Humans started energy tech at least 400,000 years ago when we first mastered fire. Yet
somehow, for 399,990 years, our ancestors didn’t bother to launch open innovation programs
like Free Electrons to spread new energy tech across the globe.

We made a lot of progress in the meantime though: Oxen and sails arrived some 6,000 years
ago. Around 2,000 years ago, the water wheel began automating ongoing work: grinding,
hammering, pumping (possibly also powering an early fan to cool the person watching the
water wheel). In 1712, the steam engine unlocked millions of years of energy stored in coal –
the Industrial Revolution followed and, as it unfortunately turned out later, so did climate
change. Electricity finally made energy independent of where it was generated.

However, inventing was often just one part of the story. The Romans already had water
wheels. What took another thousand years was pointing them at places where they would be
used for anything other than grain: fulling cloth, forging iron, sawing timber. And even then,
they spread unevenly. Some of Europe’s largest textile cities were, in some cases,
surprisingly slow to adopt water-powered fulling, the one application that would have paid
them back fastest. New technologies existed, but without spreading from one user to many,
they never reached scale, substantially slowing their overall impact.

This is a problem because, throughout history, energy has perhaps been the most important
enabler of what humans could do. From grinding grain to writing a dramatic energy-tech blog
while being cooled by an actual electric fan. Energy is so fundamental to a civilization’s
progress that one popular attempt at ranking civilizations rests on energy alone. The so-
called Kardashev scale defines a Type I civilization as one that commands all the energy
available on its home planet.

We currently sit at roughly 0.73. That sounds impressive, but the scale is logarithmic.
Doubling global energy command would move us from 0.73 to about 0.76. Our current
standing on such a hypothetical scale reflects both what we invented and how quickly we
spread those inventions, enabling them to scale from isolated breakthroughs into
technologies that transformed societies. Too bad Roman emperors never founded a cross-
empire energy-tech accelerator earlier.

Fortunately, the pattern is changing. Over the past two decades, batteries, PV and heat
pumps became normal in years, not centuries. Diffusion was self-accelerating: solar modules
and battery pack prices fell by 90% or more, making them ever more accessible. New
software for energy could diffuse even faster, enabled by an ecosystem of innovators.

Diffusion, the historically slow part of the story, is accelerating – though, unfortunately, the
energy system’s need for new solutions is accelerating even faster. One recent example is
the AI-driven boom in data centre construction. It is striking that a data centre’s capacity is
quoted in megawatts instead of racks or floor space. Energy is again a limiting constraint for
AI and therefore for what humans can do with it. Such an energy-demand shock makes it
important to move proven solutions quickly from where they exist to where they are needed.

Diffusion this fast needs a mechanism: a way that incentivizes inventors and adopters to
openly share what works about a new energy technology and to distribute insights rapidly.
Fortunately, this time we don’t rely on emperors to found energy-tech collaboration. All it
takes are seven global utilities from around the world that voluntarily engage in an energy-
tech open innovation program called Free Electrons.

Over the past decade, its pilot projects have touched nearly every category that redefined the
sector – storage, distributed generation, flexibility software, and now compute-driven demand.
A startup that proves itself across seven utilities on four continents learns in a year what a
single pilot would take years to teach – different grid topologies, different regulatory regimes,
different customer bases, all stress-testing the same product at once. And what works travels
the same way it was tested: not from one utility to the next over years, but across four
continents in parallel. The water wheel took a thousand years to cross Europe, but a Free
Electrons pilot crosses four continents in one.

E.ON has actively shaped Free Electrons since the beginning. We shared insights with non-
competing utilities across Europe, Asia, North America and Australia, each with their own
perspective on the energy transition. Most importantly, though, the program has been our Silk
Route to thousands of startups from around the world. For example, in this year’s Top 15
cohort, we get access to innovative solar modules from Israel, synthetic energy data from the
US, and maintenance robots from Japan, alongside various other frontier energy-tech
solutions from our home market in Europe and the rest of the world. Throughout the
program’s history, participating startups like GridX, ev.energy or NakedEnergy became major
success stories for E.ON and are now an important part of our business.

This is why we need a program like Free Electrons. If we want to shape the energy transition,
we cannot afford to have the water wheel 2.0 invented in Australia and only find out about it
five years later.

Free Electrons is now a 10-year success story. Imagine where we would be if a Stone Age
human had founded a version of Free Electrons with hunting buddies from seven other
tribes. Perhaps at least at a solid 0.74.

Alexander Both
Managing Director E.ON Innovation Co-Investments Inc.

Alex is Managing Director of E.ON Innovation Co-Investments Inc in Silicon Valley. He connects the E.ON Group with the Silicon Valley ecosystem, building partnerships with startups, academia, and local experts. He brings state-of-the-art energy tech and enterprise AI into the organization. Additionally, he represents E.ON’s voice in the Free Electrons program. Previously, he worked in E.ON’s Corporate Strategy team and in Deutsche Bahn’s Brussels policy office.