Energy, Rewritten

Why Energy Is the Battleground for AI, Climate Resilience, and National Sovereignty

This is a newsletter exploring how AI, climate change, and geopolitics are reshaping the foundational layers of human and planetary health.

We live in a time when biology is (re)programmable, nature is intervenable, and national borders are increasingly fluid. 1000bai examines this transformation through the lens of founders, funders, researchers, and thinkers who are rebuilding our deepest infrastructures: how we heal, grow, and survive.

Each edition will offer insight into what’s being rewritten and why it matters, with rounded analysis, provocative ideas, and curated signals from the frontier of living systems.

No noise. Just signal.

—Koshu (Okinawa) & Ander (Basque Country) of Lifetime Ventures.

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The Problem

The modern energy system wasn’t designed, it was accumulated. Over the last centuries, we optimized for affordability and scale, not resilience. We built around centralized fossil fuel infrastructure because it was cheap, dense, and geopolitically dominant. But this foundation has two fatal flaws:

1. Structural/ Economic/ Political Lock-In
   Centralized grids, global supply chains, and industrial processes have been path-dependent for decades. The deeper the roots of fossil infrastructure, the harder it is to transition to a diversified and decentralized energy system, even as clean alternatives are now mature and more affordable.

2. Misalignment Between Supply and Sovereignty
   Electricity is only one layer of the energy puzzle. Many critical sectors (steel, cement, shipping, aviation) can’t easily electrify, the ones also called “hard-to-abate”. Meanwhile, control over energy sources and grid infrastructure has become a proxy for national power, giving birth to energy sovereignty pursuits, thus creating friction between clean energy goals and sovereign interests.

Why Now?

Energy is the architecture of civilization, but we’re at an inflection point. The old energy system is incompatible with planetary boundaries, and a new one is yet to form.

But three forces are accelerating a shift that legacy systems can no longer absorb:

1. AI as an Enabler
   AI is not the solution, but can enable transition far faster. It accelerates modeling, materials discovery, and grid optimization. AI unlocks second-order systems: autonomous infrastructure, adaptive microgrids, and predictive maintenance that challenge the logic of centralized control.

2. Climate as a Systemic Risk
   Energy and climate are co-dependent. Every degree of warming makes the grid less reliable (heatwaves, wildfires), while every delay in decarbonization compounds future volatility. And we’ve reached a point where climate chaos is no longer a downstream effect, it’s an upstream disruptor to the whole economy and society that has become almost impossible to ignore by simply removing these words by websites.

3. Geopolitical Realignment
   Oil shaped the 20th century’s geopolitical order. Lithium, copper, and rare earths will shape the 21st century. But unlike oil, these minerals are unevenly distributed, environmentally intensive, and locked up in new forms of IP, mining rights, and battery chemistries. The shift from fossil empires to mineral republics is already fracturing old alliances and forging new dependencies, as prevalent in the recent US-Ukraine minerals deal.

The Future

We’re not just swapping fuels, we’re rewriting the architecture of energy.

The next system will be diversified, intelligent, and sovereign by design. It will store power like data, reroute electrons like packets, and turn carbon from waste into input.

Expect to see:

• Diversification of energy sources in major political regions: renewable plus nuclear, thermal, gravity, hydrogen, and hybrid systems buffering volatility.

• Further electrification of every single industry: clean heat for steel, cement, and chemicals.

• AI-native generation, distribution, and consumption: adaptive, decentralized, and self-optimizing in real-time.

• Carbon valorization: CO₂ from fossil fuel energy transformed into synthetic fuel, feedstock, and biology.

The real shift? Energy is being reimagined by founders building at the edge of physics, code, and capital.

Rabbit Hole

📚 Read: How to avoid a climate disaster (Bill Gates), How the World Really Works (Vaclav Smil), Electrify (Saul Griffith).

🗞 Click: Speed & Scale, BloombergNEF, Canary Media

🎧 Listen: The Energy podcast (Shell), Everything Energy

🎫 Attend: Energytech Summit (Bilbao), ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit (US), World Future Energy Summit (Abu Dhabi).