The logic of the problem is clear and irrefutable. We are poisoning the air we have to breathe, with toxic fumes from every form of combustion. If we discovered how to start fire in 2026 we would probably ban its use, for public health and safety. Combustion also produces gases that disturb the radiative balance of the planet Earth, so that it cannot cool down. To keep the Earth cool enough to support life, we have to put out the fires and ban combustion.

But we need the fires, insist the fire-promoters. As I discuss in my free-to-download book Electricity vs Fire, we can now do with electricity almost everything we now do with fire. And make the electricity without fire, more cheaply.

Not only hydroelectricity, fire-free, but also with solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind turbines. Fire-free electricity generated by physical infrastructure such as dams, wind farms and solar PV arrays and batteries is infrastructure electricity, nothing is consumed nor used up. Even the services are provided by fabricated infrastructure. Yet more infrastructure.

The threat of climate change is clearly one of infrastructure. We must reorganise institutions, governance and finance to upgrade our built and service infrastructure, and to provide infrastructure electricity to drive the service infrastructure worldwide. We must also rethink how we produce and distribute electricity, fire-free infrastructure electricity. How do we proceed?

Infrastructure electricity system
Picture a small local electricity system, perhaps a university, airport, hospital, shopping mall, housing estate or neighbourhood. Every available surface is covered with photovoltaics. Every house has an electric car, software makes its battery part of the electricity system whenever it is plugged in, charging and discharging as the system requires. If these batteries do not suffice to run all the loads on the system, the system has other separate batteries, perhaps in houses. Possibly also wind turbines to contribute, feeding into the system.

Every building on the system is thermally passive, providing shelter and comfort purely as infrastructure with no additional heating or cooling. All the lighting is LEDs, turned on or off by sensors. All the other loads on the system are optimally efficient, electric motors with software drives. Electronics requiring DC are driven by separate DC wiring fed by the DC generation. None include the usual inefficient AC-to-DC power packs.

The total generation on the system is enough to run all the loads whenever they are required. The entire infrastructure operates on infrastructure electricity running all the time. Everything just works.

None of the electricity is metered or measured. Those who live in and use the system pay a fixed, monthly or otherwise, price, like a local tax for services, to amortise the investment cost of setting the system up, as they would pay for, say, roads and street lighting and sewage. Plus a small additional charge to pay those who keep the whole system running.

Picture a small local electricity system. The total generation on the system is enough to run all the loads whenever they are required. The entire infrastructure operates on infrastructure electricity running all the time. Everything just works.

Long way from here to there
If that picture is plausible, could it be a model for what we need to eliminate fire from human society? Infrastructure electricity gives a rich array of possibility. If this model is a clue we have to work out how to get there from here – where we are now is a long way from the infrastructure electricity model, both technically and financially. Above all we have to change mindset, how we think about electricity in society.

Back in the 1880s Thomas Edison charged his new customers a fixed fee according to how many lamps they wanted. He was selling illumination, what his customers wanted, not electricity. Electricity was not a separate commodity, just part of the system delivering illumination, the service desired and paid for.

Conventionally, how we now think of electricity does not address the need to eliminate fire. This new way does. We should work out how to make it happen. Since we already have a vast array of human activities based on the traditional approach to electricity, we must upgrade the existing infrastructure to the model based on infrastructure electricity.

First step – carry out a detailed assay of the existing infrastructure, especially the buildings, to identify how well they perform the key role of delivering shelter and comfort without fire. If they fail – and most will – we must then work out how to raise performance, say to the German ‘passivhaus’ standard. For office blocks and larger buildings, the challenge will be severe.

Indeed, the entire challenge of eliminating fire from human activities is daunting; but nothing compared to the challenge of trying to live in a world in which humans continue to use fire, with its devastating consequences. Infrastructure electricity does at least give us a possible way to cope with those consequences.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of the author only and are not necessarily given or endorsed by or on behalf of the Energy Institute.

• Further reading: ‘Lessons from previous energy transitions’. Energy Institute Chief Executive Nick Wayth FEI  uses data from the EI Statistical Review of World Energy to explore the pace of the energy transition.
• ‘How a new generation of power electronics will sit at the heart of the energy transition’. Discover how UK researchers are developing a new generation of semiconductors that will be key to boosting device performance in the energy transition, with higher voltages and improved energy efficiency.