been on this planet for about
four and a half billion years,
Homo sapiensfor
maybe half a million years,
civilization only began 40,000 years ago,
humanity advanced through fire and the wheel
and levers and building ships, very, very slowly advancing.
Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world.
[Richard] And there've really been two major revolutions
that have increased the rate of this change.
First was the industrial revolution with mechanics,
only 150 years ago, human civilization
went under radical transformation.
As grand as that was, that pales in comparison
to the rate of change we've seen
since the emergence of electricity.
[Robert] Archaeological records show that our hominid
ancestors began using fire about one million years ago.
Fire use became common some 400,000 years ago.
By contrast, we have only been putting
electricity to work since the 1880s.
Therefore, if we could compress the 400,000 years
that humans have been using fire into one 24 hour period,
the electric age would span
only the last 30 seconds before midnight.
[Richard] Now the rate of change is so fast,
it is very difficult, for even those of us
working within it are trying to track it
and trying to plan it, we are constantly surprised
by how much faster change happens
than we can predict ourselves.
[Robert] If we're going to talk about electricity,
we should probably start at the beginning.
To do that, we went to the birth place of the electric age.
[Robert] We're here in lower Manhattan.
It was in this region where Thomas Edison began
the electric age with the first electric grid,
and within a mile of where I'm standing
right here in the battery,
was also the cradle of the skyscraper.
For centuries, humans have built tall structures
like the statue of liberty.
But the electric age fundamentally changed the city.
[Reddy] Just plug in, I'm ready.
[Steve] As the technology came into being,
it behaved like every other technology.
We had some successful entrepreneurs,
they saw a market, and they started out small.
Edison, he wanted a demonstration plant,
where he's going to supply electric light
to anyone who wants it. And he wanted
to be near Wall Street, because he felt he needed
the bankers on his side.
[Steve] The first commercial power plant in the United States,
the Pearl Street Station in New York City reached out
and served a small number of customers.
Pearl Street does not make a profit.
And Edison saw that if he were going to be successful,
you need some way to distribute this over a large area,
it's the only way to make it economical for the common user.
[Robert] Most of us have heard names like Edison,
Tesla and Westinghouse, they were key pioneers,
but Frank Sprague changed the way we use juice.
Before Sprague, electricity was used almost exclusively
for lighting, his innovations forced electric companies
to focus on providing power.
[Joseph] Well, Frank Sprague was a graduate of the Naval Academy,
and the Navy had the first electrical school,
and when Sprague comes into the Edison company,
he immediately starts seeing places for improvement.
Edison doesn't see motors as something that's important.
Sprague comes up with a motor, he needed something efficient,
he needed something compact,
he needed something that was economically viable
and he delivered on all three, he gets Edison's approval.
The Pearl Street plant becomes profitable for the first time,
and that changes the future of electric power,
because the early companies are all called
lighting companies, you go ten years to the future,
they're all power and light companies.
The power customer becomes the most important customer,
not the light customer.
[dramatic swooshing]
[Robert] In 1894, Frank Sprague completed the first bank
of electric elevators inside the Postal Telegraph building
at 253 Broadway.
Powered by Sprague's compact electric motors,
those elevators were faster, cheaper and cleaner
than ever before.
[Joseph] Frank Sprague, because of the project
that they posed in Telegraph building at 250 Broadway,
really casts the mold for all future skyscrapers,
large urban buildings or, as you go in any large building
anywhere in the world today, you've got banked elevators,
but this is sort of a new idea.
Basically, height is electrical,
from the time of the caves, 30,000 or 40,000 years ago.
Humanity was essentially flat.
Cities, on the one hand, are old, uh,
Rome 2,000 years ago had a million people.
But, essentially, cities remained the same
for hundreds, thousands of years.
And then, electricity came along,
and suddenly cities had become three-dimensional.
The urge to go skyward that you saw in New York
through the whole 20th century, was a manifestation
of the tremendous amount of concentrated energy.
[Jesse] If you look at the greatest buildings
of the Middle Ages, the cathedrals,
they were small by modern standards.
[Carol] In the history of architecture there were
symbolic structures which used height
in order to signify their importance,
their spirituality.
But New York, a kind of capital of capitalism
found in the skyscraper, a way to exploit the demand
for central locations and cities, and the ability
to use the elevator in order to go above the normal height
that people feel comfortable to walk upstairs,
which is about five or six stories.
[Jesse] The ability to rise in space,
even 100 feet or 200 feet, which doesn't seem like much,
completely transformed the structure,
the geography, the geometry of cities.
It made possible, office buildings
in which you could have hundreds,
thousands of people working for the same firm.
[narrator] Hundreds of relays had transferred
10,000 electrical impulses to motivate the cars.
Once you have a tall building, if you look down from space,
you can calculate the watts per square meter
that that building consumes.
The spatial density of the consumption
in a city like New York is extremely high.
[Robert] And here's the deal, vertical cities reduce
the human footprint on the natural world.
Small footprints are good.
Density, whether it involves energy production,
food production or urban living, is green.
The process of human progress is also a process
of environmental progress in that it's comprised
centrally, of energy transitions.
From energy diffused fuels to energy dense ones.
With electricity being the most important ultimate carrier
of energy for modern societies.
Energy is often referred to as the master resource.
Electricity is the master of the master resources.
Without electricity, you are effectively going back
in time to a world that we have been able
to innovate away from.
[Michael] There was a point when we were relying heavily
on wooden dung and also horse and carriages in cities,
and cities, just after a while, became unlivable.
You have to understand the energy ladder.
There's a broad pattern for how people become prosperous,
but also how we protect the natural environment.
[Jesse] Cities from my point of view,
as a green, as an environmentalist,
are the salvation of nature.
It's only by concentrating a significant portion
of humanity in livable attractive cities,
that we have the chance to spare the rest of nature
for the lions and the tigers and the eagles.
[wind blowing]
[Steve] We know that there are about 1.2 billion people
in the world today who have no access to electricity at all.
What's missing in that statistic is that there are a couple
of billion more whose access to electricity is inadequate,
intermittent, the system doesn't work all the time.
[Robert] The defining inequality in the world today
is the disparity between the electricity rich
and the electricity poor, what does that mean?
Let's go back to my refrigerator.
It uses about 1,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year.
By my count, there are about three billion people today
who, on an individual basis,
use less electricity than my fridge.
[narrator] India, a country as ancient as it is modern.
Moving as history moves across the threshold of the past.
[tape rewind]
[upbeat music]
[Robert] About a third of all Indians live in poverty
and about 300 million of them, a population
nearly the size of the United States, don't have access
to any electricity at all.
[upbeat music]
[Robert] When electricity isn't readily available,
people will do whatever it takes
to get it, and that includes theft.
People are using wires to put a hook in the wires
and draw the electricity, that is un-metered supply.
That is theft.
In central Calcutta, where hooking has been going on,
T and C losses, technical and commercial losses.
We have around 11.5% where the national average
is around 40, 45, 50, it's as high as that.
[Robert] If I can interrupt you and have you repeat that,
because these numbers kind of stagger the mind.
We... our, our loss figures, T and C losses,
technical and commercial losses total,
it's around 11.5%, whereas the national average
is around 40%, 40.
- [Robert] That's a staggering number. - That's a staggering loss.
[indistinct chattering]
So, if you look above me here to the right,
there's some hooks on the electric line
which is, uh, common,
but the locals don't want to talk about it.
[Robert] It's one of the conundrums of electricity service,
to make electricity available to everyone,
it has to be cheap, but it can't be cheap when the system
lacks integrity, whether it's customers stealing
from the utility or the utility ripping off customers,
integrity is as important to the grid as engineering.
[Steve] You can have food and not have a modern life.
There are plenty of people who don't have electricity
and have food, but whose standard of living is really
not up to what we would think
of as a modern standard of living.
[Robert] This is a biomass stove, this is rice straw,
called paddy, and then they feed it into the bottom of the...
- Yeah. - ...the, the pit here and then,
put the pots on the top so this is
uh, just a traditional method of cooking.
There's a methodic correlation found between those people
who are using the conventional biomass for their cooking
and their health, and what happens is that cooking is done
by the women, and that woman actually inhales all
the pollutant during cooking.
Cooking in that environment for four to five hours
has a serious health impact.
[Robert] Every year in India, more than one million people
die from indoor air pollution, the use of biomass
in cooking causes horrifying damage to human health.
Especially, to that of women and girls.
University of California, Berkeley, professor Kirk Smith
estimates the health impact of cooking with biomass
is akin to burning 400 cigarettes
an hour in your kitchen.
[Priscilla] Women take up the brunt of domestic work
and in the absence of electricity,
that domestic work is more difficult, more time
consuming, less productive,
and it's women and girls who deal with it.
The mothers are spending all day long
just doing the basic household chores.
Women and girls are sort of
the managers of household energy,
the way they get that is labor intensive.
Women spend a lot of time fetching firewood
because there's no energy for actual light.
It's, you know, collecting wood, collecting dung.
- [Joyashree] Collecting water. - You don't have a fridge,
so you have to cook every evening.
Kitchens are five degrees warmer
when you are cooking there.
Suppose the temperature outside is 35 degrees,
so your kitchen is 40 degrees.
You need air conditioning.
[Priscilla] Oftentimes people will talk about energy poverty
in very abstract terms without thinking about,
"Okay, what do we want this energy to achieve
"once people have it?" When you're able to transform the economy
from just being based off of raw materials,
you put women on the path
to participate in an economy that is richer,
in an economy that is more just for women and girls.
[dramatic music]
[upbeat music]
[traffic whooshing]
[birds chirping]
[rooster crowing]
And in India, sun is down by 6:00, 6:30, max.
In the summer, your time becomes short
and it's all dark, you can't see anything.
[Robert] This is an old style kerosene lamp.
This is the centuries old now version of what we use,
and we use LED lights, incandescents, fluorescents,
but in villages like this one, this is what they use here.
- [thunder rumbling] - [Joyashree] If you are absorbed in the dark,
darkness absorbs you too,
so you do not see the light
and you cannot bring the light to others.
[Robert] Electricity has allowed us to conquer
our oldest foe, darkness.
For millennia, the cost of having well-lit spaces at night
was so high that only the very rich could afford it.
Those well-lit spaces matter more than you think.
A few months before our visit, an elephant invaded
the tiny village of Chargora.
Turns out well-lit spaces help keep unwanted guests
out of the village, when the lights are out and you live
in rural West Bengal, you risk
getting trampled by roaming elephants.
Like my friend Joyashree, I had a moment
in which I finally understood what darkness means.
In the small agricultural settlement of Majalesh Pukur,
located southeast of Calcutta, I met Rehena Jamadar.
So, Rehena, can you tell me how your life is different
with electricity versus before?
[speaking in Bengali]
She is saying that there is still much to happen.
- [Robert] Sure. - But at least some help
is happening, so in the home they have entertainment system
and they have the grinding systems,
so things are happening there.
[Robert] But also your children can read at, at night?
[translating into Bengali]
[Joyashree] The, the girl goes to college.
[Robert] But, but could she go to college
when she couldn't read at night?
- No. - No.
- Straight answer is no.
If you had electricity
when you were small,
could you have gone to university?
[translating into Bengali]
Yes, she would have gone.
[Robert] Darkness had kept this gracious and intelligent
woman from achieving something
that she knew was within her grasp.
Here was a person who, had she been born in one of India's
cities instead of Magalesh Pukur, would've gone to college.
With a college education, she could've been a doctor,
a lawyer or maybe a nurse or engineer.
By the time I met Rehena, I knew plenty of facts
and statistics, the average resident of India
uses about 800 kilowatt hours of electricity per year,
which is about a quarter of the global average.
I understood the myriad correlations between electricity,
availability and health and wealth.
But that 15 minute conversation with Rehena and Joyashree
made me see the light.
...in Accra,
they used to happen quite often.
[Nader] We grew up in a place in the mountains and it was
normal to us that we're going to have
some yellow electricity and some white electricity.
[Priscilla] And I remember I was in the first grade,
I was six, and there was going to be
a pop quiz the next morning.
[Nader] In our house, we used to have the yellow lights on,
and this indicates that this electricity
is being supplied by the EDL.
So I go home and I'm studying, I'm really excited
but also very nervous, and in the middle
of my study session, the power goes off.
[light switches off]
And I began crying inconsolably, because there's no way
I'm going to go finish memorizing this times table
when there's no power.
And then every six hours the lights will go off
and then we will turn on the UPS, so we used to communicate
with my, with my father, tell him that, "I need to study now
for the school, shall I study when the yellow lights are on
or when the white lights are on?"
So the white lights, we use them using the UPS,
the fluorescent lamp.
[Priscilla] And, uh, my mother got
a kerosene lantern, lit it up for me
and sat by me while I studied my times table,
and I think that was my first recollection of
just how important that basic infrastructure is.
So, to us this was normal, it was like, we lived with it,
that we're going to be having two different types
of power and sometimes we're not going to be having power,
this was normal to us, we didn't know
that, actually, people get 100% electricity.
You know, we have this classic image of someone in a poor village
who finally has light, getting an education.
Let's say there's a, a solar panel on the roof,
it's brought light, and in the evening now,
they can s... they can be safe and they can study.
And then the kid turns 16 and they've got an education.
What are they going to do?
Is our expectation that they...
The extent of their ambition
is to remain a subsistence farmer with an education?
I don't think so, they're going to want a job.
They're going to want to do something clever, become a better farmer,
maybe an agronomic scientist.
When we top out our energy expectations
for the developing world, all we're really saying is,
"We expect that you can have enough energy
to stay poor in a little more comfort...
maybe, and maybe to be educated enough
"to know that you are poor."
Incrementalism is good, but is dangerous
when we view it as the only paradigm, what makes you think
that an African's need for power is inferior
to an American's need for power?
[Joyashree] I think that rest of the world
who is enjoying modernity
and we are not allowing others to be modern
is a crime, is a major crime.
Mutual respect for the humanity of people who live
in other continents, that should guide
global energy policy discussions.
[Robert] Today, billions of people are living
in conditions like those in rural
India and sub-Saharan Africa.
Collectively, those billions make up the low watt world.
Those with intermittent or insufficient
access to electricity.
[Priscilla] In 1989, less than 20% of the country had access
to electricity, it was a military government
that had come in power through a coup d'etat,
and the government decided that by the year 2020,
everyone in this country will have power.
Ghana transitioned into democratic rule in '92
and every government that has come since then
has stayed on the promise of universal electricity access.
So, now in 2017, access is at 83% in Ghana.
To date, whenever Ghana is about to have elections,
you see a lot of infrastructure projects going up and down
all over the country. So, in this case, democracy has really
been the tool that has propelled the electrification project.
[Robert] Keeping the electricity flowing day after day,
year after year, requires constant infusions of cash
which is then used to buy fuel, repair wires
and replace poles.
Electricity systems have to pay for themselves.
If there's any kind of leakage, like theft
or corruption, the system fails.
[Priscilla] In the year 2050, most of the world's population
will live in Africa or will be African.
How are we going to have a population
of all these bright young minds, if you're not plugged in?
What is going to be their function?
It's a huge demographic crisis staring us in the face.
I think that one of the first things to do now,
to ensure that by 2050, the young Africans on the continent
and around the world, are people who are productive,
self-reliant, empowered, people who will be free
from poverty, we have to plug them in now, it begins now.
[Robert] While scores of low watt countries around
the globe struggle to bring their people out of the dark
and into the light, the U.S. enjoys
an almost embarrassment of riches.
Electricity abounds, so much so that the high watt world
keeps stumbling into new ways
of using massive amounts of juice.
[projector whirring]
[soft instrumental music]
[tape rewinding]
[water bubbling]
[light dramatic music]
[plane rumbling]
[people chattering]
[heavy breathing]
Take me back to sea level.
Electricity does, in fact, explain the world.
That's why I'm here in Boulder, Colorado.
Arguably, the world capital of legal weed cultivation
and retailing, within about five miles of where I'm standing
here in Chautauqua Park, there are about a dozen
and a half legal weed dispensaries selling brands
like Purple Haze, but to produce Purple Haze
and other brands of cannabis sativa, they are using
lots of electricity, in fact, marijuana cultivation
is the world's single most electricity
intensive agricultural business.
All over this town, entrepreneurs are busy
turning watts into weed.
[light dramatic music]
We're, we're looking for a dispensary. It's not that hard to find them,
but there are about 20 of them in the city
or at least a dozen and a half of them, but, you know,
we're bagging dispensaries.
So to speak, uh, all these buildings, though, have big signs
on them, but the grow operations don't have any signs
and they usually only have the street number.
You just look at the exterior of the building, no signs.
And look at the long electrical conduit lines
that are on the outside, look at the size
of the three phase conduit
going into that gray box, and then how many meters
they've got right behind it.
That's all new conduit on the outside of the building.
Why else would you need that much electricity
in such a nondescript warehouse.
Look at this, this is all brand new.
This is new electrical service, 500 kilovolt amps.
That's a brand new transformer put in just
for a marijuana grow operation in this, in this warehouse.
Marijuana growers don't want people to know they're growing
marijuana, but you know what to look for, you can find them.
It's certainly keeping the energy company busy.
Operating transformers, all sorts of equipment,
upgrades like that that are needed
for high energy use facilities.
Electricity used by the cannabis industry
has been increasing sharply over the past several years.
I believe the average has been about 34% per year.
[Robert] The electricity intensity of marijuana cultivation
is 23 times that of a hospital
and about 130 times that of an average U.S. residence.
That's a lot of juice.
Want to know the real buzz kill?
About half of Colorado's electricity comes from
coal fired power plants. As a result, Boulder dispensaries
are required by city ordinance, to prove
they're growing polar bear friendly ganja.
Colorado's had a number of different mandates
and opportunities for using renewable technologies.
So, for example, I live in Boulder,
I get my, my electricity
from Xcel Energy, I can pay a little bit more
to have that energy come from wind power.
It's important for a lot of people because of politics
and wealth to be able to feel like you're doing something
environmental while you're living like everyone else does.
It has not led to an appreciable
decarbonization of the Colorado economy.
A lot of the offsetting provisions,
whether it's for the cannabis industry,
for individual homeowners, it's simply accounting.
The number that really matters is,
where does the energy come from. And so long as Colorado
gets 85% of its energy from fossil fuels,
85% of the economic activity in Colorado is from fossil fuels,
no matter which we assign to the 15%
and which we assign to the 85%.
[Robert] We're going to a black market grower in Denver.
He has decided that it's far easier to operate
in the black market and more profitable
to do it in the black market than in the regulated market.
[light dramatic music]
Okay.
[Daniel] My name is Daniel, I'm currently driving
an Uber and I also grow marijuana.
I was arrested for growing marijuana in 2003
and I received a felony conviction for that.
As a result of that, I'm not allowed to participate
in the legitimate marijuana industry.
[Robert] If you were going to tell me what are
the three key things you need to know
to set up a clandestine operation.
[Daniel] You have to have buyers for your product,
you need to have good knowledge of botany
and you need to have a good knowledge
of setting up an electrical system
that will support an operation like that.
[Robert] What about stealing electricity, what about that?
[Daniel] That's something I would never do
because if you are caught doing that,
you're probably going to be in more trouble
for stealing the electricity than you are going to be
in trouble for growing the weed.
They have ways of detecting leakage in electricity,
and they do that by scanning each part of the grid,
periodically. That could bring down the operation in itself.
[Robert] In 2013, indoor pot farms in Denver
were consuming about 100 gigawatt hours of electricity.
By 2016, that figure had almost
tripled to about 275 gigawatt hours.
To put that in perspective, businesses in Denver
are using nearly as much electricity just to grow weed
as what's consumed by the entire country of Burundi.
Colorado, which had a 2020 target for renewable energy
and emissions reduction, now has a 2025 target,
so we've moved our targets off into the future
because we're not hitting them.
Right now we're working towards
a long-term goal, a very significant goal
of 80% reduction in emissions by 2050.
Obviously, if the emissions from this industry continue
to increase exponentially, that could have a major impact,
but right now we don't think that it is going to
cause us to be derailed from our goal.
[Robert] To be sure, it's easy to snicker at the amount
of electricity needed to grow marijuana,
but the fact that people in rich countries are using electricity
to grow cannabis while people in poor ones are stealing it
solely to survive, provides a stark reminder of the vast
disparity between the people who live high watt lives
and those who live mostly in the dark.
[dramatic music]
[thunder rolling]
[dramatic music]
[wind blowing]
[gentle music]
[upbeat music]
- [man] Keep running. - [Robert] Keep, keep going...
- So this is, this is normal for... - Now, now you have the problem
that we have here in Puerto Rico.
[Robert] So, please, keep going if you don't mind
because we'll just ignore the lights
- for now and just keep going. - [man] Yeah,
let's put the batteries on the LEDs.
[Robert] We just had a black out,
this could be for an hour or two hours,
- could be the rest of the day. - Yeah,
yeah, probably two hours.
- Two hours. - Yeah.
[light dramatic music]
[gentle saxophone music]
[cameraman] So, right now we're stuck in traffic,
and in the middle of a black out in Puerto Rico.
And, obviously, the lights aren't working
because the electricity is out.
[Robert chuckles] So, you have all these cars trying to merge
through the intersection and it's kind of a, a little
game of chicken about who's going to stop
and who's going to play, and right now I'm winning.
[both chuckle]
And here's the good part, we're heading
right over there to see the power plant
that is owned by PREPA, that is not working
because no one knows exactly why.
[turn signal beeping]
[Robert hums]
- [man] We're going in this way. - [cameraman] Yeah,
private property, that's...
[man] Hi, we're doing a documentary on the corruption.
- [cameraman] Well... - [Robert laughs]
...yeah, you might have heard.
- This is Robert Bryce, people like him a lot. - [cameraman] Let's not push it.
I'm standing on the Bay of San Juan.
Puerto Rico now has the distinction of having
the longest blackout in American history.
And today, April 18th, 2018, that blackout record
is getting even longer, in fact, the entire island
of Puerto Rico today, is in blackout.
And this power plant behind me, the Palo Seco Power Station,
rated at 600 megawatts, appears to be producing
no electricity at all.
[rhythmic beating]
[cash machine dinging]
[Mariano] There's still 300,000 people that don't have power.
We are U.S. citizens and we do deserve to have
the same level of support that any U.S. citizen
has anywhere in the world.
[light dramatic music]
[car whooshing]
[Miguel] There is no production without electricity.
I mean, there is no economic movement
without access to power.
My name is Miguel Colón, I'm the vice president
of Model Offset Printing, we do mostly printing
for our manufacturing industry in Puerto Rico.
The business has been in the family since the last 30 years.
Right after the hurricane, it was like a war zone.
Passage through the roads was difficult
because there was a lot of trees on the roads.
A lot of power posts were on the floor.
It was a total devastation, inside the business
there was a lot of water, a lot of equipment damaged
by the water, our solar infrastructure was gone.
It was messy. We were without electrical power
for about three months, we are still operating
without AC, in... on the whole plant. And before the hurricane
we were paying about 30,000 dollars per month on electricity.
I pay more for the electricity than I do for paper.
[light dramatic music]
[Mariano] I understand time, I understand we're an island,
I understand it takes time to get things here, but does it take
seven months, is there really a plan?
Some people still don't have water.
I cannot envision or imagine living without access to power,
it's like water, it's a necessity.
[chickens clucking]
[gentle music]
[Robert] While visiting with Iris Ortiz and her family,
she shared a story about how one of her daughters
wanted to have her hair done for school pictures.
She was distraught, how could she use
a hair dryer without electricity?
How would she iron her clothes without electricity?
The luxuries we so often take for granted on the mainland
had disappeared, their world had been turned upside down.
They were now living low watt lives
and they're American citizens.
[Mariano] The grid looked like it was being held up
by clothes pins.
Irma comes in, who was our sparring partner,
and, obviously, the grid suffered damage there,
and some of the resources were used,
and two weeks later we get the knock-out punch.
So, the clothes pins were all over the island
and everything just fell apart.
[Miguel] There was a lot of competition for resources.
FEMA came very quickly, but it took control of all
the resources, there was no gas for the whole population.
The gas was for the military and for FEMA.
Drinking water supply was reserved
for the military and for FEMA.
[interviewer] How long do you think New Yorkers
would accept being without power?
A day, a week, a month before you would have massive
demonstrations, there's people here that today
still don't have power.
Seven months after the hurricane.
It is unacceptable.
[Robert] Two months after our trip to Puerto Rico,
Iris Ortiz sent me an email, "One minute ago
we got electricity to our neighborhood."
She wrote in Spanish:
"Thank you for your prayers, God bless you very much."
I replied touched that she'd shared her family story
with someone who was a stranger only two months prior.
[speaking in Spanish]
I wrote, "You're going back to the modern world."
[airplanes zooming]
[light dramatic music]
[Robert] We're here in Iceland, at Gullfoss Falls.
As you can see, this country has enormous
hydro power potential.
About 75% of the electricity here comes from hydro.
The other 25% comes from geothermal.
This abundant electricity is attracting industries
from all over the world and, in particular,
data centers and cryptocurrency miners.
[dramatic music]
[traffic whooshing]
[Robert] You know, the Pirate Party said,
"Just come in, they'll let you in."
You'll find the security situation is not anything
- "like what's on Capitol Hill." - [man] So, this is your left.
From the... [mimics Icelandic]
[Robert] It sure looks way too small
to be the Parliament House.
[man] There are only 330,000 people in this...
[Robert] No, I got it, but even still.
More than a third of Iceland's citizens live in Reykjavik,
the country's spotless capital city.
It's politically stable and has been for centuries.
In fact, Iceland's Parliament, the Althing,
was founded in 930, making it one
of the world's oldest parliaments.
Among the newest political parties in Iceland
is the Pirate Party, which views itself as something
of a Robin Hood of politics.
[Birgitta] The Pirate Party was created to make sure that
Iceland would become a safe haven for freedom of information,
expression and, uh, privacy.
I want transparency.
Taking the power from the powerful
and giving it to the powerless.
I created the Pirate Party to make sure that these laws
would be written and implemented,
and Iceland could resurrect as a Switzerland of bits.
A digital safe haven where you could host,
among other things, all the forbidden
knowledge in our world.
This vision is responsible for a lot
of the data centers in Iceland.
[dramatic music]
Um.
Electricity and money are becoming the same thing.
The transfer of money is the transfer of information.
Money is constantly becoming more and more electrified.
[Helmut] When you have cheap electricity available,
you can turn it into money.
That's why we need stable electricity,
stable power supply, reliable partners
like we have here in Iceland.
[Gísli] We are seeing cryptocurrency
disrupt the financial industry,
or at least gaining a lot of traction.
Banks have, for many years, been trading currency
only electronically, when you store your money in the bank,
they don't have a vault with cash in it, they just have
a digital register themselves.
One of the reasons I became fascinated with cryptocurrency
was, I heard a story about migrant workers could move money
back to their families without Western Union chipping in
a big chunk of that.
I also became fascinated
by it because I don't want somebody
to have access to every transaction I make.
I don't care if I make normal transactions,
I just don't want anybody to know exactly everything I do.
We have to develop ways to regain our privacy,
and cryptocurrency is certainly one way to do that.
[Robert] Iceland has some of the strictest privacy laws
in the world, and when you consider their views on privacy
along with a cool climate and cheap, abundant electricity,
it makes perfect sense that Iceland has become a hotbed
of cryptocurrency production.
[Gísli] This is an industry that relies on high tensity
with their infrastructure that is consuming a lot of energy.
Here in Iceland we have free air cooling.
We can rely on the cool air outside to cool down
the servers in our data centers.
[Helmut] Electricity intensity will definitely increase
because it takes more hash power to mine one bitcoin.
The more bitcoins are mined, more difficult
it gets to mine one bitcoin.
There are studies and predictions that say that
the bitcoin network is going to consume
as much power as Denmark in 2020.
The deployed power behind that is massive.
[dramatic music]
[Robert] So, you've been your whole career with HS Orka then?
Not the whole career, no.
I've been here for around... or with HS Orka
- for almost ten years. - I see.
[Robert] In terms of electricity, then,
for all the geothermal
in Iceland, about how much is produced here?
[Kristín] We are producing, in total, 175 megabytes.
Iceland has gone from undeveloped to developed.
I've also been to Africa, to Ethiopia
where, where they have very unstable electricity
and you could see it.
Where we were 50 years ago.
[Robert] So it's really only 50 years
that Iceland's gone from completely dependent
- on cod and diesel fuel... - Yeah.
...to one now where your electricity's all renewable.
- [Kristín] Yeah. - And you're attracting
industry from all over the world.
[Kristín] Yeah.
[Robert] It's a simple question,
what does electricity mean?
Technology.
[Robert] Technology?
[Kristín] Innovation
and higher standards for living people.
[Robert] The evolution of Iceland's economy was due,
in large part, to its ability to tap into its natural
resources, like, geothermal and hydroelectric power.
Just 50 years ago, the country's main export was cod.
Today, Iceland has the world's highest per capita
electricity consumption, over 53,000 kilowatt hours
per year. And its main exports
are things made with electricity.
[Richard] For us to survive, much less thrive as humanity,
we have got to dramatically step up the energy availability
and the cleanliness of that energy.
Wars are fought over profound disparities
in access to natural resources and access to information,
and almost all of that goes back to the availability
of cheap and plentiful electricity.
[missile launching]
[dramatic music]
[missiles exploding]
[dramatic music]
[fighter jets soaring]
[narrator] Where history began,
history today has made anew.
In lands at once timeless and changing,
fabled and mysterious, yet as sharply real as a headline,
the lands of the Middle East.
[dramatic music]
[driver] It's going to take 10 to 15 minutes to be in the hotel.
- [man] Thank you. - [driver] Oh, very welcome.
Where are you coming from?
- [Robert] Texas. - [driver] Texas, America.
[all chuckle]
[driver] I'm American, guys, I'm from Michigan.
- [Robert] No kidding? - [driver] I swear to God.
[Robert] I've wanted to come here my whole life.
[stutters] I've heard about Beirut my whole life.
[driver] Enjoy then, enjoy, you going to be enjoyed.
[light dramatic music]
For 1975, the state of electric utility in Lebanon
was so good that they were selling electricity to Syria.
We didn't have any shortage, we didn't have
any problem with the quality.
And during the war, things started deteriorating.
[Robert] Stuck in the world's toughest neighborhood,
Lebanon was once the crown jewel of the region.
Its capital, Beirut, was called
the Paris of the Middle East.
But a 15 year civil war coupled with constant skirmishes
with its neighbors, has left ordinary
Lebanese living low watt lives.
They were bombing roads, they were bombing, eh, power plants,
so they were trying to break the infrastructure
of the country, break the Lebanese economy
to try, to somehow, make Lebanese give up on their government.
[Robert] Destroying electric infrastructure is a staple
of modern warfare, the U.S. military bombed power plants
in North Korea, in North Vietnam and in Iraq.
Knocking out electricity supplies is considered
a strategic move, like destroying bridges or roads.
The Israelis were in conflict with Hezbollah
and they actually wanted to penalize the Lebanese people
because Hezbollah was and has been, and I think will continue
to be, part of the Lebanese government.
They are represented in the Parliament, they are represented
in the Cabinet of Ministers.
You have certain factions in this nation
that do not care about the progression of the life
of the ordinary Lebanese citizen.
[Nader] We lost a lot of, uh, infrastructure
and we haven't recovered yet,
why haven't we recovered? I think because
we had lack of political will.
The one reason in Lebanon that we do not have electricity
is corruption, plain and simple.
[Joseph Al Assad] In Lebanon, you need to schedule life
depending on electricity, you schedule your shower,
you schedule when your washing machine, your washing time,
you schedule everything depending
on electricity in our daily lives.
[Robert] Do you pay two electric bills?
As all Lebanese people,
we pay two power electric bills,
we pay one power electric bill to EDL
and you pay like the double of that
to the private generators in general.
Let's be frank of this, so the average Lebanese,
they need electricity, they need power, they don't need
to live in the dark, so they don't care
where this comes from,
we can't live without electricity for 12 hours a day,
so we have to rely on private generators or diesel generators,
and we can't all afford it. So, the idea of having
what we call a neighborhood generator evolved.
Where every powerful person in the neighborhood,
will buy a private generator, produce electricity
and sell electricity to the neighborhood.
That's we call the generator mafia.
[Robert] Do you know this term, the generator mafia?
- 100%. - [Robert laughs]
- Um, 100%, yeah. - [Robert] Everybody knows
- about generator mafia? - Oh, yes, it's the mafia.
They don't want to, to fix the electrical...
[Robert] They don't want the grid to work.
Exactly.
Because, you know, if they do the work
and they give it to us, 24 hours,
those mafias going to close.
- Yeah. - They not going to make money.
[Salah] And this business is
a very, it's a very big business, and it's hundreds
and hundreds of billions of dollars.
I don't think they would be happy if this business stops.
Look, I am a positive person, I don't like to call
these mafias, I, I would say
these are companies or business men
that were created by necessity.
If the national utility was supplying electricity,
reliably, 24 hours, this wouldn't have existed.
I live, my parents live in a village, and I know,
without those generators, life would have been
much, much more difficult.
They need the money, they taking the money from the people
just to put in his... their, their pocket, government.
First, the government.
I'm talking about the government in Lebanon.
The mafia, who's the government, the mafia, who's the government.
EDL produces around 20 to 25 cents per kilowatt hour,
and they are selling it around 10 to 11 cents,
so the more they generate, the more they lose.
At the time, the private generators, they generate
at around 20 cents and they sell it around 27 cents.
So, the more they generate, the more they make profit.
So, if you look at this very simple equation,
you would immediately conclude that EDL would lose money
by producing electricity, whereas the private generators
would, would make money by producing electricity so. [Chuckles]
[Robert] Throughout our travels in Lebanon,
I asked people what they thought of the generator mafia.
The best answer, by far, came from an advisor
to the Energy Minister.
He paused for a moment and then replied,
dead serious, "Well, they're not all mafia."
We're here in Jounieh, Lebanon, just north of Beirut.
My right over here is the old power plant.
You can see the big fuel tanks and the old smoke stacks.
It's not operating right now, but if you look over here,
that's one of the Turkish power ships.
Why are they leasing these power plants from the Turks?
Because the power grid here in Lebanon is so fragile,
they can't meet demand with the power generation
stations that they have, so they're leasing them
from the Turks. And what happens if they don't pay the bill?
The Turks just take the power ship and sail back to Turkey.
[light dramatic music]
My name is Mustafa Baalbaki.
I'm 30 years old, software engineer,
living in Beirut, Lebanon.
So, the cool feature of my app, Beirut Electricity,
is that it provides you push notifications
ten minutes ahead of time when the electricity will be off,
so that you can maybe grab that elevator
or just save your work before shutting down your computer.
I'm not fixing the electricity issue here in Lebanon.
I'm just trying to help people to cope with it.
[Antoine] I returned to Lebanon in 2011 after a long career in energy,
and I brought with me a coffee machine that I had purchased
in Canada, and I love that machine because I'm used to it.
It, it, it's fantastic, it grinds you fresh beans
at exactly at the time where it's brewing the coffee.
And you can program it to wake you up at seven o'clock
in the morning. And when I plugged it in Lebanon,
it woke me up at ten, and I realized they had
the power cut off three hours the same night.
My wife that actually I met in Canada,
she said, "Look, either you solve this problem, or I'm going back."
So, had to fix it.
[Robert chuckles]
[dramatic music]
[traffic whooshing]
[Robert] Still going backwards.
Hey, E24, rock on.
[Antoine] The reason we are in Lebanon is because it's a great lab.
The first problem is environment.
We are breathing our own fumes.
The second issue is, I know households who are paying
800 dollars for their mortgage
and another 700 or 800 dollars for electricity.
It is overall a catastrophe on both economical
and environmental aspect.
The tendency today is for consumers to buy more iPhones,
more laptops, more ACs, more equipment in general.
All of those require electricity.
The infrastructure that every country on the planet has
is basically fixed, and it takes time.
And the larger the country, the more time it takes
to upgrade that infrastructure.
Micro-grids are the future.
[Robert] In spite of Lebanon's many challenges,
corruption, war and a reliance on diesel generators
that are both expensive and dirty, along came E24.
Theirs was a two-fold solution, one part solar,
Lebanon has plenty of sunshine, and the other part, storage.
At a resort called, Qirzai, E24 is using lead acid batteries
designed in Bulgaria and manufactured in India
to store electricity produced by panels made in China.
It's a true micro-grid, unplugged from EDL
and beyond the reach of the generator mafia.
[Jessica] There's a lot of different sources of clean energy.
We need to be pursuing all of them.
[Roger] There is an idea that, wouldn't it be great
if we could get the electricity for free?
Free in terms of its cost,
free in terms of its environmental impacts.
The idea of renewable energy
meets that need for some people,
because there's sunshine, there's wind.
We don't have to dirty the world to get that.
[Jessica] The idea that we can power the world on 100%
renewables, particularly wind and solar, is powerful
because it's pure and simple, it's sort of wholesome,
like your grandma's energy. People see, you know,
solar panels on a roof and that feels good to them.
We have to focus on cost, reliability
and environmental attributes.
We can't develop a system for decarbonization
that doesn't accomplish those goals.
[Ben] Why do we care about climate change? It's not
because we care about the number,
the atmospheric CO2, it's because we're trying to protect
ourselves and protect the world we have around us
from the impact of climate change.
So why in the name of doing that would you flood a river forest?
Why would you cover the landscape with wind turbines?
Why would you take sensitive desert area for solar
if those were the values that we were seeking to protect
by the low carbon system, why would we go and interfere
with those values in the name of bringing down carbon?
[Roger] One of the defining characteristics of debate
over energy and climate is,
it's vitriolic, it's nasty,
um, people have very strong views,
they also have very strong beliefs
that their views are the right ones.
We want to have broad access to a wide variety of
energy sources that meet the needs of modern life
for as much of the world's population as we can achieve,
cheaply, reliably and with attention paid
to the environmental impacts of producing their power.
That's the goal, should renewables be a part of that
solution, I think the answer is yes.
[Priscilla] And then people start talking about things like,
"Okay, well, maybe instead of expanding the grid,
maybe we should give people solar lamps."
No, it doesn't work that way.
People are not going to eat solar lamps.
People are not going to be transformed by solar lamps.
[Steve] I think the idea that we can move the entire economy
to a set of renewable energy resources,
it's really framing the objective in the wrong way
because it makes renewables the objective.
It turns the means into the end itself.
[Ben] By creating this brand, renewable, which has put in the same basket,
a massive hydroelectric dam, a wind turbine
and a solar PV panel. They're remarkably different ways
of getting energy, each with respective advantages
and disadvantages. It's the opposite of what we actually
want in the system we're trying to provide.
We're not trying to create something chaotic.
We're trying to create something stable, predictable,
that can give people what they want, when they want it
at a low cost [chuckles] every hour of the year.
Preferably, you wouldn't do that with something that was driven by the weather.
[light dramatic music]
[Michael] If you care about the natural environment,
you're not going to create a power plant
that requires
150 times more land,
per unit of energy, than a nuclear plant.
Nuclear power was 50, 60 years ago, thought of as
our energy future, it was going to provide energy that was too
cheap to meter, and that everyone would have free energy.
Nuclear power became perceived as risky,
and high profile events like Chernobyl and Fukushima have contributed
to that public perception.
[man on TV] May I say something?
Go ahead.
The energy in the atom is the most
destructive force the world has ever seen.
It can also be one of the greatest blessings.
God has ever given us, which is it to be?
[Robert] When people consider environmental protection,
nuclear energy is likely one of the last things
to come to mind, it seems divorced from nature.
I understand that sentiment.
The first article I ever published
was an anti-nuclear piece.
I was in high school, and like many people from that era,
I associated anything having to do with nuclear
with the war effort and the military.
Fear of nuclear, and especially, from environmental
organizations is really a long standing tradition.
Most of these environmental organizations really came out
of anti-war organizations, they benefited a lot
from conflating nuclear power with nuclear weapons.
You know, early nuclear designs did come out of the military,
so I think there's that association for people
who don't like that big, military industrial complex.
[traffic whooshing]
- So, where we going, Robert? - [Robert] We're at the Indian Point Energy Center
in the village of Buchanan, New York.
This is the largest nuclear plant in the state of New York.
[gentle music]
[Robert] Today I'm at the Indian Point Energy Center,
located about 40 miles north of New York City.
This plant has been operating since 1962
and today it produces about 25% of all the electricity
consumed in the city of New York.
These two reactors behind me produce more than 2,000
megawatts of electricity.
The amazing thing about this plant is that is sits on
about one square kilometer of land.
[narrator] As uranium atoms in the nuclear reactor
disintegrate, tremendous amounts of heat are generated.
When the heat is transferred to a liquid
and the liquid has circulated from
the reactor to a boiler room,
it can produce steam.
Steam drives a generator to produce electricity.
[Robert] Getting into Indian Point wasn't easy.
We went through multiple security checkpoints
and multiple ID checks, but once inside I was,
as the Brits like to say, gobsmacked.
I've seen oil fields, coal mines, gas plants,
hydro plants, refineries and all kinds of factories,
but Indian Point was an engineering marvel.
A relic from another era.
Indian Point covers one square kilometer.
Replacing its output with wind energy would require
covering more than 13 hundred square kilometers
with wind turbines. That's one and half
times the size of New York City.
This pad will hold about 75 years' worth
of nuclear fuel.
- So, the spent fuel. - Of spent fuel.
So, in eight decades of reactor years,
- right? - Right.
You can fit all of the waste
from all of that in this area
which, I don't know, a couple tennis courts, maybe?
The likelihood of somebody coming along
and carrying one of these off is...
It's impossible, each cast weighs
about 230,000 pounds when loaded.
You can see our equipment that moves it, it moves
at about one mile an hour, it's, you know, a tank, basically.
So, the original plan was for the federal government
to come in and take that fuel off the hands of the utilities,
and when the utilities realized that that... that wasn't
going to happen, they basically invented dry cast storage,
so they could safely store it on site.
Just really a political issue about
what to do with it long-term.
[Robert] Indian Point is suffering a fate similar
to that of many nuclear facilities
throughout the U.S., premature closure.
Since 2013, U.S. utilities have closed or announced
the closure of 15 nuclear power plants.
In many cases, those reactors including the ones
at Indian Point, could've obtained license extensions
that would've allowed them to continue operating
for decades into the future.
[cars whooshing]
[birds chirping]
[Theresa] So, we've been known for many years as the smallest
municipality with nuclear power plants in it.
And there's generations of people
who have worked at that plant,
continue to work at that plant.
Entergy is the largest employer here,
they employ over 1,000 people.
Our budget in the village Buchanan is approximately
six million dollars, we're looking at losing half
of our budget when Entergy closes.
When you talk about replacing three million dollars
and replacing 1,000 jobs,
that's, that's a pretty s... steep hill to climb.
[train whirring]
[light dramatic music]
[Jessica] We're seeing a lot of these nuclear power plants close
prematurely in the U.S. and almost everywhere,
when they closed, they're being replaced by natural gas.
That's the first choice for utilities.
For Indian Point, they are planning to replace
the generation from Indian Point with natural gas,
which is a huge loss for the state of New York,
because New York has a very ambitious climate target
to reduce emissions, and Indian Point is about 25%
of the electricity for New York City.
So, taking that offline and replacing it with natural gas,
that's a big step backwards if you're concerned
about climate and trying to reduce emissions.
Indian Point is a built system, there are a lot of assets
that have already been invested in Indian Point.
It's zero carbon emitting, so if we want to reduce
carbon emissions in New York City, then we really don't want
to be removing a source of power
when it's not emitting carbon.
I commend reforming the energy vision as a vision,
as an ambitious plan, Indian Point
contributes to that vision.
To me, it just doesn't seem to really make good
economic or environmental sense.
It's a premature political decision.
Reducing carbon emissions, fighting climate change
is a big challenge, and you don't want to take anything off
the table, I think we're going to need a lot
more wind and solar, for sure, but we're also going to need
a lot more nuclear and a lot more natural gas to replace coal.
[Robert] You're either a climate change denier
or a believer, it's drill baby drill
or save the spotted owl.
Like most things in life, especially with something
as complex as electricity, it just isn't that simple.
But here's what we know, there are over three billion
people in the world today without adequate access
to electricity, in order to empower the low watt world
and keep up with the ever increasing power demand
from high watt citizens, we're going to need a lot more juice.
[Robert] What's the iron law of climate?
So, the iron law of climate is based on the idea that...
There, there's really only two ways that we can reduce emissions.
One is we could become poorer,
the other is that we can use technology
through how we source and use energy.
The iron law says we're not going to reduce emissions
by willingly getting poorer,
rich people aren't going to want to get poorer,
poor people aren't going to want to get poorer.
If there's one thing that we can count on, it's that policy makers
will be rewarded by populations if they make people
wealthier, so GDP is going to go up, we're doing everything
we can to try to get richer as nations, as communities,
as individuals, so if we want to reduce emissions,
we really have only one place to go, and that's technology.
[gentle music]
[Michael] I think the reason that nuclear is special is that
it's the only way to lift everybody out of poverty
and solve climate change.
[Ben] People don't appreciate the quantum of difference.
We've seen a step up of energy density in the fields
that we've used today, going from wood to charcoal,
coal, oil, gas... [chuckles] and then suddenly you step up
two orders of a magnitude to uranium.
[narrator] In a piece of uranium the size of a walnut,
there's as much potential energy as in the amount
of coal to fill a 100 car train.
We're not going to get a better battery than that.
So, here's the only way to make electricity production
that contains all of its toxic waste, all of it.
[Ben] I was raised in the environmental school of thought
that was telling me the world was getting worse,
and then I hit my 30's and started doing my own research
and realized, actually, on, on so many metrics the world
has got better, we're just stuck in an energy paradox
that the energy that's helping us make the world get better
has this horrible side effect, let's get rid
of the side effect, let's not get rid of the energy.
[Michael] This idea that there's too many people and that we all
have to reduce our energy consumption, the only people
in the world who say that are rich people.
I, I go around the world, I interview small farmers
everywhere, India, Africa, Latin America, Asia,
I've never had a small farmer
tell me that there's too many people and that
we consume too much, never, you know, um, never had that happen.
[Robert] Whenever we think about electricity,
if we think about it at all, we tend to think
of it on our own terms, as long as we can flip on
the air conditioner, charge our phone, watch TV
and surf the web, we take it for granted.
Electricity's just there, ever present, invisible,
making our high watt lives richer.
That's why we hit the road.
It's why we traveled over 60,000 miles and interviewed
more than 50 people over a three-year period.
We talked to professors and authors, engineers
and activists, and, of course, to people who grapple
with electricity poverty on a daily basis.
Their answers and observations
were as varied as their backgrounds,
but they could, on occasion, find common ground.
[Robert] What does electricity mean?
Electricity means prosperity,
means good life, means business.
What does electricity mean? I feel like it means life.
Electricity means opportunity.
Electricity is the life blood of a modern society.
Modern society is hooked on electricity.
If we can't keep our hospitals open, our ventilators going,
our refrigeration going, it all requires electricity.
Electricity means you are a human being.
If you don't have food, you can't live.
In a modern world, if you don't have
electricity, you don't have food.
If you don't have electricity,
you're cut off from policy making,
if you are not plugged in, how will you know?
How will you have mobile money, how will you have a bank account?
Electricity is like gold to us, without electricity,
we're nowhere, we go backwards, not forward.
No human should live on this planet
without basic access to electricity.
I see electricity as a basic human right.
I think people have basic rights,
rights for water, rights for necessity.
It should be the universal access,
everybody at the same level,
imagine how much more we can do?
You think about the potential of that.
When you can marriage dense fuel, particularly electricity
with human ingenuity, we can do nearly anything.
[Robert] As I drove home, I thought about the battles
that are waged in the name of electricity in the U.S.,
and couldn't help but compare them to what I had seen.
While we bicker about our favorite electricity sources,
billions of people are still stuck in the dark.
Electricity explains the world because everywhere
we went we saw how the electric grid reflected the society
it was powering. In Reykjavik, they smelt aluminum
and mine bitcoin because their electricity's almost free.
In Beirut, people endure daily blackouts
because the city's grid has been hobbled
by endless war and corruption.
Electricity, or rather, electricity access,
pits two of the toughest challenges
of our day against each other.
Energy poverty versus climate change.
There is no easy, one size fits all solution.
The only certainty is that people will do whatever
they have to do to get the electricity they need.
The challenge, it's a daunting one, is this.
We have to double global electricity production
over the next three decades or so, and we're going to need
solar, nuclear, coal, gas, geothermal, wind and hydro,
all of it, to make that happen.
[Roger] Governments aren't going to wait around for academics
to resolve their disputes, people around the world
are going to demand access to electricity.
[Steve] Can we, the developed industrialized world,
help these countries
move towards a place of political stability
and help them along the road to electrification?
[Joyashree] We are spending so much of time, how do we provide
sanitation, how do you provide... just provide
electricity and everything will come.
I think this is a wonderful opportunity to start fresh.
To look at new ideas, to experiment, I want to be totally
sustainable, I want to be off the grid, I want to be able
to take charge of my future and my business
and not depend on a third person.
It's both an opportunity, but also an impending challenge,
and it all goes back to electricity,
it shouldn't be an either or trade off, we can't afford
to choose electricity over climate change.
[Ben] I mean, the moment we start trying to trade
these things off, something has to lose.
If people have a choice between either no energy
and dirty energy, they will take dirty energy every time.
[Steve] By mid-century,
something, like, 75 to 80% of the world's
population is going to live in an urban or suburban setting.
It's going to be populated by people who really
don't want to have to think about their electricity.
They want to walk in a room, they want to flip on a light
and they want the light to work, just like us.
[light dramatic music]