The four-axis ranking
We rank humanity’s most important problems on four quantifiable dimensions — quantity of humans affected, severity per capita, current solution quality, and addressable market size — and package each as a proposal in the spirit of Musk’s Hyperloop Alpha. This document is the proposal for energy abundance. Every number below is sourced and tagged with confidence. Every ranking is a conjecture, open to refutation.
Quantity · humans affected
8.1B
highSeverity · WTP / wealth
15%
medCurrent solutions
4.0 / 10
medMarket size · TAM
$10.0T
highWhat we are trying to solve
Energy underwrites every other quest. Current global primary energy use is ~600 EJ/year at ~$0.10/kWh average. Thermodynamic physics allows orders of magnitude more throughput at far lower cost. Fusion (net energy achieved at NIF 2022), advanced fission (SMRs, Gen IV), and enhanced geothermal are all within the adjacent possible. Energy is the denominator in Musk's utility-delta: cheap energy improves every human life.
The gap between the world and the world that is physically possible
Today: ~700M humans lack reliable electricity. Clean firm baseload requires policy heroics. Industrial heat + desalination + direct air capture remain economically marginal at current energy prices.
Current solution quality is rated 4.0 / 10 (med confidence) — meaning there is substantial unclaimed ground between what exists and what is possible. estimated — renewables scaling but intermittent; fission politically stalled; fusion pre-commercial.
Who is already working on this
34 entities are currently working on this problem across public markets, private companies, and research orgs. Each is evidence the market is real; none has obviously solved it.
First Solar
public · USACadmium-telluride thin-film solar — non-Chinese supply chain, larger US manufacturing capacity than the rest of the industry combined.
$20.0B
Oklo
public · USAMicroreactor developer (Aurora). Fast-spectrum fission using recycled nuclear fuel.
$9.0B
NuScale Power
public · USAFirst SMR design certified by the US NRC (VOYGR-77). 77 MWe modules, integral pressurized water reactor. Romania CE Oltenia deployment in development.
$4.5B
NANO Nuclear Energy
public · USAMicroreactor designs ZEUS (solid-core, mobile) and ODIN (low-pressure salt). IPO May 2024. R&D-stage; no operating reactor yet.
$1.0B
Energy Vault
public · USAGravity-based long-duration storage (composite blocks lifted by automated cranes), plus battery and green hydrogen platforms. Operations in China, Australia, US.
$200M
Heliogen
public · USAConcentrated solar with computer-vision-aimed heliostats producing 1000+ °C process heat for industry. Backed by Bill Gates; SPAC-listed (NYSE: HLGN).
undisclosed
Commonwealth Fusion Systems
private · USAHigh-temperature superconducting tokamak (SPARC, ARC). Aiming for commercial fusion energy by early 2030s.
$9.0B
Helion Energy
private · USAPulsed, aneutronic fusion with direct electricity conversion. Signed 50MW PPA with Microsoft targeting 2028.
$5.4B
TAE Technologies
private · USAAneutronic fusion via field-reversed configuration (p-B11 fuel). Backed by Google, NEA, Vulcan. Cancer-therapy spinout TAE Life Sciences.
$3.0B
Newcleo
private · UKLead-cooled fast reactor running on reprocessed nuclear waste (MOX fuel). Closes the fuel cycle. HQ London, R&D in Italy and France.
$3.0B
Form Energy
private · USAIron-air batteries — 100-hour storage at ~1/10th the cost per kWh of lithium. First commercial deployments with Xcel and Great River Energy underway.
$2.4B
Fervo Energy
private · USAEnhanced geothermal using horizontal drilling from oil & gas. Operating commercial pilot in Nevada.
$1.4B
22 more entries on the problem page.
If we solve this, here is the world we get
After · 20 years
Energy approaches "too cheap to meter" ($0.01–0.02/kWh wholesale). Universal access. Industrial heat, mass desalination, and carbon removal become economically trivial.
Requests for startups · 3 concrete companies to build
The fission permitting unlock
The NRC takes years and tens of millions to license a reactor design that has already been built and run safely. The bottleneck is paperwork, not physics. Build the regulatory-tech company that compresses approval to months.
- why now
- Post-2024 advanced-reactor legislation reopened the path; a generation of SMR designs is queued behind process, not engineering.
- shape
- Software + regulatory expertise that productizes licensing: standardized design packages, automated safety-case generation, and a track record that compounds across applicants.
- success
- Time-and-cost to license a proven reactor design falls 10×, and firm clean baseload actually gets built.
Geothermal everywhere via oilfield tooling
The oil & gas industry already knows how to drill anywhere on Earth, cheaply. Redirect that exact capability into closed-loop geothermal and you get firm clean power on demand.
- why now
- Directional drilling and downhole tooling hit a cost/perf point where engineered geothermal pencils out; displaced O&G crews are available.
- shape
- A geothermal developer that acquires and redeploys oilfield drilling capacity, standardizes closed-loop well design, and sells firm power via PPA to data centers and grids.
- success
- Firm geothermal is deployable in most geographies at a cost competitive with gas peakers.
Hundred-hour grid storage
Renewables are the cheapest electrons in history and worthless when the wind stops. Lithium is too expensive past ~8 hours. Build the long-duration storage company that makes 100-hour storage cost-competitive.
- why now
- Iron-air, thermal, and mechanical approaches crossed from lab to first commercial deployments in 2024–26.
- shape
- A storage developer + manufacturer betting on one chemistry/mechanism, selling multi-day firming to utilities under capacity contracts.
- success
- A renewables-plus-storage grid delivers firm power at a cost below new fossil generation.
full rubric + framing on the Requests for Startups page.
What the market can pay
The world is already paying $10.0T per year against this problem (global primary energy market — IEA WEO 2025 (electricity, fuels, industrial heat); high confidence).
A successful solution does not need to capture more — it needs to redirect a meaningful slice of existing spend, plus the latent willingness-to-pay implied by the severity score above. The cost ceiling for a real solution is bounded by this number; everything cheaper is dominated, everything more expensive is a non-starter.
What could go wrong, and how we know we are not wrong
Section in progress
Failure modes, ethical considerations, and the conditions under which this whitepaper would be falsified are being authored as the weekly cadence ships. The Deutschian commitment: every claim above is a conjecture; we publish the conditions under which we would update. New whitepaper sections ship with each Monday newsletter drop. Subscribe to get the upgrade, or contribute on GitHub.
Who would back this
Capital allocators with a stated thesis or deployed portfolio in this domain. This is a starting list — Exa Websets enrichment will expand it to direct check-writers per company.
Thiel Fellowship
$100k to stop out of school and build something important.
776 Fellowship
$100k over two years for 18-24 year olds tackling climate change.
Activate Fellowship
Two-year salary and national-lab access for scientists taking PhD research to market.
Prime Coalition
Catalytic capital for climate tech that would not get conventional VC funding.
Speculative Technologies
ARPA-style coordinated research programs for big-if-true platform tech.
Homeworld Collective
Climate biotech is neglected vs pharma. Fund the gap.
Deep Science Ventures
Outcome-first venture creation. Define the holy-grail outcome, then recruit founders.
Marble
Hard climate tech studio, pair scientists with operators.
Founders Fund
Contrarian hard tech that rebuilds the industrial base.
a16z American Dynamism
National-interest technology, aerospace, defense, manufacturing, public safety.
What the thinkers say
“The entire Tesla Master Plan is a bet that a sustainable-energy economy is both necessary and engineering-tractable. Solar + batteries + electrification is the physics-possible path.”
“Nuclear, fusion, and solar abundance are the central infrastructure quests. Safety is an engineering achievement of progress, not a brake on it.”
“Energy abundance, specifically fusion, geothermal, and next-gen fission, is a canonical hard/good quest that markets structurally underfund.”
Where this is wrong, tell us
Every number on this page carries a source and a confidence tag. Every section open to refutation. If a citation is wrong, a number is stale, or a conjecture is unfounded — file a correction.
corrections → use the feedback widget in the nav · open issue at github.com/adamtpang/optimism.fun