Matt Jones – Planetary Energy System Changes at Street Level

Media Evolution

”We don’t have an energy problem, we have a matter problem.”
Matt Jones (he/him) has been designing digital products and services since 1995. Most recently he was Head of Design at Lunar Energy, a company building the world’s best clean energy products to deliver home electrification at scale. From 2013-2021 he worked at Google as a Principal Designer, primarily in Google Research working on advanced AI concepts for hardware and software. Now he is focusing on helping the solar energy sector harness more of the power already available to us.

Have you heard of Nikolai Kardashev? Matt introduces the Kardashev Scale, measuring a civilisation’s technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is capable of harnessing. From the planetary to the stellar, even to the galactic scale – this might sound like the stuff of Star Trek, but it’s quite simple. Matt believes that with the existing wind, water and solar power available to us (plus storage capabilities) we can reach Type 1 living on the Kardashev scale – we’re currently only at 0.7.

By working with the 3Ds of energy: decarbonisation, digitisation and decentralisation – products like the solar batteries produced by Lunar can help us get all the electricity we need, while still leaving fossil fuels behind.