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Energy

Laura Watts

Energy cannot end and it cannot be made. Energy is always conserved, physics tells us. In some ways, it has no future and no past. It can only change form, shifting through one artefact, place, body and time, into another. So what might be the biography of one little flash of a photon carried in a fibre optic cable?

This piece of light is one digital bit that is part of the story of my life. Let us say it comes from a poem that commemorates the death of a wave energy converter.1 It takes perhaps ten picojoules of energy. So what might we predict for the future of this bit of energy? We cannot keep that poem forever. We cannot keep everything we make in bits and bytes. It takes electricity, and that takes land and water; its boundaries are finite.2 We have to make choices. So I offer you, here, one future for the end of that energy.

In many years yet to come there will be an island in the North Sea, designed by an aging archaeologist called Miriam.

There she is, striding along a frozen gravel footpath, down the spine of the little round island in her warning-orange waterproofs and balaclava. She looks a lot like an astronaut, except she walks with a tall staff, pressing against the wind, her other hand deep in her pocket.

She grips a precious stone pebble. In its silicon bonds are stored the final digital remains of the world’s first on-grid wave energy converter, Pelamis the sea snake.3 No one wanted to keep the industrial wonder of the machine’s twisting metal hulk – its almost 200-meter-long yellow skin and 1300 tonne body – so it was melted down for scrap. In Miriam’s stone is all the data it generated: its renewable energy, its blueprints, its digital twin and a poem by a forgotten ethnographer. The data had been stored in a museum server drawer, until now.

Now it is time to let the legendary wave machine go, and to grieve its loss.

Miriam walks because she believes in choice, in letting some pasts become just an oral story – passed on from person to person rather than using up energy in a server farm. She knows that storing data takes energy, land and water. She has been spurned for her heresy; for insisting on the possibility of a good death for digital things. She has her principles for a good digital death: dignity, care, and sustainability. And so she presses on as the evening wind begins to ease and the first bright pinhead of a planet begins to shine.

She is almost at the end of the island, almost at the copper dome that sits on a grass rise, its curve blurred in a clouded North Sea sky; her destination: the data crematorium.

The data crematorium is where data and its energy go to die. It looks like an old-fashioned observatory, from back when telescopes had mirrors to look at the night. Its servers and workings are buried in the ground beneath, and its power comes in through seaweed-covered cables on the beach, the electricity drawn from wind and wave turbines in the sea all around.

Miriam knocks at the metal entrance to the dome, and the heavy rust-spotted door swings open. The crematorium technician smiles a warm welcome from within her black quilted overalls and motions Miriam into the wind-free corridor.

The door shuts on the silent passage, and Miriam takes a moment for her eyes to adjust to the red strip lighting.

Together, the old archaeologist and the technician walk in the dim red light to the antechamber.

There Miriam is surprised to find that the long, familiar wall is covered in a huge tapestry, beautifully woven abstract art made of blue, green and turquoise squares, like some giant, coloured QR code.

‘A local weaver downloaded the Pelamis data,’ explains the technician. ‘They found some words and images from the engineers, and they wove this.’ The technician stops and lets Miriam feel the data embroidery filling the wall.

‘This is what’s left of the sea snake,’ the technician says, quietly.

Miriam runs her fingers down the silken threads.

The tapestry will be the final material remains of the world’s first wave energy generator. It seems fitting to Miriam that it will hang here, on a North Sea island powered by wave energy. She recalls the words of one of the people from the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney, where Pelamis was first plugged in to the electricity grid:

‘Pelamis has been one of the icons of the marine renewables industry. The waves will keep pounding. [Though] the world is still using fossil fuels, we know marine energy will have its day.’4

And he had been right.

But his words, and the poem by the ethnographer, and so much else stored in her stone, will be lost in just a few moments.

Miriam murmurs the first lines of the poem, perhaps the last time the words will ever be uttered,

Red and yellow bellied

sea snake, genus, Pelamis,

Out there, undulating in the sky-sea

One hundred three thousand tonnes of floating metal,

A creation myth.5

She breathes out, prepares herself.

‘Are you ready?’ asks the technician, gentle, knowing that this is an important moment for Miriam – the final ending of the wave energy machine.

Miriam nods to the technician. ‘I am.’

‘I just need to confirm the direction of the beam is in Cetus?’

Miriam nods again. It was an easy choice, where to send the energy. The constellation Cetus, the sea monster, was low in the sky, but a sea snake would be at home among those stars.

‘It will take a few seconds for the data to be deleted from your storage, for the energy to be received, and for the laser to transmit it out to the stars.’

Miriam feels the smooth pebble in her pocket, where the last bits of data for Pelamis are stored. Deleting data takes energy, which leaves an energetic residue.6 To truly release data, to burn the energy away, requires attending to the Conservation of Energy. So Miriam had designed this place: where data could be deleted and its energy burned off in a laser, and sent towards the stars. A fitting end for data the world could no longer keep; its energy never lost, because energy can never be, but dispersed in a laser beam through the quanta of deep space.

The technician opens the door to the dome, and invites her to step forward, into the dim circular room of the crematorium itself.

Inside, Miriam hears servos whirring, and the great segmented shutter of the dome begins to roll back, letting a broken Milky Way scatter down over her. The North Sea chill rushes into her lungs. Then the scaffolding around the great laser begins to swing low, as it finds its stellar altitude – fixing on a distant galaxy in the constellation Cetus. For a moment the two of them, technician and archaeologist, look back through time, towards a darkness 40 million years away. Miriam wonders if that means the energy of Pelamis will still exist millions of years into the future: a sea snake caught in fading laser light.

The technician gestures to a slot in a pedestal at the base of the laser. Miriam takes out her polished stone, and drops it into the opening.

The stone is swallowed whole. The data is uploaded, its energy transduced, and the stone is crushed and ground down to be added as sand to the island coast.

Then the technician gestures to the display on the pedestal. A single glowing gold button appears. It says: ‘End’.

Miriam holds her staff tightly in one hand, and reaches out to the button with the other, then closes her eyes for a moment in reverie.

She remembers Pelamis, remembers the ethnographer’s poem that told its story: the engineers who slept in a shipping container because they needed to save money, the Sunday night they made history by plugging it into the electricity grid, the terrible day in 2014 when the company went bankrupt, the nose cone that became a cafe, the misery of the sea snake rusting, chained to a pier, sold for one British pound, but the hope it gave to an entire industry – to the world.7

Miriam presses the button.

Its energy ends on the earth.

And is sent to the stars.

This is my prediction for how the energy of my poem ends, how it, and the wave energy machine it remembers, is deleted forever from the planet. This is the end of that story, that particular bit of energy and its ten picojoules.

Although perhaps in 40 million years it will still be there, a quanta of light, out in the dark.