I’ve always believed that the widespread adoption of clean energy will be a historical event with an impact comparable to the Industrial Revolution. My core reasoning is this: it creates the conditions for humanity’s total energy usage to increase by one or more orders of magnitude.

• Humans initially obtained energy through food and then mobilized energy through their bodies to transform the environment and create civilization. Gathering, storing, and releasing energy were all done by their own bodies.
• Soon after, humans learned to domesticate livestock. By using animal power, the mechanical energy that humans could mobilize increased significantly, and the links of gathering, storing, and releasing began to gradually separate from their own bodies.
• Coupled with the use of natural forces, humans could accomplish more things that were previously impossible. There are many types of natural forces, but humans have learned to stably control few of them during this period. Wind power is one of them.
• After that, until the Industrial Revolution, the pattern of human energy use did not change significantly. The Industrial Revolution was a turning point. Humans learned to release and stably control the energy accumulated by billions of years of life activities. The source of this energy is the sun. But the side effects of fossil fuels are clear to us now. Overuse can cause a backlash against civilization. Therefore, the current energy use pattern is itself a bottleneck, limiting the total amount of energy that humans can actually use to a certain level.
• Nuclear energy is another important advance, but I classify it as a broad category of clean energy, so I’ll talk about it together. Clean energy reduces or even avoids the backlash against civilization. After transitioning to a clean energy society, humans can get rid of the fossil fuel bottleneck and further expand the scale of energy gathering, storage, and release.

Because of clean energy, the supply of energy can be raised by several orders of magnitude. As for the demand for energy, there is no need to worry at all. Human desires are endless. Sufficient supply becomes possible, and demand will naturally come. Many extremely high-energy-consuming things will move from the small circle of professional fields to the public, and there will be ways of using energy that are unimaginable today.

Therefore, the significance of clean energy is not only to save the earth and save lives, but also not only to replace the existing fossil energy by an equal amount. After the replacement occurs, the blowout of clean energy has just begun, and the great leap forward of human civilization will also begin.