We don't have an energy
generation problem.
We have an energy management problem. The world generates more energy than ever. Solar is the cheapest electricity in history. And yet — grids buckle, data centers strain power infrastructure, and billions lack reliable access.
Energy is a cycle. We treat it like a line.
Energy passes through ten distinct domains on its journey from source to useful work and back again. Each domain has its own science, its own industry, its own silos. And at every handoff between them, energy leaks out — not because the physics is hard, but because nobody is managing the whole loop.
Nine domains without a brain.
We have world-class solar panels, grid-scale batteries, and smart meters on every building. The components work. But nobody is orchestrating the whole system. Energy management — the intelligence layer — is the missing center.
California curtailed 2.4 TWh of renewable energy in 2023 alone — enough to power 350,000 homes for a year. The energy was generated. Nobody could route it where it was needed.
Electricity costs 5–10x more during peak hours — not because generation is more expensive, but because demand scheduling is primitive. We know when peaks happen. We just don't act on it.
Data centers provision 2–3x their average load for peak headroom. Most of that capacity sits idle, drawing standby power, waiting for spikes that may never come.
Solar DC → grid AC → building AC → server PSU DC → VRM DC → chip. Each conversion loses 5–15%. By the time photons become compute, 40–60% of the original energy is heat.
Ten domains. One loop.
To fix energy management, you first have to understand what you're managing. Energy passes through ten domains — each with its own physics, its own failure modes, and its own opportunities.
Ambient energy is everywhere — vibration, thermal gradients, RF signals, light. Today's harvesters capture microwatts to milliwatts. Enough to power sensors. Not enough to power compute.
Harvesting becomes transformative when paired with ultra-low-power compute. A device that needs 50 mW instead of 5 W can run forever on harvested energy alone. The constraint isn't the harvester — it's the load.
Solar hit $0.02/kWh in 2024. Wind isn't far behind. Nuclear is getting modular. Generation is, for the first time in human history, approaching abundance.
Cheap generation means the economics shift from “produce less” to “waste less.” Every dollar of generation saved through better management downstream is pure margin.
Every time energy changes form — DC to AC, AC to DC, voltage up, voltage down — some fraction becomes heat. A typical data center power path has 6–8 conversion stages. Chained together: 60–70% efficiency.
Eliminate unnecessary conversions. Solar panels produce DC. Batteries store DC. Chips run on DC. Direct DC distribution can reclaim 15–20% of total facility energy.
Raw power is noisy. Voltage sags, harmonics, transients, power factor drift. UPS systems alone waste 4–10% of throughput energy in standby mode.
Intelligent conditioning adapts to the load, not the worst case. If the source is already clean, skip the heavy filtering. Match conditioning intensity to actual power quality — not to legacy specifications written for 1990s grids.
The US grid loses 5–6% of all generated electricity in transmission and distribution — about 200 TWh per year. Inside buildings and campuses, distribution losses add another 2–5%.
Localize generation. The shortest distribution path is no path at all. On-site solar plus battery eliminates transmission losses entirely. For what must travel, intelligent routing cuts waste by half.
Lithium-ion round-trip efficiency: 85–95%. But that's the easy part. The hard part is knowing when to charge, when to discharge, and how much to hold in reserve.
Storage is a time-shifting tool, not just a buffer. Charge when energy is cheapest and cleanest, discharge when demand peaks. With proper management, storage turns intermittent renewables into reliable baseload.
You can't manage what you can't measure. Most facilities know their total power bill. Few know power consumption per rack, per server, per workload. Without granular measurement, optimization is guesswork.
Measurement at the workload level changes everything. When you know that query A costs 3 millijoules and query B costs 300, you can make intelligent decisions about routing, scheduling, and pricing.
This is the missing piece. The orchestration layer that sees all nine other domains and makes real-time decisions: shift load here, discharge battery there, skip this conversion, recover that heat.
Energy management isn't a feature. It's the product. A management layer that spans all ten domains — with real-time telemetry, predictive scheduling, and cross-domain optimization — turns a collection of siloed components into a system that actually works.
A data center is a giant space heater. All that electricity becomes heat eventually. Most facilities spend additional energy to remove it — cooling systems that consume 30–40% of total facility power.
Waste heat is a resource. District heating, absorption cooling, industrial preheating, desalination. Nordic data centers already pipe waste heat to warm homes. What's missing is the management layer that routes heat to where it has value.
Batteries degrade. Solar panels lose efficiency. Transformers age. The infrastructure that handles energy has its own lifecycle — and replacing it has its own energy cost.
Extend the useful life of energy infrastructure through better management. A battery managed well lasts 2–3x longer than one managed poorly. Predictive maintenance and lifecycle-aware scheduling turn renewal from a cost center into a competitive advantage.
The management layer changes everything.
When you add an intelligent management layer across all ten domains, something remarkable happens. The domains stop fighting each other and start reinforcing each other.
Storage doesn't just buffer — it time-shifts load away from peaks. Measurement doesn't just report — it feeds the optimizer. Recovery doesn't just capture heat — it reduces cooling load, which reduces conversion demand, which reduces distribution losses.
The gains compound. A 10% improvement in each domain doesn't yield 10% system improvement. It yields 40–60% — because the management layer turns local optimizations into global ones.
The same facility. The same hardware. The same energy sources. The only difference is a management layer that treats energy as a system, not a collection of parts.
Software that treats energy as a first-class concern.
OpenIE applies interface engineering to the energy problem. We build tools that see across domain boundaries, measure at the workload level, and optimize the whole loop.
Real-time energy measurement at the workload level. Know exactly how many millijoules every query, every page load, every computation costs.
Get the extension →The energy-aware systems programming language. Energy budgets in the type system. Compile-time energy limits that prevent waste before it happens.
Explore Joule →The self-optimizing, energy-aware database. Routes queries to right-sized compute based on complexity and hardware thermal state.
View research →
The energy crisis is a
management crisis.
We have the generation. We have the storage. We have the hardware. What we've been missing is the intelligence to tie it all together.
Building in the energy space? We'd like to hear from you.
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