Welcome to the Coordination Century - Breakpoint Abu Dhabi Briefing

For roughly a hundred years, power meant scale. Who could drill the most oil, burn the most coal, build the biggest power plant. The 20th century rewarded those who controlled supply through sheer size and centralized ownership.That era is over.We are now entering what I call the Coordination Century. And the companies that understand this shift will define the next hundred years of energy infrastructure.The Efficiency TrapHere’s something that took me years to fully internalize, even with a PhD in energy optimization: you cannot conserve your way out of an energy crisis.In the mid-1800s, William Stanley Jevons studied coal usage in Great Britain and noticed something that defied all logic. James Watt had just developed a steam engine that was vastly more efficient than anything before it. Less coal required for the same work. The obvious prediction? Coal consumption would drop.The opposite happened. Coal became so cheap per unit of work that entirely new applications emerged. Factories, trains, ships, industrial processes nobody had imagined. Consumption exploded. The efficiency gains accelerated the Industrial Revolution.This pattern repeats everywhere. Make cars more fuel-efficient, and people buy SUVs and commute longer distances. Make computing cheaper, and we invent entirely new industries that consume more electricity than previous generations could have imagined.The lesson is uncomfortable but essential: making energy cheaper or more efficient does not reduce consumption. It creates new uses. Humanity always finds ways to absorb abundance.Which means Sourceful cannot be an efficiency company. We have to be a coordination company.The Abundance ParadoxHere’s the part that should make you sit up straight: the generation problem is solved.The sun delivers roughly 1,000 times Earth’s entire energy needs every single hour. Solar panels and large-scale batteries have crossed a critical economic threshold. In most markets worldwide, building new renewables is now cheaper than running existing coal or gas plants.The hardware exists. The technology works. And yet we have a crisis.In southern Sweden — a near-perfect laboratory for the energy transition — we saw over 400 hours of negative electricity pricing in 2024. Some municipalities experienced closer to 700 hours. Think about what that means: energy generators paying the grid to take their electricity because the system is overloaded.A homeowner with solar panels gets paid to use more energy or simply shut off their system. Not because we lack power, but because we cannot coordinate it.The physics of electrical grids demand that supply and demand balance every single second. When an uncoordinated wave of solar hits the grid at noon and base-load plants cannot ramp down fast enough, system stability becomes threatened.This is not an energy crisis. It is a coordination collapse masquerading as an energy crisis.The hardware is ready. The operating system is broken.300 Million Mobile Power PlantsConsider the electric vehicle. Traditional utility executives see EVs as liabilities — millions of people plugging in after work, crashing the grid. A blackout waiting to happen.We see something completely different.A parked EV sits idle 95% of its life. The global fleet will grow from roughly 58 million vehicles today to over 300 million by 2030. Collectively, those vehicles will carry an estimated 2,800 gigawatt-hours of flexible storage capacity.That is more flexible storage than the entire legacy European grid was designed to handle.This is not a problem. This is the largest distributed battery deployment in human history, waiting to be orchestrated.The multi-trillion dollar question becomes: how do you coordinate millions of energy decisions made by private citizens across the globe, minute by minute?OAuth for EnergyToday, if you buy a Tesla Powerwall, it communicates with your Tesla EV and the Tesla app. A closed ecosystem. It has limited or zero communication with a competitor’s solar inverter or the real-time pricing signals from your local grid operator.Everything is siloed. Proprietary. You need permission to interact with anything outside that wall.This centralization stifles innovation and limits the value consumers can generate from assets they already paid for.What we are building at Sourceful is an open coordination primitive for distributed energy resources. Think of it like OAuth — when you log into a third-party app using your Google account, you do not give that app your password. You grant specific, temporary permissions. Access to your name and email. Nothing more. And you can revoke it instantly.Our coordination layer works the same way, but for energy assets. The owner controls the permissions. They decide who gets to access the flexibility of their battery or their EV charging schedule, for how long, and for what compensation. They can revoke access at any time.This is energy sovereignty. And once people experience true ownership over the value their assets generate, they will never go back to being passive consumers in a centralized model.The Numbers That MatterTheory is worthless without proof. In dynamic markets like Sweden, a standard home setup with solar and a small battery generates between $800 and $1,500 per year through a combination of bill reduction and actual revenue from grid services.Optimal setups — larger storage, connected EVs, multiple revenue streams — have generated up to €4,000 annually. These are verifiable figures backed by bank statements showing payouts from grid operators.How? By providing services the grid desperately needs: frequency response and peak shaving.The grid frequency (50 Hz in Europe, 60 Hz in North America) is the vital sign of balance. Deviate too much and you get blackouts. The grid needs assets that can respond in seconds to inject or absorb power. A massive centralized power plant takes minutes to adjust. A network of thousands of distributed batteries coordinated instantly can provide this service with unmatched speed. Grid operators pay a premium for that responsiveness.Peak shaving is simpler: reducing demand during the highest-cost hours (typically 5-8 PM) so utilities do not need to fire up expensive peaker plants for just a few hours. Coordinated home batteries and EVs can pause charging or draw from storage instead of the grid.The UK utility-scale battery market offers a cautionary tale. Everyone built for frequency response. Everyone optimized for the same niche. Revenues dropped 76% in two years as the market saturated.Distributed coordination avoids this trap. Geographic diversity. Asset heterogeneity. A home in a rural area handles voltage support. An EV fleet in a city does intraday arbitrage. Suburban batteries handle frequency response. The value per connection increases exponentially, not linearly.Why the Infrastructure MattersGrid coordination requires machine speed. Electricity balances every second. Rewards need to be paid instantly to change behavior.We need rails that can handle millions of tiny transactions at near-zero cost. Solana delivers 400-millisecond block times, finality in about 2.5 seconds, and sustained throughput of 3,000-5,000 transactions per second. Average transaction cost: $0.00025.Compare that to issuing 50,000 payments on a congested Ethereum mainnet at $5 per transaction. The economic model collapses before it starts.The technical choice is deliberate and performance-driven. But here is what matters more: blockchain is a tool, not the product. We use it where it creates non-negotiable value — transparent rules for compensation, efficient global rewards distribution, and robust authentication. The core narrative remains focused on energy coordination itself.The Mission AheadWe are heading to Solana Breakpoint 2025 in Abu Dhabi not as observers but as operators. The goal is simple: establish Sourceful as the definitive emerging power in the energy and infrastructure sector.Every conversation forces a choice between two futures. Centralized proprietary control, where utilities dictate terms and consumers remain passive. Or distributed permissionless participation, where asset owners control their flexibility and capture its value.The 20th century rewarded those who controlled supply. The 21st century will reward those who coordinate complexity.We are building the operating system for energy abundance. And we are just getting started.Listen to the full briefing on “Coordinated with Fredrik” wherever you get your podcasts. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit frahlg.substack.com

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