What if the real challenge wasn’t which energy to use, but who decides how to produce it and for whom?
The engineer gazed out the window at the sunset. The sky was turning red and orange as the city began to light up. Every light reflected the contradictions of the energy system he would face the next day during yet another conference on the transition.
“Nuclear or renewables?” The question was cyclical, but the answer was never simple. Fission was powerful and proven, with reduced emissions, but it left behind radioactive waste and plants that were difficult to decommission. Promises of greater safety with the fourth generation didn’t erase the weight of the legacy it would leave.
Fusion, on the other hand, seemed like the perfect dream: inexhaustible, free of dangerous waste, potentially capable of revolutionizing everything. But it remained confined to laboratories.
ITER, the colossal experimental reactor under construction in southern France, represented a concrete hope, but it was still far off. Years, maybe decades, separated it from large-scale real-world application.
Meanwhile, renewables had gained momentum. Photovoltaic panels and wind farms were multiplying, costs were falling, and production was increasing. In Europe, they covered over a third of electricity demand. But the structural limit of intermittency remained: the sun sets, the wind stops. Without adequate storage systems and flexible grids capable of balancing variability, overall reliability remained a challenge.
Yet, the real breakthrough didn’t seem to be technical. “Energy is power, and as such, a political issue before being a technological one,” he reflected. He thought of his homeland, where large “green” plants were imposed from above in the name of sustainability, but left communities with only marginality and dependence. The transition was happening, but it was for the few.
It was at that moment that he truly understood the core issue: it wasn’t a race to find the “right source,” but a rethinking of the model itself. The alternative was a distributed system, where production was widespread, accessible, and locally controlled. Not a network dominated by a few players, but millions of small generators, solar rooftops, cooperatives, energy communities capable of producing, exchanging, and managing autonomously.
Every transformation begins with a change in vision. At the conference, he would certainly talk about isotopes and storage, but the heart of his speech would be something else: justice, participation, the right to energy as a common good.
The city beneath him now shone like a network of glowing veins in the dark. Every light, a need. Every shadow, a question still hanging. The future didn’t depend only on new technologies but on new choices.
The real challenge began now.
