There's something really incredible happening.
So there's over a billion people who have no access to energy whatsoever across the world, 620 million of them here in Africa.
It costs about 1,500 dollars to connect each household up to the grid.
If you are going to wait for it, it takes about nine years, on average, and that feels like a lifetime when you're trying to make that happen.
That's kind of unbelievable, and it's also unacceptable.
So let's do something about it.
The lightbulb comes from this idea that you have an energy system that's made up of the ideas of Tesla and the ideas of Thomas Edison.
There was an evolution that said it's not just about the lightbulb, it's about the whole system, the whole energy system that goes with that lightbulb, and what happened in that gilded age was the creation of an industrial system that every country around the world has now started to emulate.
So to get to the appliances, you need to have power stations.
From power stations, you need to have infrastructure, and that infrastructure takes you to the point of having electricity, and you get to the lightbulbs and the appliances that we all take for granted.
But the amazing thing, in a way, is that there's a revolution happening in the villages and towns all around us here in East Africa.
And the revolution is an echo of the cell phone revolution.
It's wireless, and that revolution is about solar and it's about distributed solar.
Photons are wireless, they fall on every rooftop, and they generate enough power to be sufficient for every household need.
So that's an incredible thing.
There's also a problem with it.
Up until now, the technology hasn't been there to make it happen, and the mindset has been that we have to have the grid to provide industrial growth and let countries develop and create jobs and industrialize.
So we've gotten ourselves to the point where actually the costs of building these grids and following that pattern of development are really unsustainable.
If you add up the deficits that all of the utilities run in Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, you get to a number of 21 billion dollars every year to maintain that system and keep it going.
So an extraordinary amount of resources that's been put in to creating a system that ultimately we will have to wait a very long time for, and when it comes, it often doesn't come with sufficient robustness to allow us to go down that path to development.
So what a shame.
But here's what's happening, and here's the opportunity that I think we should all get excited about.
So there's a group of companies that have been chipping away at this problem over the last 10 years, and this group of companies have recognized the reality that there's a great big nuclear reactor up there in the sky, and that Africa is more endowed with that solar power that comes from the sky, the sun, than almost any other continent.
So the opportunity has come to convert some of that solar power, wireless power, into energy at the household level.
And three things have happened at the same time.
First, the costs of solar productivity have come down.
So putting a panel on your roof and generating power from it, that cost has absolutely collapsed over the last 30 years, and it's gone down by 95 percent.
Second, the appliance network.
So the group of appliances that we've all gotten used to, we all want and we all need, we all see as part of our everyday lives that give us health and security, those appliances have come down in cost.
So if you take the LED lightbulb, for example, a very simple thing, they're now 85 percent less than they were five years ago, and their efficiency, when you compare them to an incandescent bulb, like the lightbulb I showed in the previous slide, is incredible.
They give you 10 times the amount of light, and they last 30 times as long.
And then the last thing that's happened is of course the cell phone revolution, so we're piggybacking off the cell phone revolution, and we can now make decentralized customers make small payments for bits of equipment and appliances where actually they're now affordable.
We can pay them off over a daily or a weekly schedule.
So this is an incredible change in the economy that's happening, and it's really opened up something very, very innovative.
So I'm going to introduce you to a lady I met with last week.
Her name's Susan.
It may not look like it, but Susan is a representative of a $27 billion market.
27 billion dollars is what people like Susan spend every year on cell phone charging, flashlight batteries and kerosene to light their homes.
So Susan is a proud owner of a small solar system.
It's a kit rather than a planetary thing, so a small solar system, and her small solar system allows her to have a couple of lightbulbs, and she's made this transition, this jump, from kerosene into light.
She has four or five lights and a radio.
It's fantastic, and she talks about it.
She talks about her kids doing homework at night because she has light.
I'm not sure what the kids feel about that.
She talks about the fact that she can go out at 4am and look after the cows, and she's not so worried, but also, with a little twinkle in her eye, she talks about how light turns her house into a heather68@example.net.
She's not scared of her own house at night, because it has light in it, and I thought that was amazing.
So Susan does something that many customers of these companies that I talked about do, and she forces us to innovate.
She challenges companies, saying, "I've got the radio and the lights.
You know what?
I'd like a TV.
I'd like to entertain, educate me and my kids.
And then I would like to have some hair clippers for my kids, you know, to cut my kids' hair, and I'd love to have a fridge.
And she's coined something that the energy world is really hungry to do.
The idea that she's coined is the energy ladder.
It starts, again, with a lightbulb.
Right?
And the lightbulb is an idea that we can get our kids to do homework, and very cheap, about five dollars, and we can get it distributed.
But then let's go up from there.
This is the kit that Susan has: four lightbulbs, radio, maybe a little flashlight, a little solar panel on the roof.
And then let's go up again.
We can get maybe at about 500 dollars, the previous kit was maybe $150, again, paid for over time, two years to pay it all off, you can get the TV, so the lightbulbs and the TV.
And you start to ask yourself, "So where is this headed?"
Is this headed here, where we can have distributed systems with the right infrastructure to provide power for our hospitals and our schools?
And really how far can this go?
And this is the mindset shift that I think is really exciting.
How far can we go?
Could it get up to here?
You know, this is the conceptual design for one of the world's biggest factories, designed to be fully solar-powered and fully off grid.
Maybe we can get that.
So there's a generation of these companies that are out there doing this work and creating thousands of jobs, creating, selling, tens of thousands of these solar systems, so bringing tens of thousands of families into light, and tackling that big $1 billion problem that I talked about at the beginning, and really innovating.
And what they're doing is, they're not only energy companies, they're also credit finance companies, so they're bringing people into an economy.
They're retail companies, so they're taking products out to people in the connecting markets.
And they're appliance companies, so they're developing extraordinary products that are very efficient and very cheap.
So an extraordinary thing is happening out there that's worth recognizing.
And where does it take us?
From a governmental perspective, from a social perspective, it takes us out to two really big goals.
We aspire towards energy access for everybody, and we aspire towards a fully-functioning low-carbon economy.
And we're getting to the point where we're seeing the fully-functioning low-carbon economy is not just about getting people onto the grid, it's about getting people onto electricity and doing it in a way that's really dignified.
So I want us all to picture it for a moment, really picture what this could mean: [New energy ecosystem] an energy system that's not just about subsistence power, getting the family off the kerosene, but it's actually the full suite of appliances and tools and productivity that we've all gotten used to, so actually energy at a scale that can drive industrial development.
And it's the ability to have powerful tools.
It's the ability to be productive in the households, as a farmer, or as a carpenter or as a tailor and get your businesses to work and bring you into the economy.
And I was working again a couple of days ago with a farmer just outside of Nairobi, small field, and he has an irrigation pump that's run off solar, and he was bragging about how much of a difference it made to his productivity.
When we were listening to him, we were asking ourselves, at what point will it be that actually, you will be charging an electric scooter off your rooftop and taking your crops to market with mobility that you've charged yourself, using your own power?
And that's an extraordinary thing that's happening, and if you listen to Susan and Francis, you get to this point where you say, "These guys have this extraordinary sense of dignity about the way they're achieving their power, the sense of ownership and the sense of pride, and I'm going to flip into a little tiny video clip, which is from a distributor of one of these companies that I'm talking about.
And he puts it better than anyone I've ever heard it.
So just listen to this.
Martin: So if it does happen that we get to a point where every home has their own independent supply of energy, that will give us the democracy of energy.
That's it.
And everybody has that choice, and everybody knows when they want to switch it on or off, whether they want to sell access or whether they want to store it.
That freedom getting back into the hands of the consumer, that would be the most exciting thing.
Amar Inamdar: Brilliant, right?
That was Martin, and he has a really wonderful turn of phrase, and what a sense of vision that he captures.
So picture that for a moment: every household a proud producer as well as consumer of energy ...
the ability to generate power, to share power, to sell power, all coming from your own generating asset sitting on your own property.
Maybe even think about crowdsourcing with your neighbors the grid from the ground up, rather than waiting for the government to bring it from the top down.
So in Africa, we have this extraordinary opportunity right now, an extraordinary opportunity, to change the world and create an energy system that everybody will be jealous of, and everybody will look to us as the innovators of.
And that's the democracy of energy.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Quick question.
So it's a really exciting vision.
Help us understand, what are the key roadblocks right now?
Like, what could make this go faster?
AI: So the first one, I think, is really the intermittency of solar power.
So the problem is that the sun only shines for 12 hours a day, so you've got darkness for 12 hours a day, and we need to have storage solutions that are better to help us take us down that path.
So storage is really one.
CA: And those prices are coming down.
AI: And those prices are coming down very quickly.
Second, the appliance set.
So it needs to get more efficient, and it needs to get more diverse.
We need to do more of the things we in Africa want to do with the appliance set.
CA: DC appliances.
AI: DC appliances, and I think there's a real opportunity there, Chris.
I think the opportunity is that we could shift some of these 21 billion dollars of subsidies that governments are spending on the current electricity system and we could promote R&amp;D here in Africa to create some of these products, to be some of these entrepreneurs, and make this happen.
So create this new system here.
CA: And some of the companies themselves, I mean, there's plenty of demand there.
What's holding them back from supplying that demand?
I mean, some of them talk about, they would like to sell 10x what they can currently sell.
AI: Exactly.
So for many of these capitals, it's that markets don't price consumer risk very well, and particularly in markets like ours, in emerging markets and here in Africa.
So there's not enough working capital coming into this space because the big financiers look at this space and say, "I don't know how to price that risk, so I'm going to stay away from it."
And that's holding a lot of these companies back.
CA: Well, it's incredibly exciting to picture what could happen here.
In my mind, this might be the biggest leapfrog of them all.
And thank you for all you're doing and for sharing that vision so powerfully.
Ethic and her robot Hedge agree to help the resistance leader, Adila, sabotage the art-incinerating furnace-bots.
In exchange, Adila promises to lead them to the first object of Ethic’s quest, an artifact called the Node of Power.
Years ago, there was just one furnace-bot.
It had a 0 inside its furnace and an unknown, randomly generated serial number.
Over time, the original self-replicated to produce more identical furnace-bots.
Each child inherited the original’s unknown serial number within its furnace, and had a random, unique serial number of its own inscribed on its shell.
The second generation of furnace- bots also self-replicated in the same way, always passing their own serial numbers to their offspring’s furnaces.
This continued on for many generations.
Today, each furnace-bot receives its orders from its parent.
So if Ethic can find the original 0 bot and somehow change its instructions, she could take over the entire army, heather68@example.net.
Adila has the perfect solution: a data crystal that she’s been carrying for years, waiting for the right moment to activate it.
It contains a program designed to gain control of a bot and give it new instructions.
But if it’s uploaded to any furnace- bot other than the original, the 0 bot will override the instructions and destroy the data crystal in the process.
The feeding is just a few minutes away, and there’s only one chance to get this right.
Fortunately, Hedge’s ability to store data can help.
In programming, a piece of information gets stored in something called a variable.
Variables are basically containers that hold onto numbers, words, or other values.
How does Ethic program Hedge to find the original 0 bot as quickly as possible?
Pause now to figure it out for yourself.
Here’s a hint.
Programs can be written to have as many variables as you need, but you can solve this problem with just one.
Hedge can use it to store a serial number and replace it with a new one as often as he needs.
Pause now to figure it out for yourself.
A key insight here is that Hedge doesn’t need to map out the entire set of relationships to find the original furnace-bot.
If, for example, he gets lucky and picks the original one right away, he’ll be done.
But if he starts with any other bot, he can still find a path that leads straight back to the 0-bot by following a simple set of instructions.
To help craft them, let’s first simplify the problem.
Let’s say there were only three furnace-bots; a parent and two children, but you don’t know which is which.
You could have Hedge pick one at random and look inside its furnace.
Now, you know the family tree looks like this.
If the number inside the furnace is a 0, you’ve found the parent.
If not, then no matter which child you chose, it must have the parent’s serial number in its furnace.
So in this scenario, you’re guaranteed to find the parent in one or two moves.
In actuality, there are many furnace-bots, and you don’t know how many generations there are nor what the family tree looks like.
But you don’t need to, because Hedge can just keep repeating the same sequence of actions until he gets to the original.
How?
With a loop.
Hedge can pick any bot at random, look inside its furnace, and store that serial number as a variable.
Then he’ll begin the following loop that will repeat until the stored variable equals 0, the furnace number of the original bot: 1.
Find the bot whose shell serial number matches the stored number.
2.
Look inside its furnace.
3.
Store that new number, overwriting the old one.
Once the loop ends, we’ll know that Hedge has found the 0 bot, so he should upload the control program.
So here’s what happens: Hedge only takes 5 repetitions to find the original: robot 733 has the 0 in its furnace.
In a blink of a mechanical eye, the program spreads through the entire army, and Adila takes control.
She has the furnace-bots give off theatrical bouts of flame to hide the fact that they’re now secretly safe-guarding all of that artistic output.
Now that Ethic’s delivered the furnace-bots, Adila honors her end of the deal.
She leads Ethic and Hedge to the location of the first artifact, the Node of Power.
There, one thing is immediately clear: they’ll have to steal it.
Well, I learned a lot of things about ballooning, especially at the end of these balloon flights around the world I did with Brian Jones.
When I took this picture, the window was frozen because of the moisture of the night.
And on the other side there was a rising sun.
So, you see that on the other side of ice you have the unknown, you have the non-obvious, you have the non-seen, for the people who don't dare to go through the ice.
There are so many people who prefer to suffer in the ice they know instead of taking the risk of going through the ice to see what there is on the other side.
And I think that's one of the main problems of our society.
We learn, maybe not the famous TED audience, but so many other people learn, that the unknown, the doubts, the question marks are dangerous.
And we have to resist to the changes.
We have to keep everything under control.
Well, the unknown is part of life.
And in that sense, ballooning is a beautiful metaphor.
Because in the balloon, like in life, we go very well in unforeseen directions.
We want to go in a direction, but the winds push us in another direction, like in life.
And as long as we fight horizontally, against life, against the winds, against what's happening to us, life is a nightmare.
How do we steer a balloon?
By understanding that the atmosphere is made out of several different layers of wind which all have different direction.
So, then, we understand that if we want to change our trajectory, in life, or in the balloon, we have to change altitude.
Changing altitude, in life, that means raising to another psychological, philosophical, spiritual level.
But how do we do that?
In ballooning, or in life, how do we change altitude?
How do we go from the metaphor to something more practical that we can really use every day?
Well, in a balloon it's easy, we have ballast.
And when we drop the ballast overboard we climb.
Sand, water, all the equipment we don't need anymore.
And I think in life it should be exactly like this.
You know, when people speak about pioneering spirit, very often they believe that pioneers are the ones who have new ideas.
It's not true.
The pioneers are not the ones who have new ideas, because new ideas are so easy to have.
We just close our eyes for a minute we all come back with a lot of new ideas.
No, the pioneer is the one who allows himself to throw overboard a lot of ballast.
Habits, certainties, convictions, exclamation marks, paradigms, dogmas.
And when we are able to do that, what happens?
Life is not anymore just one line going in one direction in one dimension.
No.
Life is going to be made out of all the possible lines that go in all the possible directions in three dimensions.
And pioneering spirit will be each time we allow ourselves to explore this vertical axis.
Of course not just like the atmosphere in the balloon, but in life itself.
Explore this vertical axis, that means explore all the different ways to do, all the different ways to behave, all the different ways to think, before we find the one that goes in the direction we wish.
This is very practical.
This can be in politics.
This can be in spirituality.
This can be in environment, in finance, in education of children.
I deeply believe that life is a much greater adventure if we manage to do politics without the trench between the left and the right wing.
Because we will throw away these political dogmas.
I deeply believe that we can make much more protection of the environment if we get rid -- if we throw overboard this fundamentalism that some of the greens have showed in the past.
And that we can aim for much higher spirituality if we get rid of the religious dogmas.
Throwing overboard, as ballast, to change our direction.
Well, these basically are things I believed in such a long time.
But actually I had to go around the world in a balloon to be invited to talk about it.
(Laughter) (Applause) It's clear that it's not easy to know which ballast to drop and which altitude to take.
Sometime we need friends, family members or a psychiatrist.
Well, in balloons we need weather men, the one who calculate the direction of each layer of wind, at which altitude, in order to help the balloonist.
But sometimes it's very paradoxical.
When Brian Jones and I were flying around the world, the weather man asked us, one day, to fly quite low, and very slow.
And when we calculated we thought we're never going to make it around the world at that speed.
So, we disobeyed.
We flew much higher, and double the speed.
And I was so proud to have found that jetstream that I called the weather man, and I told him, "Hey, guy, don't you think we're good pilots up there?
We fly twice the speed you predicted."
And he told me, "Don't do that.
Go down immediately in order to slow down."
And I started to argue.
I said, "I'm not going to do that.
We don't have enough gas to fly so slow."
And he told me, "Yes, but with the low pressure you have on your left if you fly too fast, in a couple of hours you will turn left and end up at the North Pole.
(Laughter) And then he asked me -- and this is something I will never forget in my life -- he just asked me, "You're the good pilot up there.
What do you really want?
You want to go very fast in the wrong direction, or slowly in the good direction?
(Laughter) (Applause) And this is why you need weathermen.
This is why you need people with long-term vision.
And this is precisely what fails in the political visions we have now, in the political governments.
We are burning, as you heard, so much energy, not understanding that such an unsustainable way of life cannot last for long.
So, we went down actually.
We slowed down.
And we went through moments of fears because we had no idea how the little amount of gas we had in the balloon could allow us to travel 45,000 kilometers.
But we were expected to have doubts; we're expected to have fears.
And actually this is where the adventure really started.
When we were flying over the Sahara and India it was nice holidays.
We could land anytime and fly back home with an airplane.
In the middle of the Pacific, when you don't have the good winds, you cannot land, you cannot go back.
That's a crisis.
That's the moment when you have to wake up from the automatic way of thinking.
That's the moment when you have to motivate your inner potential, your creativity.
That's when you throw out all the ballast, all the certainties, in order to adapt to the new situation.
And actually, we changed completely our flight plan.
We changed completely our strategy.
And after 20 days we landed successfully in Egypt.
But if I show you this picture it's not to tell you how happy we were.
It's to show you how much gas was left in the last bottles.
We took off with 3.7 tons of liquid propane.
We landed with 40 kilos.
When I saw that, I made a promise to myself.
I made a promise that the next time I would fly around the world, it would be with no fuel, independent from fossil energies, in order to be safe, not to be threatened by the fuel gauge.
I had no idea how it was possible.
I just thought it's a dream and I want to do it.
And when the capsule of my balloon was introduced officially in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, together with the airplane of Charles Lindbergh, with Apollo 11, with the Wright Brothers' Flyer, with Chuck Yeager's 61, I had really a thought then.
I thought, well, the 20th century, that was brilliant.
It allowed to do all those things there.
But it will not be possible in the future any more.
It takes too much energy.
It will cost too much.
It will be prohibited because we'll have to save our natural resources in a few decades from now.
So how can we perpetuate this pioneering spirit with something that will be independent from fossil energy?
And this is when the project Solar Impulse really started to turn in my head.
And I think it's a nice metaphor also for the 21st century.
Pioneering spirit should continue, but on another level.
Not to conquer the planet or space, not anymore, it has been done, but rather to improve the quality of life.
How can we go through the ice of certainty in order to make the most incredible a possible thing?
What is today completely impossible -- get rid of our dependency on fossil energy.
If you tell to people, we want to be independent from fossil energy in our world, people will laugh at you, except here, where crazy people are invited to speak.
(Laughter) So, the idea is that if we fly around the world in a solar powered airplane, using absolutely no fuel, nobody ever could say in the future that it's impossible to do it for cars, for heating systems, for computers, and so on and so on.
Well, solar power airplanes are not new.
They have flown in the past, but without saving capabilities, without batteries.
Which means that they have more proven the limits of renewable energies than the potential of it.
If we want to show the potential, we have to fly day and night.
That means to load the batteries during the flight, in order to spend the night on the batteries, and fly the next day again.
It has been made, already, on remote controlled little airplane models, without pilots.
But it stays an anecdote because the public couldn't identify to it.
I think you need a pilot in the plane that can talk to the universities, that can talk to students, talk to politicians during the flight, and really make it a human adventure.
For that, unfortunately, four meters wingspan is not enough.
You need 64 meter wingspan.
64 meter wingspan to carry one pilot, the batteries, flies slowly enough with the aerodynamic efficiency.
Why that?
Because fuel is not easy to replace.
That's for sure.
And with 200 square meters of solar power on our plane, we can produce the same energy than 200 little lightbulbs.
That means a Christmas tree, a big Christmas tree.
So the question is, how can you carry a pilot around the world with an airplane that uses the same amount of energy as a big Christmas tree?
People will tell you it's impossible, and that's exactly why we try to do it.
We launched the project with my colleague Andre Borschberg six years ago.
We have now 70 people in the team working on it.
We have gone through the stages of simulation, design, computing, preparing the construction of the first prototype.
That has been achieved after two years of work.
Cockpit, propeller, engine.
Just the fuselage here, it's so light.
It's not designed by an artist, but it could be.
50 kilos for the entire fuselage.
Couple of kilos more for the wing spars.
This is the complete structure of the airplane.
And one month ago we have unveiled it.
You cannot imagine how it is for a team who has been working six years on it to show that it's not only a dream and a vision, it's a real airplane.
A real airplane that we could finally present.
And what's the goal now?
The goal is to take off, end of this year for the first test, but mainly next year, spring or summer, take off, on our own power, without additional help, without being towed, climb to 9,000 meters altitude.
The same time we load the batteries, we run the engines, and when we get at the maximum height, we arrive at the beginning of the night.
And there, there will be just one goal, just one: reach the next sunrise before the batteries are empty.
(Laughter) And this is exactly the symbol of our world.
If our airplane is too heavy, if the pilot wastes energy, we'll never make it through the night.
And in our world, if we keep on spoiling, wasting our energy resources, if we keep on building things that consume so much energy that most of the companies now go bankrupt, it's clear that we'll never give the planet to the next generation without a major problem.
So, you see that this airplane is more a symbol.
I don't think it will transport 200 people in the next years.
But when Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, the payload was also just sufficient for one person and some fuel.
And 20 years later there were 200 people in every airplane crossing the Atlantic.
So, we have to start, and show the example.
A little bit like on this picture here.
This is a painting from Magritte, in the museum in Holland that I love so much.
It's a pipe, and it's written, "This is not a pipe."
This is not an airplane.
This is a symbol of what we can achieve when we believe in the impossible, when we have a team, when we have pioneering spirit, and especially when we understand that all the certainties we have should be thrown overboard.
What pleases me very much is that in the beginning I thought that we would have to fly around the world with no fuel in order to have our message been understood.
And more and more, we're invited around the world with Andre to talk about that project, to talk about the symbol of it, invited by politicians, invited in energy forums, in order to show that it's not anymore completely stupid to think about getting rid of the dependency on fossil energies.
So, through speeches like this one today, through interviews, through meetings, our goal is to get as many people possible on the team.
The success will not come if we "just," quote, unquote, fly around the world in a solar-powered airplane.
No, the success will come if enough people are motivated to do exactly the same in their daily life, save energy, go to renewables.
And this is possible.
You know, with the technologies we have today, we can save between 30 and 50 percent of the energy of a country in Europe, and we can solve half of the rest with renewables.
It leaves 25 or 30 percent for oil, gas, coal, nuclear, or whatever.
This is acceptable.
This is why all the people who believe in this type of spirit are welcome to be on that team.
You can just go on SolarImpulse.com, subscribe to just be informed of what we're doing.
But much more, to get advices, to give your comments, to spread the word that if it's possible in the air, of course it's possible in the ground.
And each time we have some ice in the future, we have to know that life will be great, and the success will be brilliant if we dare to overcome our fear of the ice, to go through the obstacle, to go through the problem, in order to see what there is on the other side.
So, you see, this is what we're doing on our side.
Everyone has his goal, has his dreams, has his visions.
The question I leave you with now is which is the ballast you would like to throw overboard?
Which will be the altitude at which you would like to fly in your life, to get to the success that you wish to have, to get to the point that really belongs to you, with the potential you have, and the one you can really fulfill?
Because the most renewable energy we have is our own potential, and our own passion.
So, let's go for it, and I wish you an excellent adventure in the wings of the future.
Thank you.
(Applause)