h+ Magazine

In an unassuming corner of Burnaby, a lush, green suburb of Vancouver, BC, I’ve arrived at the doorway of a company that could potentially change the world. But you’d never know it from the nondescript office park it’s situated in, or the bare bones furniture and office equipment I see once I open the door and announce my presence.

There may soon be a run on coconut futures. Vintage 2002 Indonesian coconut-shell charcoal is being used to help build what may become the first commercially viable Tokamak fusion power electrical generating facility near Cadarache in the south of France – about 38 miles from the Mediterranean.

Surge suppressors are about to get upgraded. Via wireless, networks and virtual reality, they are about to become — in a way — the newest type of renewable energy: negawattage.

If you were trying to design an energy system for a rapidly growing population, it would be hard to do worse than the one we have today. It's brittle — dependent upon unstable regions and massive centralized networks. It's dirty — poisoning us with mercury and heating the atmosphere with carbon. And it's finite — we're perilously close to running out of one of our key energy resources, oil. Getting away from all of this won't be easy, and we're running out of time to make it happen.

A generator designed to mimic the motion of fish has the potential to transform energy production in both the developed and developing worlds.