Exocapitalism Part 5 - Energy shows what cannot be lifted away

(Thanks again to Ryan Wood for the discussion)

Energy is the stress test for any theory that says the firm can lift itself away from the physical world.

I find the Lift argument in Poliks and Alonso Trillo’s Exocapitalism compelling right up to the point where it meets the grid, because coordination can become increasingly abstract while failure remains stubbornly physical.

Energy utilities provide a particularly clear example. Virtual power plants already aggregate household solar, batteries and controllable loads into dispatchable portfolios. AEMO’s 2026 Integrated System Plan forecasts rooftop solar on 56 per cent of suitable NEM dwellings by 2050, with two-thirds of those homes also holding batteries and consumer battery capacity reaching 35 GW.

That creates genuine room for specialisation. Forecasting, dispatch, maintenance, retail, billing and aggregation can be coordinated at a finer grain than a vertically integrated utility could manage, while agentic systems could further reduce the cost of matching those capabilities as conditions change.

This is Lift extended into infrastructure.

But the orchestration layer does not inherit a right to escape accountability.

Networks still have physical safety obligations, AEMO still has to maintain system security, and households care about backup power, control and fair returns, not simply wholesale optimisation.

The last of those is particularly interesting because the benefit-sharing model remains unresolved. If households supply the capital, flexibility and battery degradation, they need visibility into what was dispatched, what value it created and how that value was divided.

And energy is only one example. The same constraint appears wherever digital coordination sits on top of physical systems: transport and logistics, healthcare, manufacturing, construction, water, telecommunications and critical infrastructure all create situations where execution can be distributed but physical consequences cannot.

A market can separate forecasting from maintenance, aggregation from ownership and optimisation from execution. It cannot separate anyone from the obligation to carry the safety case, absorb the consequences of failure and answer for the outcome.

The future may distribute execution widely. What it cannot distribute away is physical accountability.

That is the boundary I would watch most closely.

#EnergyTransition #VirtualPowerPlants #AusEnergy