I spend my days around power. Not the political kind. The kind that keeps machines running, buildings cool, and lights on. So when I come across people chasing power in places nobody else thought to look, I pay attention. This week I found two of them. Different continents, different budgets, same instinct. If the world needs power, go get it from somewhere new.
The guy chasing volcanoes
Andrew Redd used to build rockets. He worked as an engineer at SpaceX before he walked away to start something almost nobody else was doing. His company, Endurance Energy, is going after geothermal power from underwater volcanoes.
Not the kind on land. The kind two miles under the ocean, where hydrothermal fluid comes out at 750 degrees. Redd’s team built a generator called Adelie. This month they are deploying it to an oceanic volcano off the coast of Oregon.
He has raised 63 million dollars. His team is around 36 people, a dozen of them also came from SpaceX. Four prototypes have already gone down near two miles deep. Next year they are planning a bigger pilot in Tonga, aiming for megawatt scale power.
Redd said something simple that stuck with me. People need power. That is the whole thesis. He is not chasing this because it is trendy. He is chasing it because the world runs on electricity and most of the easy sources are already spoken for. So he went looking somewhere nobody else wanted to go, two miles under the ocean, next to an active volcano.
Most people look at a hard problem and go find an easier one. He looked at a hard problem and went two miles deeper.
The guy who grew up in the dark
Second story. Different country, different scale, same spirit.
Johannes Amo-Aye grew up in Ghana with the power going out all the time. Instead of getting used to it, he decided to fix it. He co-founded a company called MINAGIE Energy and built something called the Fusion Wind Turbine, a hybrid wind and solar system, built and manufactured locally, made to run with almost no maintenance in places that do not have a repair shop down the street.
He is not selling this to rich cities. He is aiming it at rural clinics, schools, and homes that have never had reliable power. This year the Royal Academy of Engineering named him to their Africa Prize cohort. UNICEF Ghana and Ghana’s own Ministry of Health are backing the work.
What gets me about Amo-Aye is this. He did not wait for someone else to bring the solution to his country. He built it there, with people from there, for people from there. That is its own kind of power.
Why this matters right now
Here is the part I think about a lot in my own work. The world’s appetite for power is not slowing down. Data centers, AI, electric vehicles, manufacturing coming back home, all of it needs more electricity than the grid was built for. Every serious person in energy knows we are short on supply and short on time.
That is exactly why stories like these matter. We are not going to solve a shortage this big with only the obvious sources. We need people willing to go underwater, and people willing to build from scratch in places everyone else overlooked. Redd and Amo-Aye are proof that both ends of that spectrum, the well funded lab and the local workshop, are moving at the same time.
Why I am writing about this
I am not an engineer. I did not build a rocket and I have not built a wind turbine. I am just a guy who believes in paying attention to people who go after hard things instead of complaining about them.
Both of these men had every reason to stay comfortable. Redd had a good job at one of the best companies on earth. Amo-Aye could have accepted the outages the way everyone around him did. Instead they both decided the problem was theirs to solve.
That is the message today. You do not need permission to go after something hard. You do not need the easy path to open up before you start. Redd went two miles under the ocean. Amo-Aye built his own supply chain in a country that did not have one. Neither of them waited for ideal conditions.
If you are sitting on an idea right now, waiting for it to feel safe before you move, it might never feel that way. Go anyway. Build the thing. Solve the problem in front of you, the way these two did.
That is what I want this space to be about. Real people doing real things, worth knowing about and worth sharing.
More of these stories are coming. If you know someone quietly doing something remarkable, send them my way. I want to write about them too.
Phil
Sources: GeekWire on Endurance Energy and Interesting Engineering on Johannes Amo-Aye.
