For some reason, homo sapiens tried to replace the natural phenomenon of seasonality with an on-demand, 24/7 society. How flawed is this?

Farming.

Construction work.

Ski tourism.

In many industries, seasonal production is normal and unavoidable. Could applying these principles to industrial production help us end the energy crisis for good?

We all know that we need to limit our energy consumption for a long time. Scientists have warned us about the man-made climate catastrophe for decades. With the current global heat wave, climate change now becomes visible even to the fiercest skeptics.

The current energy crisis has now added another reason to save energy. Having largely ignored scientists’ warnings about climate change over decades, Mr. Putin has added some urgency in saving energy and shifting to clean energy.

But clean energy is largely seasonal.

So let’s embark on a thought experiment. Could we significantly contribute to ending the energy crisis if industrial production went seasonal, just like farming, construction, and ski tourism? What would be the implications of such a shift?

Financial Implications

All too often, new ideas are smashed with financial arguments before they are even turned into concepts. It’s too expensive to shut down an industrial plant during winter time. There is no business case if we cannot have the plant run 24/7/365. Seasonal production is inefficient.

Think twice. Think longer-term than the next financial year or your 15-year investment plan. Consider the price and value of resilience, weighing it against efficiency in the economic case.

Add the rising costs of energy to your financial plea. Just like the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC), we need to introduce the concept of the Weighted Average Cost of Energy (WACE).

The more we shift to clean energy, winter energy is bound to become and stay a lot less available and hence much more expensive than summer energy.

Take the production of common salt. Although salt is available in abundance both as a mineral and in seawater, it takes huge amounts of energy to vaporize the water it is dissolved in. Using the concept of Weighted Average Cost of Energy (WACE), it might suddenly make sense to only produce common salt in summer, when cheap excess solar power is readily available.

The same goes for power-to-gas, sustainable methanol, and H2 production — wherever excess renewable energy is available, your WACE goes down. And by reducing WACE, you rid yourself of CO2 emissions and geopolitical pressure, just as a side product.

Supply Chain Implications

Reducing or stopping industrial output over the winter months means waving goodbye to just-in-time supply chains, instant availability of goods, and finally the on-demand society.

Returning to the example of common salt, there isn’t a reason why salt cannot be stocked in fall, with supplies to last for a year. Just like farmers’ harvest of wheat and potatoes in fall needs to last for a year.

Shifting industrial production into seasonal mode will require ample adaptations of the supply chain and storage infrastructure. Large, centralized storage facilities are susceptible to disruptions. Therefore, supply chains need to be decentralized in multiple layers — regional, communal, and also at home.

Even with decentralized supply chains, single-sourcing any good needs to be replaced to make supply chains more resilient. This is not just an insurance policy for goods availability, but also against price shocks inflicted by energy availability or geopolitical tensions.

Social Implications

This is the hardest part of it all, yet it has the largest potential. If industrial production turns seasonal, what will all the workers in those industries do in the wintertime?

Let’s turn to history. Hibernating was more than a concept from your high-school biology class. In the cold winters of the old ages, human activity died down. People recovered from the strain of hard work during the summer. People weaved clothes and fixed shoes.

In today’s world, you’d probably argue that those industrial workers turn to IT in wintertime. But most of the industrial workers are craftsmen and practitioners, not knowledge workers. So simply turning those people into IT won’t work out.

However, industrial workers could use the idle winter months for maintenance, training, assembly line improvements, and process optimization.

Or, just like many construction workers are ski instructors in winter time, why can’t industrial workers be ski instructors?

And last but not least, more and more people want to abandon full-time jobs anyway. Rather than working 3 or 4 days of the week over the entire year, how about working 8 months full-time, and getting 4 months off?

Environmental Implications

Seasonality is a natural thing. All ecological systems need periods of quiet and regeneration, and periods full of activity. For some reason, homo sapiens tried to replace this natural phenomenon with an on-demand, 24/7/365 society.

Instead of using natural sources of energy that are abundant in a seasonality ecosystem, we turned to dirty energy to bridge the quiet periods.

So reverting all aspects of our lives into a seasonality concept would help us reduce dirty energy consumption — and through this send most autocrats into insignificance as a by-product.