The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 20

All over the world, the shift in energy sources from fossil fuels to solar and wind had been disruptive. It had changed the world.

The shift ought not have even been noticed by the end-consumers of energy. Power was power, and was simply there when you wanted it, and no-one should really have cared how their lights worked or car ran, as long as everything did.

But they had cared. They had cared more than anyone then had expected. They had cared because energy was expensive, and because energy was oddly emotional, too.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, energy had mattered to everything. Energy had counted for more than goods, or people, or weapons, or laws, and whoever controlled energy, whoever controlled the means by which energy was produced, they had all the power in the world.

Although none at the time had known it.

The corporation which Ellie and Sameh now worked for was one of those energy-producers. NewSol had been lucky. It had been manufacturing the right product, at the right time, when the attitudes of the world’s consumers had begun to shift.

In the late twentieth century, energy had suddenly become political. Energy had become about emotion. On one level, energy was still energy, an input into a system which produced work or other outcomes, but on another level, people no longer saw it that way. The kind of energy one used expressed something about the self, and then, very quickly, the type of energy one consumed became about more than self-fulfillment, it became about loathing other groups of people, and their lifestyles, and their provider corporations.

Loathing some, and worshipping others, and NewSol had been fortunate enough to be one of those which was worshipped.

NewSol Corporation had begun as a domestic solar-panel manufacturer at the end of the twentieth century. It had sold reasonably good panels reasonably cheaply, and been utterly unnoticeable in a crowd of other small-and-medium businesses.

No-one had realized it then, not even NewSol, but the world had been about to change.

NewSol company historians now saw NewSol as being at the forefront of the enormous social changes of the twenty-first century, and a key early-mover in the post-modern to last-modern transition of consumers’ lives from forced dependency on the monopoly of a single nation-state, to selective cooperation with a series of corporate benefactors and patrons. It had been an enormous shift, a liberating shift, and NewSol had been one of the first and earliest companies to make this transition.

They had transitioned without entirely realizing, because it had been an utterly different world, back then.

In the early twenty-first century, large-scale energy producers were usually owned or licensed by governments. Usually they were outsized and unwieldy, gave poor service, imposed arbitrary pricing, and had rude employees as well.

Consumers had become hostile. They didn’t like monopolies, and the inability to choose. They had become hostile to the large energy companies in the same way as they had become disenchanted with the single-provider model common among national governments. They didn’t like to be forced to do business with an entity, any entity, if they had no illusion of choice about who they dealt with. This observation, first made by Nobel-laureate Anh Dũng Silva, was the underpinning of the modern economic system.

It was why people had been so unhappy in the early twenty-first century.

Consumers then had disliked all of their corporate provider-partners. They had wanted change simply for the sake of change. They had loathed their financial institutions, and vehicle manufacturers, and toll-road operators, and food-providers. They had loathed any business which had a monopoly on the supply of a given good or service. They had obviously loathed their governments, and had thrown those shackles off gratefully when mid-century fiscal imprudence finally made that liberation possible, and they had especially loathed their energy and telecommunications providers.

The providers NewSol was about to displace.

NewSol had freed consumers from the tyranny of large government-owned energy providers. With NewSol’s panels, it quickly became possible for consumers to make their own electricity, and so they did. They did by the tens and hundreds of millions. They preferred it, even if the twenty-year cost of either option was exactly the same. They had wished to avoid doing any business with the large, established energy providers that much.

This was the heart of NewSol’s success. People wanted choice, even if there was no financial advantage. NewSol had realized this before its competitors, and had began to market their solar panels as a liberating technology conferring freedom, rather than a product whose sole value was price-competitiveness. Consumers responded, and NewSol grew, and rapid conversion and expansion drove the development of cheaper and more efficient panels. Eventually, NewSol had sold enough of its panels to have one on almost every roof in the wealthiest parts of the world, and to become one of the hundred largest corporations in China.

It had also upended the existing global business of electricity supply forever, but by then NewSol had understood exactly what it was doing.

By that time, when most domestic and commercial energy supply was already based on rooftop solar panels, large industrial generation facilities and vast transmission networks were no longer needed. Not when every rooftop was its own energy source. Those transmission networks were expensive to maintain, and barely used, and NewSol had begun the second phase of its expansion. It had begun buying up the existing transmission networks in many countries, the actual poles and wires, and adapting them for data connectivity, and as they had done this they had their second stroke of good fortune.

They had been converting power grids to data networks just as the third great phase of internet expansion began, when core bandwidth needs began exceeding the capacity of wireless networks, and people started transitioning back to wired internet. NewSol had been very well positioned to leverage its transmission-line-based data network into new business, as rival wired internet networks had been allowed to degrade during the second internet, and lose capacity, and NewSol’s cabling was often the sole surviving provider in many areas. NewSol had done well. NewSol had done better than well. It had leveraged its links between both the energy generation and data-provisioning sectors and taken early control of the first energy credit trading schemes, the systems of micro-transactional peer-to-peer trading of domestically generated energy from one consumer directly to another which became vital to the world economy as electric cars became widespread.

NewSol had become a huge enterprise leveraging the energy credit trading schemes. It had evolved, and grown strong. Now, it was just a business, which bought and sold and traded, and supplied people and services, but everything it had, all of it, had been built up from energy credit trading and the manufacture of domestic solar generation panels. And along the way, because of the need to supply credit to customers, it had founded a bank, and because it owned a bank it had needed to collect its debts, and so it had begun a security division, and that security division was where Ellie and Sameh now worked.

Ellie and Sameh worked for NewSol, and NewSol was also the workplace of a very worried, very important parent.