Nick, I hope you are well. Here is an Addendum: 25/05/2022 Reading again the actual definition as originally worded in your image above, I previously thought my interpretation of it was not literal. Actually it is, since all energy available to Earth comes from the sun, and there is no actual source of energy on Earth, then by default, we have to be no longer consuming fuel from Earth, therefore we have to be 100% solar powered. So actually, I have interpreted it literally in all of my stories. I think Kardashev might have been one of a very rare minority who saw instantly that we have to go entirely solar powered, and assumed most other people would trivially see this too. But from experience now, this has been one of the most difficult things to show to business minded people, we have got so carried away with the idea of "Renewable Energy", when actually that completely muddies the water.

It is becoming clear that conventional profit driven business is intricately linked, and even dependent upon extracting energy from Earth capital, to the point that now I am now sometimes accused of being extreme, when I point out this problem.

So to be really extreme, I have defined a new Specialism of Systems Engineering, which concentrates on all of the Engineering and financial aspects of properly connecting to the energy of the sun. I've called this new discipline "Kardashev Engineering", to clearly delineate it from the classical, profit driven / fuel extraction / scarcity enforcement model.

In short, we have the technology now to convert sunlight to any and all of money, fuel, and even food, generating no pollution and no adverse climate effects, in fact, adding back some of what we took out of Earth, in the last few thousand years. And because we made if from energy donated for free, it must be issued to all for free.

When we do that, the old model of capital / energy extracted from fuel / capital wielded for gain / scarcity enforcement falls into irrelevance.