The Hoover Dam was not built by a family. It was built by a nation — twenty thousand workers over five years, publicly funded and publicly governed, designed to electrify an entire region and make a desert habitable. The Tennessee Valley Authority brought power to some of the poorest communities in America. The Interstate Highway System connected a continent. These were not small projects. They were acts of collective ambition, financed by pooled resources and authorized by democratic decision.
The People's Share argues for participatory democracy, not for smallness. Sometimes democracy builds a garden. Sometimes it builds a dam. The principle is the same at every scale: the people who depend on the infrastructure should govern it. A family putting solar panels on its roof and a nation investing in superhot-rock geothermal are not in competition. They are the same impulse — self-determination through energy — operating at different magnitudes.
The companion essay, The Sun Hits the Earth at Ten Thousand Times, covered the technologies that are here now: solar, wind, lithium-ion, iron-air, enhanced geothermal. This essay looks further out — at the energy moonshots that are still in development, the ones that could transform the landscape within a generation. We take them seriously. We also ask the question that moonshot rhetoric typically leaves out: who decides which ones get built, who funds them, and who governs what they become?
I. The Principle: Scale Without Surrender
There is a temptation, in movements that value community self-reliance, to become allergic to bigness. To treat the rooftop solar panel as virtuous and the gigawatt power plant as inherently suspect. To romanticize the local and distrust the collective undertaking.
This is a mistake. It confuses the scale of a project with the governance of a project. A community solar microgrid governed by its members is democratic. A continental supergrid governed by its users through elected representatives is also democratic. A rooftop panel owned by a family is self-determination. A publicly funded fusion reactor that delivers free baseload power to a nation is also self-determination — at a scale no family can achieve alone.
The enemy is not bigness. The enemy is exclusion — from decision-making, from ownership, from benefit. Mondragón is not small. It is a federation of cooperatives employing over eighty thousand worker-owners, operating across multiple countries. It is big. And it is governed by the people who do the work. That is the model: scale without surrender. Ambition without abdication.
What follows is a survey of the energy technologies that require collective ambition — pooled resources, sustained research, infrastructure that no household can build alone — and an honest assessment of where each one stands, what it promises, and what governance demands it makes.
II. Superhot Rock Geothermal: Heat Everywhere
The first Autotroph essay covered Fervo Energy's enhanced geothermal work in Utah — drilling into hot rock and creating artificial reservoirs to generate 24/7 baseload power. That technology is real and delivering results. But the frontier beyond it is even more consequential.
Superhot rock geothermal targets depths of five kilometers or more, where temperatures exceed 400°C — conditions that exist, at sufficient depth, nearly everywhere on earth. At those temperatures, water reaches a supercritical state that carries far more energy per unit than conventional geothermal steam. A single superhot well could produce five to ten times the power of a conventional geothermal well.
If this works at scale, the implications are extraordinary. It would provide clean, dispatchable, weather-independent baseload power available to any nation, regardless of latitude, climate, or solar resource. Northern countries with long dark winters — Scandinavia, Canada, northern Russia — would have access to the same clean baseload as equatorial nations. Island nations, landlocked countries, dense urban cores where solar and wind face space constraints — all of them could tap the heat beneath their feet.
The challenge is engineering, not physics. Drilling to five kilometers in crystalline rock, managing the extreme pressures and temperatures, preventing the induced fractures from closing over time — these are hard problems. They borrow techniques from the oil and gas industry's deep horizontal drilling, but push them into territory that petroleum extraction has never needed to reach. The research is being funded by a mix of government agencies — the DOE's Enhanced Geothermal Shot initiative — and private ventures. Progress is real but measured in years, not months.
For The People's Share, superhot rock geothermal is the strongest argument for public investment at scale. No family drills five kilometers into the earth's crust. No neighborhood builds a supercritical steam plant. This is Hoover Dam territory — publicly funded, publicly governed infrastructure that serves millions. The question is whether the resulting energy will be owned by the public that funded the research, or privatized once the hard science is done and the profits are ready. That pattern — public risk, private reward — is the oldest trick in the energy playbook, and The People's Share will call it out every time it appears.
III. Fusion: The Honest Assessment
Fusion is the technology that could change everything and the technology that has been about to change everything for seventy years. That history demands both respect and skepticism.
The science is sound. Fusing hydrogen isotopes into helium releases enormous energy — the process that powers the sun. The fuel is effectively limitless: deuterium from seawater and tritium bred from lithium. No carbon emissions. No long-lived radioactive waste. No risk of meltdown — a fusion reaction that loses containment simply stops.
The engineering is ferociously difficult. Containing a plasma at a hundred million degrees Celsius — hotter than the core of the sun — for long enough to produce more energy than it takes to sustain the reaction has been the central challenge for decades. In December 2022, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore achieved scientific ignition for the first time: more energy out of the reaction than the lasers put in. It was a genuine milestone. It was also a laboratory result, not a power plant.
The private sector is now in the race. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, backed by significant venture capital, is building SPARC — a compact tokamak designed to demonstrate net energy gain using high-temperature superconducting magnets. TAE Technologies is pursuing a different approach — field-reversed configuration with hydrogen-boron fuel that would produce almost no neutron radiation. Several other companies are working on other designs. The optimists say a commercial demonstration reactor could operate by the mid-2030s. The realists note that "commercial demonstration" is still a long way from a power plant on a grid serving homes.
The People's Share should be honest about fusion: if it arrives, it is the ultimate backstop. Limitless clean baseload power would remove every remaining constraint on the energy supply side. But no practical vision for the next twenty years should depend on fusion arriving on schedule. The energy transition works without it. Every investment in solar, wind, storage, geothermal, and distributed generation is justified on its own terms, right now, with technologies that are shipping product. Fusion is the bonus round, not the foundation.
And if fusion does arrive, the governance question will be the most important question of the century. A technology that provides effectively limitless energy will either be the greatest public good in human history or the greatest concentration of private power ever achieved. There is no middle ground. The ownership of fusion energy must be settled democratically, and it must be settled before the first commercial reactor is built — not after, when the patents are filed and the contracts are signed.
IV. Hydrogen: The Complement, Not the Replacement
Clean hydrogen — produced by splitting water with renewable electricity — does things that batteries and direct electrification cannot. It stores energy seasonally: surplus solar in summer can be converted to hydrogen, stored in underground caverns, and converted back to electricity in winter. It fuels heavy shipping, long-haul aviation, and industrial processes that require temperatures too high for electric heating. It is a feedstock for ammonia (and therefore fertilizer), steel, and synthetic fuels.
The DOE's Hydrogen Shot initiative targets clean hydrogen at $1 per kilogram by 2031 — an eighty percent cost reduction. If achieved, hydrogen becomes competitive with natural gas as an industrial fuel, and the cascade effects are significant. Green steel. Green ammonia. Green shipping fuel. The decarbonization of the hardest sectors to electrify.
But hydrogen has a political economy that demands scrutiny. The fossil fuel industry has embraced hydrogen rhetoric enthusiastically — because hydrogen preserves the centralized fuel-distribution model. You still need production facilities, pipelines, storage terminals, distribution networks. You still need an intermediary between the energy source and the end user. For every application where hydrogen is genuinely necessary — heavy industry, seasonal storage, long-haul transport — there is an application where hydrogen is being proposed as a substitute for direct electrification that batteries can already handle: heating homes, powering cars, running short-haul trucks. In those cases, hydrogen is less efficient, more expensive, and more complex than plugging in. Promoting it anyway is a strategy for preserving the fuel-distribution business model.
The People's Share should cover hydrogen as what it is: an essential complement to electrification for the applications electricity alone cannot reach. Not a replacement for putting solar on the roof and a battery in the garage. And not a back door for the fossil fuel industry to reinvent itself as the hydrogen industry while preserving the same centralized, extractive ownership model.
V. Gold Hydrogen: The Unexpected Gift
In 2012, a well drilled in the village of Bourakébougou, Mali, struck not water but naturally occurring hydrogen gas. The village has been using it to power a generator ever since — clean, free fuel seeping from the earth's crust.
For years, geologists dismissed natural hydrogen as a curiosity. The assumption was that hydrogen, being the lightest element, would escape the earth's crust too quickly to accumulate in useful quantities. That assumption is being overturned. Research over the past several years has identified potential hydrogen seeps and subsurface accumulations on multiple continents. The geological processes that produce this hydrogen — serpentinization of iron-rich rocks, radiolysis of water by natural radioactivity — are widespread and ongoing.
If extractable reserves of geologic hydrogen turn out to be large — and several exploration companies are now drilling test wells to find out — the implications are significant. Naturally occurring hydrogen requires no electrolysis, no renewable electricity input, and no manufacturing infrastructure. It is simply there, in the rock, waiting to be tapped. The extraction cost could be a fraction of green hydrogen's cost.
This is too early to build policy around. The reserves may be small, the extraction may prove impractical, the geology may not cooperate. But it is worth tracking closely, because if it works, it is another input into the surplus economy — and another resource whose ownership and governance must be settled before extraction begins. The village in Mali owns its well. That model should be the default, not the exception.
VI. Seasonal Storage and the Winter Question
Iron-air batteries solve the multi-day problem — a hundred hours of storage gets a community through a three-day storm or a week of clouds. But a northern latitude winter, where solar generation drops by seventy or eighty percent for months, demands something longer: seasonal storage.
Several approaches are in development. Thermal storage — heating sand, gravel, or molten salt with surplus summer energy and extracting the heat in winter — is technically straightforward and pilot projects exist. Compressed air stored in underground caverns can be released to drive turbines when needed. Gravity-based systems — lifting heavy weights when energy is abundant and lowering them to generate power when it's scarce — are being commercialized for shorter durations. And hydrogen, stored in salt caverns or depleted gas fields, can serve as a seasonal energy carrier: surplus summer solar produces hydrogen via electrolysis, and the hydrogen is converted back to electricity (or used directly for heat) in winter.
None of these is as far along as iron-air or lithium-ion. Most are site-specific — you need the right geology for caverns, the right geography for gravity storage. But they are not science fiction, and they are being actively developed. The DOE's Long-Duration Storage Shot targets systems that can deliver ten or more hours of storage at costs below current lithium-ion within the decade, with longer-duration systems to follow.
For The People's Share, seasonal storage is the horizon line. It is the technology that, combined with overbuilt solar and wind, would make a fully renewable grid viable year-round at every latitude. It requires the kind of sustained public investment — in research, in pilot projects, in infrastructure — that only collective action can provide. Another dam-scale undertaking. Another reason not to confuse democratic governance with smallness.
VII. Carbon-Negative Concrete and the Shelter Connection
A brief note here, because it connects the energy moonshots to the next domain The People's Share will cover in depth: shelter.
Concrete is the second most consumed substance on earth after water. Its manufacturing accounts for roughly eight percent of global carbon emissions — more than aviation. If the building material itself could be made to absorb more carbon than it emits during production, the construction industry would flip from one of the largest sources of emissions to a carbon sink.
Several companies are working on exactly this. Technologies that mineralize captured CO₂ into concrete aggregate, or that use alternative cementitious materials with lower embodied carbon, are in various stages of commercialization. Combined with 3D-printed construction — which uses less material, generates less waste, and builds faster than traditional methods — the prospect of building homes that are not just carbon-neutral but carbon-negative is within reach.
This is where domains converge: cheap renewable energy powers the concrete plant, the 3D printer, and the carbon capture system. Surplus midday solar runs the process at near-zero marginal cost. The resulting home generates its own power, stores it in its own battery, and was built from a material that pulled carbon from the atmosphere while it cured. That is not a fantasy. It is an engineering integration problem — and integration, as The New Agrarians argued, is exactly what intelligence makes possible.
VIII. What's Missing from the Moonshot List
The standard inventory of energy moonshots — the one circulated by the DOE, echoed by industry analysts, repeated in technology media — has a consistent blind spot. Every item on the list is a supply-side technology. How to generate more energy, store more energy, transmit more energy. The ambition is real. The framing is incomplete.
Missing from the list: demand-side transformation. Passive solar architecture — buildings designed to heat and cool themselves through orientation, thermal mass, and natural ventilation — can reduce a household's energy needs by fifty percent or more before a single solar panel is installed. District heating systems that capture waste heat from industry or geothermal sources can warm entire neighborhoods at a fraction of the energy cost of individual furnaces. Walkable neighborhoods, designed for people rather than cars, eliminate transportation energy at the urban-planning level. Food systems that shorten supply chains — local agriculture, community-supported farms, reduced cold-chain logistics — reduce the enormous energy embedded in the industrial food system.
These are not moonshots. They are design choices. They are less glamorous than a fusion reactor, and they don't attract venture capital. But they are available now, they reduce the scale of the supply-side problem, and they put agency back in the hands of communities rather than technology developers. The People's Share will cover them with the same rigor we bring to iron-air batteries and superhot rock.
Also missing: who funds the moonshots and who owns the results. The DOE's SunShot initiative is correctly celebrated for driving down solar costs. But the benefits of that publicly funded research flowed overwhelmingly to utility-scale developers and wealthy homeowners who could afford early rooftop systems. The communities that needed cheap energy most — low-income neighborhoods, rural areas, the Global South — received it last, if at all. Public investment, private capture. The pattern is old and it is not accidental.
If public funds develop superhot-rock geothermal, the resulting technology should be publicly owned. If public research cracks seasonal storage, the intellectual property should be in the public domain. If public investment makes fusion viable, the reactors should be governed by the communities they serve — not licensed to private operators who charge rent on a technology the public already paid for. This is not radical economics. It is common sense: you should own what you paid for.
IX. The Demand-Side and the Full Picture
The complete energy vision of The People's Share is neither all gardens nor all dams. It is both, and the intelligence to connect them.
At the household level: solar generation, battery storage, smart energy management, passive design that minimizes demand before generation even begins. This is the autotroph — the organism that makes its own energy from light.
At the community level: microgrids that share surplus, community-scale storage that provides resilience, cooperative ownership that keeps governance local. This is the neighborhood as energy commons.
At the regional and national level: overbuilt renewable capacity with long-duration and seasonal storage, enhanced and superhot geothermal for weather-independent baseload, hydrogen for the applications electricity cannot reach, and — if it arrives — fusion as the ultimate backstop. These are the dams: collectively funded, collectively governed, serving the public good.
At every level, the principle is the same: the people who depend on the energy should govern it. A family governs its rooftop. A community governs its microgrid. A public governs its geothermal plant. The scale changes. The principle does not.
And connecting all of it: intelligence. AI-optimized energy management at every scale — household, neighborhood, grid — that balances generation, storage, consumption, and surplus in real time. Not intelligence owned by a technology company and delivered as a subscription. Intelligence embedded in the infrastructure, governed by the people who use it, trained on data they consented to share.
This is the full picture. A million gardens and a dam. Local self-sufficiency and collective ambition. The smallest roof and the deepest well. All of it governed by the same principle: we own what we build, and we govern what we own.
The energy moonshots are real. Some will land in this decade. Some will take a generation. Some may not arrive at all. What will certainly arrive, because it is already here, is the basic capacity for families and communities to generate, store, and govern their own power. That capacity exists today, and it is getting cheaper every year.
The moonshots extend the horizon. They do not replace the foundation. And the foundation — solar on the roof, a battery in the garage, a microgrid on the block, a community that owns its own infrastructure — is available now, to anyone with the resources and the political will to build it.
The People's Share will continue to cover both: the technologies that are here, with addresses and price tags, and the technologies that are coming, with honest assessments of their promise and their risks. And we will keep asking the question that matters most: not whether the technology will arrive, but who will own it when it does.