One of the defining projects of the New World Order is "na likcasyn," or "electrification," the goal of providing consistent access to electricity to the entire planet. Likcasyn is a major pillar of the New World Order's legitimacy. At the same time, a core principle of Globalism is to halt the collapse of the natural systems on which human life depends, and most particularly, achieving a steady or falling level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to stave off the worst impacts of global warming. Whatever its many faults, and speaking as a political refugee from the Order, I can attest they are considerable, the Order is very science-driven in its public policy. Hence, a very central narrative in the development of the Order has been expanding likcasyn while remaining carbon-neutral.

This has been a significant challenge for the Order. Much of the generating capacity it inherited from the pre-Collapse order was carbon dioxide intensive fossil fuel generation (like the coal-dominated electrical generation of modern Britain). And a significant amount of the necessary infrastructure was destroyed or scavenged in the Collapse, or antiquated and in poor repair.

With everything that happened up to the founding of the Order - the Iran War, the Global Financial Collapse, the Global Collapse, innumerable smaller wars touched off as the international system disintegrated, waves of pandemic starting with COVID-23, incessant disasters rooted in accelerating climate change, rapid degradation of critical natural resources and ecosystems like fisheries, and finally the nuclear holocaust of the Middle East War, the New World Order was and is much poorer than the global order it arose from. Electrification was not consistent anywhere in the early days, with wealthy and corporate customers close to major centres of political power having the best access. The abandoned, ghostly towers you see in many cities even today and the general flattening out of population centres is a testament to just how untenable some aspects of modern life became without consistent electricity for critical services like water pumps and elevators.

The process of likcasyn has been a slow and painful project that has taken decades, with still very uneven results across the planet. Likcasyn tends to be better in cities than in the countryside and in States as opposed to Protectorates. There are those that say that this is deliberate on the part of the Order to avoid letting the population get too comfortable. My colleague Trafalgar tends to believe that is more in the vein of a conspiracy theory. I'm not sure I agree, but she does have more direct knowledge of the NWO elites than I do.

General Characteristics

With the resources of the entire planet at their fingertips, the NWO doesn't worry about geographic concentrations of certain resources like lithium, cobalt or vanadium which are important in certain energy technologies, unless it significantly increases costs. And equally, it is very willing to actively encourage horrific human exploitation to ensure supplies of whatever it thinks it needs. It is more sensitive to environmental damage, but on the balance, it is overall willing to sacrifice the environment for what it sees as the needs of humanity if the impacts are mainly local.

That said, the Order's energy tech is not so much optimal as cheap and scalable, as they are trying to electrify the entire planet with limited resources. While virtually any technology that has been dreamed up by humanity for carbon-neutral electrical generation or storage is in use somewhere, there are certain broad themes and technologies that have become de facto standards and tend to seen everywhere.

It is rare for any area other than the neighbourhoods of the very wealthy, or critical corporate, government or military installations to have very reliable electricity. Despite decades of steady improvement, the rest of the population still has to contend with somewhat frequent brownouts and blackouts and uses a mixture of local power storage and generation as applicable to try and cope. One service which gets priority access to electricity and rarely goes down is the wireless internet that bathes any significant population centre.

Because of the political importance of likcasyn for the Order, the world's generation, distribution and storage infrastructure are all major targets for the various trol factions that want to undermine and overthrow the NWO. Not only that, the infrastructure itself, like the thousands of kilometres of copper wire, is incredibly valuable to thieves to sell as scrap. So securing this investment against attack is a major preoccupation for the Order, and actually something of a design consideration around the infrastructure itself, as avoiding security vulnerabilities is a critical goal.

Generation

All generating capacity in the Order is carbon-neutral with some kind of offset for its carbon costs to establish. It is virtually all renewable energy. The Order has access to very advanced nuclear reactor designs, but uses virtually no significant amount of nuclear power, because nuclear power is an incredibly controversial and emotional issue, even among the elites, and there is huge opposition to any expansion of nuclear power.

If you can imagine a renewable power source, the Order is probably trying to use it somewhere. Anywhere there is a viable site for geothermal or hydroelectric power, you will probably see them in use. However, the vast majority of the Order's electricity comes from wind, and most especially solar power.

One estimate I have seen is that an area of the Earth's surface larger than the entire nation of Finland is taken for electrical generation. This creates significant angst for the elite Uzren (Green) faction, who are a politically significant member in good standing of the Globalist coalition, and also for the Ratikys Uzren (Radical Green) trol faction. The former tends to find reasons to oppose more generation capacity to limit harm to the environment (as elites themselves, they don't really personally pay the price of slowed or reduced likcasyn), and the latter like to attack power stations and infrastructure for that reason.

In general, you find at least small scale generating capacity everywhere. Most rooftops have solar panels, it is very common for a large farm to have its own windmills, and in general you see windmills scattered everywhere. Solar is really king, although in areas with poor solar resources, the local authorities will seek any possible alternative. Small scale storage, particularly cheap redox flow batteries, is also ubiquitous.

My home state of Epekwit is a great example of one of the exceptions to the rule. We don't exactly have the ideal climate for solar generation. Instead, most of the State's power comes from gigantic hydroelectric dams in the Province of Labrador, and is transmitted over high voltage transmission lines and undersea cables from Labrador, through Western Newfoundland, and finally to Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia and on to Epekwit Island itself. This is a huge blessing for Epekwit which has enabled the State's massive manufacturing and mineral extraction industries but is also a constant security headache for the State, since power to much of the State could be cut off in a single trol attack.

Otherwise, though, our fields and hillsides are dotted with windmills and our roofs are covered in solar panels, providing a bit of extra security and making up any shortfall from Labrador.

Generating capacity is usually privately owned, although massive public works like the Labrador dams may be publicly owned by States or the Global Government itself.

Distribution

Pre-Collapse grids were lower tech than modern grids and were vulnerable to collapse over massive geographic areas under the right conditions. Because of the peaceful and prosperous nature of those times, such grid collapses were rare and experienced as exceptions to the rule, but during the Global Collapse, this vulnerability became hideously clear, as massive grid collapse became more the rule than the exception.

The New World Order addressed this problem by globalizing the global electricity grid, i.e., all power distribution infrastructure became the property of the Global Government. The Global Government sets standards for its infrastructure and funds its expansion and maintenance, paying private contractors to perform the actual building and maintenance work.

It was interesting for me when I first sought assylum in Britain that the few small plug-in devices I brought did not work without scrounging specially-made adaptors - the voltage, frequency and even the shape of the outlets is all different. That doesn't happen in the Order, everything is the same globally.

I understand that the process of achieving this single, global electrical standard was incredibly disruptive, as it involved fundamentally tearing up most of the infrastructure that supported former, national standards. The new standard was made to not match any of the previously existing national standards so that the pain would be spread equally. This aspect of likcasyn, like Commonisation or "Uxáfen," that Trafalgar wrote about, is one of the great, under-acknowledged ways in which the early New World Order actually prolonged the pain of the global recovery that they so like to take credit for.

Modern grids are highly computerized, with AIs making critical decision every millisecond to balance shifting demand with highly distributed and variable sources of generation and storage. They don't always succeed, but if you look at the engineering challenge of modern grids versus pre-modern ones, it is actually remarkable the degree to which they do succeed.

They are designed to minimise as much as possible the impact of any part of the grid going down, to make it difficult for a trol attack on the grid to have a very dramatic effect. Their success in this area is mixed, as power generation is not always possible to have perfectly distributed and diversified - look at Epekwit's dependence on hydroelectric power that is transmitted over hundreds of kilometres from Labrador. The Order likes to have distributed power generation, but they will transmit it over very long distances and incur the security costs if it makes sense to do so.

All electricity customers pay the Global Department of Energy (na Onpas Paratysyn na Enyci, or na OPE) for electricity from the grid, and anyone with an OPE account can supply electricity to the grid, whether from a private rooftop solar array or from a massive corporate solar installation and be compensated for whatever the grid takes (which is generally whatever you can give it, although all participants in the system must accept Global computerised control of their grid access).

Storage

Electricity storage is possibly the most critical piece of the New World Order's power system. Pre-Collapse, it was customary to use fossil fuel powered thermal generation that could be brought online quickly to manage shifts in demand in virtually real time, and the ability to do this was and is absolutely essential to the stability of the grid. Exactly as much power as is needed must be produced at the exact time it is consumed.

Renewable power is not controllable in this way and in the case of solar, fails to provide peak capacity to align with peak demand. The early growth of renewable power put enormous strain on grids in this way. The solution to this problem is readily dispatchable energy storage, that can efficiently absorb huge amounts of excess generating capacity during peak generation times, and then supply it to the grid on demand. These storage solutions started to be seen prior to the Collapse, but really came into their own under the Order.

All storage connects to the grid in the same way - it is mostly all privately owned, and pays for electricity from the grid to store. The the storage owner must accept computerised control to access the grid, like any other customer, and they are generally restricted to buying power that is in excess of demand from other customers. In turn, when the grid needs power, the AI controllers can request power from the storage provider, which sells it back to the grid at a profit.

A storage site can be as simple as someone's home battery, but usually is a much larger corporate-owned installation called "ny Horoca," a Collector. Collectors are found everywhere, and tend to be very important sites for other reasons, because they tend to attract certain industry that is particularly sensitive to consistent access to electricity. This is because the security forces and the OPE tend to most highly prioritise the capacity and security of the distribution infrastructure supplying power to these sites, which nearby customers can take advantage of, and the physical proximity to a Collector helps to reduce disruptions in the final leg. Often, such customers will have a special arrangement with the Collector for first access to backup power - this limited private bypass of the grid is somewhat irritating to Global Energy, but is legal.

The types of customers you will often find clustered around Collectors can include any kind of energy-intensive industry, but the most significant ones you will often find are desalination plants in dry areas along coasts, and photofermentation sites manufacturing hydrocarbon fuels for the considerable global energy consumption that isn't electrified, notably air travel and the New World Army's war machine, practically anywhere.

A Collector usually uses a mix of technologies, most typically two separate storage systems at each site, one for shorter term provision of power very quickly, and another for longer term provision of large amounts of base load that might need a little more time to come online. Many, many possibilities have been tried for both system types, and in fact many technologies are in use around the world. But by and large, most Colectors seem to have settled on two specific technologies, not necessarily because they're the best but because a relatively poor and stretched Order could deploy them relatively cheaply at massive scale. These are flow batteries and liquid air cryo generators (known as Liquid Air Energy Storage, or LAES systems in English).

A typical Collector will have a redox flow battery for fast power release over short timespans to ensure bridging power to its cryo systems and to provide the grid with immediate response while cryo systems are switched from collection to generation. When electricity is plentiful, the Collector will charge its flow cells and manufacture tons of liquid air, which it stores in immense farms of insulated tanks. The facility will also contain massive heat sink systems, to increase the round trip efficiency of the technique. When the facility needs to generate power, it will pump liquid air into its turbines along with heat from its heat sinks to rapidly expand the air back to the gaseous state and drive its turbines.

This liquid air technology is not necessarily the absolutely most efficient or compact option the Order could have chosen, but it appears to scale well and be relatively easy and cheap to deploy. It also allows railcars of liquid air to be transported to places where power is needed and plugged into a generator as an option to supply emergency power to an area, and for railcars full of liquid air to even serve as emergency battery storage to drive the train to safety if overhead power fails, for trains that don't have better and more expensive batteries.

An interesting irony of LAES systems is that this technology was actually first developed and deployed in Britain. Today it is the most popular type of long term energy storage system for grid support in the New World Order, yet is virtually unknown in Britain.

One advantage of the typical flow/cryo Collector is that these technologies are relatively less dangerous than many other options, lacking, for example, the fire hazard problem with the more expensive and precious lithium ion batteries, giving trols less bang for their buck if they manage to compromise such a facility. However, other types are not exactly uncommon, either - for example, pumped hydro remains very popular in areas that can support it geographically.

Lithium Batteries

The New World Order actualy has extremely good battery technology, much better than Britain's, and of course unhampered by lack of access to specific raw materials. Their best batteries remain lithium ion batteries, although due to these batteries' expense and flammability (making them especially gratifying targets for trols), they are rarely used for large-scale storage despite having some superior characteristics for this application. These batteries are considered too precious to use in any application where a less energy-dense battery will do, and are typically reserved for handheld devices like taws, and for transportation.