I recently entertained a visitor I didn’t know from the US, he’s actually a Brit who has lived in the US a long time. Having discovered he is an airline pilot and ex-RAF we suddenly found a common interest and passion for aviation. Almost by accident we found another one when we stopped in our walking tour of Hampstead by the blue plaque commemorating Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets. There was some to and fro between the British visitor and our American companions about ‘real puppets’ which I didn’t get and then he turned to me for help and said, ‘you must have liked Thunderbirds’. This led to an animated conversation about which Thunderbirds machine was best, which Tracy son we wanted to be, and many other important things, none of which meant anything to our younger American friends.

Why do I bring this up? Thunderbirds was created in the optimistic 1960s, a time when the space race was in full swing, and advances in technology were rapid and were bringing many benefits, albeit without recognition of the negative consequences of many of them. That recognition had to await the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s. Back then we thought technology could solve all problems, most often applied through big, centralised projects. ‘Small is beautiful’ had to wait until 1973.

I was of course an avid Thunderbirds fan. The idea of a benevolent millionaire industrialist (no doubt a billionaire in today’s money) creating amazing machines to rescue people stuck in impossible situations is a great idea. It’s a pity that none of today’s generation of billionaires- at least the well known ones – aren’t doing the same.

Thinking about Thunderbirds also makes me think of the climate crisis, as well as the numerous intersecting problems of biodiversity and environmental degradation and destruction, and the role of technology. Reversing climate change and the loss of biodiversity are two of the massive challenges we face as a species, the others include improving social inclusion through better forms of capitalism, and of course the main one which is avoiding exchanges of nuclear weapons.

We spend most of our time on working on the problems but sometimes forget why are trying to build a better world with less impact from climate change and an abundant, verdant biosphere? It is more than just survival. Survival of course is a prerequisite but on its own it isn’t enough. Surely it is about creating a world where everyone can live peacefully and comfortably and fulfil their potential. Individuals’ potential and passions cover a huge range from music to art to science to technology to exploring this planet and of course other planets.

Although high technology has lost much of the allure it held in the 1960s, and today we are better at seeing the whole range of effects it can have, (although not always better at acting upon them), advanced, and advancing, technology is inevitable and necessary to solve the nexus of problems we face and to enable people to live fulfilling lives, rather than lives of hunger, suffering, oppression and hate. The current anti-science movement is so wrong headed and very scary. We have the most amazing scientific, medical and engineering technology ever and we are on the verge of being able to treat so many diseases that ruin lives and kill hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people. The benefits of vaccination are so obvious, but now in places like South Carolina we are just starting to see what happens when you reduce the vaccination rate through mis-information and ignorance. And it is not just in medicine, in energy we are in reach of having abundant clean energy through renewables, batteries and electrification.

People sometimes ask me about the paradox about working on climate change related problems and being into aviation and space exploration. I don’t see any paradox at all. To me those interests are fundamentally human – the desire to see and go further, to explore the universe and test one’s self, and to have adventures, it is just as human as making music, creating art, or just enjoying the countryside. We need to solve the climate and other environmental problems, as well as the risk of nuclear war so that we can all fulfill our potential and follow our passions, whatever they may be.

And just in case you are wondering – my favourite Thunderbirds machine is Thunderbird 2 and my favourite Tracy brother is Virgil. Yes, it is slower than TB1 and it is a cargo vehicle, but the design and the launch sequence, starting with Virgil going down the slide from the living room, is so cool.

The title of this blog is a quote from Virgil Tracy in the Thunderbirds episode ‘Give or take a million’

Photo credit: Steven Fawkes

For those that are interested the Museum of Brands in London has an excellent Thunderbirds and Space: 1999 exhibition, which actually covers all Gerry Anderson’s shows, running until 28 February 2026. Don’t miss it.

Introduction
For more than a century, the link between technological systems and political power has been clear. Centralised grids, heavy industry, and national utilities reflected the centralised authority of governments and corporations. Yet as we move into an era of distributed, renewable, and digital energy, that old alignment is breaking down.

W. Brian Arthur, the economist and complexity theorist, offers a powerful lens through which to understand this shift. His concept of “domains” — clusters of related technologies that evolve and interact as a whole — reveals how decentralised energy could reshape not only markets but the very structure of political and economic power.

Domains versus Individual Technologies
Arthur argues that the economy rarely transforms in response to a single technology. What truly changes society is the arrival of an entire domain — a body of technologies that work together and enable one another.

A single railway engine did not revolutionise transport and the world; the entire railway domain did — including steel production, surveying, scheduling, finance, logistics, and even the measurement of time itself. Likewise, the digital revolution emerged not from a lone computer but from the domain of semiconductors, software, data storage, and telecommunications. And today, the energy transition is being driven by the domain of solar PV, batteries, inverters, smart grids, and digital markets — not by any single component.

How Economies Encounter Domains
Arthur describes the economy as a living, adaptive system that “encounters” new bodies of technology rather than simply adopting them. This encounter forces reorganisation: industries evolve, institutions adapt, and new economic structures emerge.

When a domain arrives, everything shifts:
– Old industries decay or are restructured.
– New sectors, professions, and infrastructures arise.
– Regulation, finance, and ownership models evolve.
– Cultural and political norms adjust to the new possibilities.

This process of systemic adaptation — not invention alone — is what creates revolutions. We are in a revolution today, a revolution in the energy domain.

Technological Revolutions as Domain Emergence
Each major revolution in history reflects the rise of a domain. The Industrial Revolution was not about the steam engine but about the mechanical domain — metallurgy, precision tools, and factory organisation. The Digital Revolution was the coming of the digital domain — computing, networking, and information theory.

The emerging Energy Revolution is now defined by the decentralised energy domain: solar, batteries, EVs, and smart grids, all linked through data and flexibility markets. Together, these technologies are reshaping not just how we power our lives, but how we structure economies and political systems.

The Political Implications of Decentralised Energy
Energy has always been a political instrument. Centralised grids and fuel networks gave governments and monopolies immense power over economies and citizens. Decentralised energy disrupts that dynamic by redistributing generation and control.

Key implications include:
1. Energy Sovereignty – Communities that generate and store their own power can gain autonomy from central authorities.
2. Democratisation – Decisions about energy investment and management can move to local cooperatives and councils.
3. Economic Empowerment – Revenues from distributed generation can stay within local economies.
4. New Inequalities – Without fair policy, decentralisation could benefit wealthier early adopters first.
5. Institutional Reinvention – Regulators and utilities must adapt to a new world with millions of independent producers.

In short, decentralised energy transfers both electrical and political power from the centre to the edge.
Like all such changes these trends will be resisted by incumbents, and we are increasingly seeing the lengths the incumbents will go to such as spreading false information and confusion. How they do this is a subject in its own right.

Government’s Changing Role
The governments role does not vanish in a decentralised energy system — it needs to evolve. Their role shifts from direct control to orchestration and coordination. Regulation becomes about ensuring interoperability, fairness, and access rather than commanding production. The challenge for governments is to facilitate and encourage change and not over-protect the incumbents.

Countries like Germany, Denmark, and the UK are already experimenting with models that empower communities and aggregators. Citizen-owned energy cooperatives now account for a significant share of renewable capacity in Europe, while local flexibility markets in the UK are redefining how the grid is managed.

Global and Geopolitical Consequences
At the global level, the emergence of the decentralised energy domain challenges the geopolitical order built on fossil fuels. Energy independence weakens the leverage of oil and gas exporters as demand for fossil fuels declines, and we are seeing the traditional petrostates in the Middle East race to diversity. On the other hand the change strengthens the leverage of the suppliers of electricity domain technology, which right now means China. Developing nations can leapfrog directly to clean, distributed systems.

Cultural Shifts: Energy as a Commons
Beyond economics and politics, decentralised energy carries deep cultural meaning. When people produce and manage their own electricity, they will begin to see energy differently. Awareness of consumption grows, and communities could become more engaged in managing collective assets.

This cultural transformation could foster new forms of civic participation, linking sustainability to democratic renewal.

Arthur’s Insight Applied to the Energy Domain
Arthur’s insight — that “the economy does not adopt a new body of technology; it encounters it” — captures what is happening today. The economy is encountering the decentralised energy domain, and in the process, it is reorganising itself.

Utilities are becoming service platforms, citizens are becoming producers, and entire markets are being redesigned around flexibility and data. What we are witnessing is not merely an energy transition, but a profound restructuring of how society distributes and governs power itself. Like all transitions it will not be a smooth journey and there will be bottlenecks, detours and even defeats along the way. The fundamental direction however if clear.

Conclusion: Rewiring Power
The 20th century’s centralised grid mirrored the centralised state; the 21st century’s distributed energy mirrors a more networked, participatory society. The technologies of solar, batteries, and digital control are not just changing our infrastructure — they are redefining the architecture of power.

In Arthur’s terms, we are living through the emergence of a new domain — one that will ultimately reshape economies, politics, and culture as deeply as the industrial and digital domains did before. As the decentralised energy domain matures, it will continue to blur the boundary between electrical power and political power — placing both increasingly in the hands of citizens.

Last week I was lucky enough to attend an event at the Royal Institution hosted by Braintree entitled ‘AI: Digital Consciousness – Sustainable Intelligence’. As far as I understand it, Braintree has developed a different approach to AI based on Symbolic architecture, which promises AI with far lower computing requirements and hence far lower power and water requirements in data centres – a more sustainable way.

Like many people, I have played around with LLMs and have been equally amazed and terrified. The incidence of LLM hallucination, coupled with a general and probably growing trend to accept anything that comes out of a computer as true, is deeply worrying with massive implications for education, science, engineering, our brains, and global society.

The whole evening was so interesting I have tried to write up my notes from the event, apologies to the speakers if I have mis-interpreted their presentation.

The two external speakers were brilliant and thought provoking. Kay Firth-Butterworth is a lawyer who has specialised in ethical AI for fourteen years, which in itself is amazing given that 14 years ago the profile of AI was much, much lower than today.

Kay’s presentation included the facts that: 20% of men in the US have an intimate relationship with an AI, each query to an LLM consumes 0.25 litre of water, and that by next month AI will be generating more data than humans. Kay spoke about the problems that AI is creating in the legal system where briefs now often include ‘hallucinations’ created by AI, either referring to non-existent cases or just making up evidence. This means the legal system is grinding to a halt and of course lawyers can be charged with contempt if they put forward arguments based on AI hallucinations.

There is also evidence from the US that AI means that recent University graduates are illiterate in their own subjects. AI is literally creating stupidity. Trust in AI is falling but at the same time it is increasingly being deployed, not just in ‘simple’ things like the apps and programs we use but also in autonomous lethal weapons. Organisations are facing cascading risks and the very nature of management and leadership is changing.

The second speaker, Pippa Malmgren, has been an adviser to President George W. Bush, and the UK Cabinet, as well as many large companies. Having set the context of the explosion in knowledge Pippa gave essentially a positive view of AI and talked about how it can do the ‘heavy lifting’ in many fields while humans can be freed up for more human things, like art and creativity.

Pippa talked about how AI is forcing the abandonment of the cartesian split, the split between left brain and right brain. She also touched on how most of our data input is visually whereas other senses like touch and smell are important. She used good quotations including:

Suffering comes from having an argument with reality

Evolution comes from adapting to reality

Imagination is more important than analytics

Pippa believes that AI will help us move from scarcity to abundance.

The vision of AI taking on the heavy lifting, and the dull and dirty tasks, while humans focus on creativity and more right brained stuff, is beguiling – and of course it has long been used in science-fiction. The concern of course is that if all the ‘boring’ stuff like cars, the Air Traffic Control system, nuclear power stations, and the ICBMs are controlled by AI which starts hallucinating that is really very bad. This vision has also been widely used in science fiction, notably in the 1970 film “Colossus: The Forbin Project” in which an AI is given command of the ICBMs and starts communicating with its Russian equivalent. In ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ HAL tries to kill all of the crew of the spacecraft as he has decided it is in the best interests of the mission.

It seems that through the work of Kay and others we have started to address the issue of ethical AI but we need to do a lot more as the Silicon Valley ‘tech bros’ and wave of investors backing AI seem hell bent on pushing its use without much if any thought. The precautionary principle seems to have been forgotten entirely.

A few things came together for me in the last week or so including; reading an article about the continued low returns from fossil fuel investments; the continued extreme high temperatures in the UK and much of Europe and the USA; the passing of Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’, (‘BBB’); and a text conversation with a pioneer of sustainable finance who categorised his work as ‘early skirmishes’. His phrase inspired me to continue my military inspired theme from my blog of 2 June, ‘Are energy engineers fighting the last war?’ in today’s title.

The energy transition, (and the wider drive towards net zero), like all economic and social transitions, can be characterised as a war – a war between the incumbents who will fight tooth and nail, using all their resources and powers, to protect their existing business, and the disruptors. It is a familiar story from the innovation literature as well as history. The early skirmishes have been things like the work on sustainable finance and the adoption of renewables using various forms of subsidies in the early days. Now we are in a situation where economics, the really powerful driver – the big guns if you like, are widely, (if not universally yet), in favour of electrification, renewables, batteries and flexibility and against fossil fuel driven systems. The relative economics makes capital flow but of course changes in the direction of capital are not instant and there is considerable inertia in the system caused by several factors, including the long life time of many assets and investors wanting to maintain at least the illusion of financial performance by not publicly admitting losses.

The incumbents are clearly facing a rising tide that in time will wash them away – but until that happens they will build every barrier they can. We see that in the ‘PR’ (actually propaganda) against EVs and heat pumps, and we see it very clearly in the ‘BBB’ which will end tax credits for renewables as well as open up Federal lands for oil and gas drilling and coal mining. In the words of the President of the American Petroleum Institute, ‘It includes almost all of our priorities’ so they have won that battle in the US but it doesn’t mean they have won the war.

Meanwhile the Institute for Energy Economic and Financial Analysis reports that:

• Fossil fuel stocks reported a 5.72% return in 2024, barely one-fifth of the S&P 500’s return of 25.02%
• The fossil fuel sector has under-performed the S&P 500 in seven of the last 10 years, delivering the lowest returns and highest volatility of any of the S&P’s sectors over the period.
• At the end of 2024 the energy sector made up only 3.2% of the S&P’s total value, compared to 30% in 1980.
• Fossil fuel investments are now an implicit bet on geopolitical disruption and near-term destabilisation.
• The sector’s free cash flow remained weak.
• The shift of capital away from fossil fuels continued as more major pension funds divested.

This shift was also reflected in the IEA’s 2024 World Energy Investment report which showed that the investment into clean energy of $2 trillion is almost twice that into fossil fuels.

Investors consider returns and risks – low returns and high volatility are bad, higher and stable returns which can be generated by electrification and renewables are inherently more attractive. The big guns of economics and the shifting capital flows are just getting started. The battle ahead will not be easy and will not be without its losses, but the outcome is clear.

Note
The quote in the title is from Winston Churchill’s speech on the Battle of Egypt in the Mansion House, 10 November 1942.