Energy // Decoded — Every way humanity makes power

// Grid telemetry

The power mix, by the numbers

Data graphs cycling through cost, carbon, capacity factor and the shifting global energy mix. Auto-advances; hover to pause, click any chart for the detail, tap a dot to jump.

// The sources

Energy index — every way we make power

Every major way humanity generates and stores electricity — click any card for the full spec sheet and history.

// The frontier

The next grid

Cheap solar and wind won the cost war. These are the technologies racing to make clean power firm, dispatchable and always-on.

Fusion

A star in a bottle

Fusing hydrogen into helium releases millions of times more energy per gram than burning fuel, with no long-lived waste and no carbon. In 2022 Lawrence Livermore’s laser fusion hit "ignition" — more energy out than the lasers put in. Turning that lab spark into a power plant is the remaining, enormous engineering challenge, with dozens of private firms now chasing it.

Advanced nuclear

Small modular reactors

SMRs shrink the reactor into factory-built modules a fraction the size of a conventional plant, aiming to cut the cost and construction risk that stalled nuclear. Paired with new fuels and passive safety, they promise firm, carbon-free power that can be sited near data centres and industry.

Geothermal

Heat from the rock

Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) drill deep and fracture hot dry rock to make steam anywhere — not just volcanic hotspots — using techniques borrowed from shale drilling. It offers always-on, carbon-free baseload power, and pilot plants are now feeding the grid.

Green hydrogen

Fuel from water

Splitting water with clean electricity makes hydrogen that stores energy for weeks, fuels heavy industry and can be burned or run through a fuel cell with only water as exhaust. The prize is decarbonising steel, shipping and aviation; the hurdle is the cost of the electrolysers and clean power to run them.

Grid storage

Firming the sun

Solar and wind are cheap but intermittent, so the grid needs somewhere to put the energy. Lithium and sodium batteries handle hours, pumped hydro and flow batteries handle longer, and iron-air targets multi-day storage — together turning variable renewables into round-the-clock power.

Transmission

The wires that decide it

The quiet bottleneck isn’t generation — it’s moving power from where the sun and wind are to where people live. High-voltage DC "superhighways" and a modernised, digital grid are as important to the transition as any new power plant.

// Frontier dispatch · newest in energy

Solar and storage take over

Where the energy transition actually stands right now.

THE COST FLIP

Solar became the cheapest electricity humanity has ever built — and storage is making it firm.

In little over a decade, the cost of solar power fell by roughly 90%, making new utility-scale solar the cheapest source of electricity in most of the world. Wind followed. The result is a historic flip: in much of the world it is now cheaper to build new clean power than to run existing fossil plants.

The remaining problem is that the sun sets and the wind drops. That is why batteries have become the fastest-growing part of the grid — solar-plus-storage now undercuts new gas for evening peaks — while advanced nuclear, geothermal and, further out, fusion race to supply the firm, always-on power that renewables alone can’t. The 2020s are the decade the grid is being rebuilt.

> Sources: IEA · Lazard LCOE · Our World in Data · IPCC. Cost and carbon figures are typical ranges, not single projects.