1 · What is the Kardashev scale?
A civilization's level is how much power it can use.
The Kardashev scale ranks a civilization by the power it harnesses: a planet's worth, a star's worth, or a galaxy's worth.
Power means energy per second, measured in watts (W). A kettle uses about 2,000 W.
K = (log10(P) − 6) / 10, with P in watts1
Each step of 0.1 on K means 10 times more power. So the scale climbs like a staircase of powers of ten, not a straight line.
2 · Where are we?
We are at about K = 0.73.
Humanity uses about 20.1 terawatts on average, all day, every day.2
K = (log10(2.01 × 1013) − 6) / 10 = 0.730
Honest caveat: this counts primary energy, the fuel and electricity we put in. It is not useful work. A lot of that energy is lost as heat along the way.2
3 · How we got here
Every jump came from a new way to release energy.
Scroll, and watch the night side of the Earth light up.
About 1 million years ago
Fire
The oldest strong evidence of controlled fire, found in a cave in South Africa. Cooking and warmth let humans spread.4
1712
Coal and steam
Thomas Newcomen's engine is the first practical machine to turn burning coal into motion.5
Today
K ≈ 0.73
All of that history, coal, oil, the grid, nuclear, solar, moved us about 0.12 on the scale since 1900.3 To reach Type I we need 500 times more.
4 · What levels us up
Four bottlenecks decide how fast we climb.
The biggest one right now is not making power. It is connecting it: new projects wait years to plug into the grid.11
Generation
How fast must we grow?
The world already makes about 31,772 TWh of electricity a year.10 Pick a yearly growth rate for all energy use.
Type I in …
One extra point of growth, kept up, pulls Type I in by about a century. Steady compound growth is an assumption, not a forecast.
Transmission
The waiting line
In the US, the median project built in 2025 waited more than 5 years from asking to connect to switching on.11 Grids, not just generators, are the constraint.12
Storage · play the grid operator
Run one home battery for a day
These are real Texas wholesale prices for 13 August 2026, hour by hour.14 Your battery holds 25 kWh, moves 5 kWh per hour, and loses 12% on the round trip. Tap an hour to cycle it: idle → charge → sell.
The best possible day earns about $0.43. Paying off the battery's hardware costs about $0.68 a day, even at a cheap $150 per kWh.15 Price swings alone don't pay for storage yet. The money is in the grid services and software around it.
Compute and making things
Turning power into capability
Power only matters for what it does. Data centers used about 415 TWh in 2024, about 1.5% of the world's electricity, and the IEA expects that to roughly double by 2030.13
1.5% of world electricity · 2024
Meanwhile about 655 million people still have no electricity at all.16 Leveling up means both: more power for new tools, and some power for everyone.
5 · What you can do
Pick one bottleneck and move it.
There are three honest ways to help: build, fund, or advocate.
Build
Work on the things that make power cheaper, faster to connect, or easier to store.
- Base Power · home batteries on the Texas grid
- Terraform Industries · fuel made from sunlight and air
- megawatt.fun tools · open source, with tests
- Live ERCOT prices · watch the Texas grid price move
Fund
Put money behind hard energy technology that needs patient capital.
- Breakthrough Energy · funds and policy work on clean energy
Advocate
Push for faster grid connections and fair permitting, with the facts.
- Institute for Progress · fast grid interconnection
- RMI · interconnection queue reform
Want the detailed plan? Read the working roadmap.