An outlook into the future, in other words, why we are building Sunday.

It took the flooding of my hometown to ground me to the reality about climate crisis. That it’s no longer a problem with feedback loops so far away in time that we needed to fix to protect our future generations. This is a conflict now, with drastic implications on the lives we are about to live.

The most critical driver of climate change is the rampant carbon emissions. Post-industrialization emissions threatens to drive a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees, enough to destroy entire biosystems and shift climatic patterns to their extremes. Of course, we know this, at least in theory. As we further delve into the data, we realise that one-third of all greenhouse gases (GHGs) are emitted by the energy industry. As our industries are increasingly electronics-driven and transportation (which contributed another one-third in GHG) is shifting focus into electric-mobility, the offsetting and elimination of emissions from generation and distribution becomes critical to minimizing the impact of climate change.

We tend to think of this merely as a technology problem, that as technology progress the way we expect it to, soon clean, renewable energy would scale and become the norm.

But reality is a very different picture: Wind is a highly unpredictable natural renewable source, small-hydro is location-constrained and bottlenecks an ecosystem already in conflict.
Solar is extensively build either as rooftop solar or utility-scale solar farms.

Rooftop photovoltaics is not sufficient to take a middle-economic family off-grid (that is, if they were lucky to have a sun facing roof side with no shade casted in the first place) let alone in an urban landscape where hundreds of individuals live under the rooftops of high-rise apartments.

Solar farms are built in barren and wasteland areas, a land feature that is not uniformly spread everywhere. These utilities need to be installed close to a substation, which are close to community settlements. This creates a conflict for land owners; to setup solar farms or to maintain agriculture. This conflict for space is increasingly threatening the scalability of renewables world over.

The distribution grid, the power lines are legacy systems of the power station model of energy distribution, and is highly ineffective for the intermittent nature of available renewable energy sources.

This is not to say that the only hope we have is to wait for some sort of fusion technology to work. We need to rethink our systems ground up, to work towards enabling a distributed, resilient and cross-compatible energy generation, access and consumption. To achieve an industrial revolution that is in synergy with the global ecosystems, we need a new paradigm to think about energy, because this is what drives other technologies and scopes of what we could be.

To meet this objective, since mid 2019 I began working on a series of technologies under an umbrella initiative called Sunday; a new generation paradigm has been devised that leapfrogs over the space constraint faced by rooftop solar and utilities, which could enable local communities to generate an output that could make them independent from the grid and new solutions for energy access systems are on the drawing board.

Widely speaking, the goal of Sunday is to build energy systems that focuses on planet, profit and people in equal measure.

In other words, design a future, where choosing between people or planet is no longer a zero-sum game. Societal development and community well-being should go hand in hand. We need to build tools to enable communities to adapt and thrive in a changing planet. This is no simple task, but with the right collaborators from all , Sunday could be a genuine fighting chance for all of us.

The foundations of Sunday is now in the process of being built up; the initial power generation systems are being designed, began identifying communities to test the platform, met with research groups to build datasets, and more importantly for the project, appropriate financial components are being vested.

So if you are an engineer, designer, systems thinker or even define yourself beyond these singular identities, and want to collaborate on this project, drop by or drop an email to reachforsunday and say hi.