Coherence, Not Just Capacity: What the "Coherence Economy" Means for the Energy Transition

Why closing the loop alone on materials, capital, and power might be the source of the same problem.

Hayley Moffiet's latest essay, "The Coherence Economy," offers an argument that energy professionals will recognise despite the fact that it is not about energy at all. She contends that we don't lack ideas, wealth, or technology to develop a better economy; rather, we lack coherence among the components. Capital reward extraction. Even within dispersed structures, governance becomes more centralised. For better or worse, technology amplifies the reasoning upon which it is based. Life-supporting systems continue to work against it, not out of malice, but because they are misaligned.

Swap “economy” for “grid,” and the diagnosis barely changes.

The energy transition has never really been short on generation. Renewable capacity has scaled faster than almost anyone predicted a decade ago. What it has been short on is a coherent way to move that power to where it is needed, in a form the world can use, without rebuilding the grid underneath it. Data centres burn gas while waiting years for a connection. Industrial sites run on diesel not because they prefer it, but because the clean alternative cannot get to them. Renewable developers curtail perfectly good output because there is nowhere for the surplus to go. None of this is a technology gap. It is a coherence gap — generation, storage, transport, and demand pulling in different directions instead of functioning as one system.

Moffiet asserts that "capital does not merely fund systems. Wealth influences structures. The same applies to the medium selected by a system for energy transmission. Compressed hydrogen and battery logistics embody the presuppositions of the systems that created them – elevated pressure, deterioration, and reliance on the grid they are intended to circumvent. iQ LOOP is based on an alternative concept: it utilises stable solid aluminium to store energy, which can be charged, transferred, released as heat, electricity, or hydrogen, and subsequently recovered and refilled perpetually. It is intentionally a closed loop, rather than being a result of an offset. The circularity is not a post hoc assertion on the system; it constitutes the mechanism itself.

Moffiet's framework proves to be more than a metaphor in its closed-loop nature. She cites bioregional and localised systems, resources recovered by the people who manage them, and infrastructure designed for durability and regenerative material flows as early indicators of what a coherence economy looks like in practice. That same reasoning applies to power, with a platform that allows industrial sites, remote operations, and entire communities to develop their own reserve of clean energy, independent of grid access and deployed on demand wherever the grid cannot reach. Energy sovereignty is not a side effect of resolving the delivery challenge; it is what coherence looks like when solved at the bioregional scale rather than the boardroom level.

The essay's part on technology as "amplifier or distorter" is also worth considering, because deep tech cannot claim neutrality simply because the underlying chemistry is sound. A storage medium that recharges without loss is only coherent if it is financed, deployed, and governed in ways that reward the long-term stewardship for which it was designed, rather than being folded into the same short-cycle capital logic that, as Moffiet warns, is already reshaping decentralised and regenerative initiatives elsewhere. This is a design question for both iQ LOOP's relationships and governance, as well as its metallurgy.

Moffiet concludes her essay with an inquiry instead of a summary: where does incoherence exist, and what measures are necessary to achieve coherence? The energy system faces a significant challenge: the disparity between plentiful clean energy production and the industrial locations, distant activities, and towns that continue to rely on diesel due to the inability to transmit that electricity effectively. Closing that gap — quite literally, in a loop — is one small, concrete answer to a much larger question about what an economy in service of life might require.

References

Moffiet, H. (2026, July 17). The coherence economy: Repatterning our economies in greater service to life. Haylo's Way (Substack). https://haylo7.substack.com/p/the-coherence-economy and https://lnkd.in/db298AJF

iQ LOOP Energy. (n.d.). Company (mission, vision, and approach). https://www.iq-loop.co.uk/company

iQ LOOP Energy. (n.d.). Technology: How iQ LOOP's platform works. https://www.iq-loop.co.uk/technology

iQ LOOP Energy. (2026, June 27). The need for platforms like iQ LOOP [Blog post]. https://www.iq-loop.co.uk/post/need-energy-systems-like-loop