Affordable and Clean Energy

SDG 7 is the spine of Watts and Wealth. Every facility on the board is a clean-or-dirty energy generator with explicit cost, output, and pollution columns, and the Renewable Pathway co-operative win is keyed directly to SDG 7.2 (substantially increase the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix).

Primary mechanics

Twelve facility types populate the build menu — coal, oil, solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, tidal, floating-solar, biomass, waste-to-energy, and offshore drilling. Each carries deterministic cost / output / pollution numbers, so every build is a transparent trade between SDG 7.1 (access), 7.2 (renewable share), and 7.3 (efficiency).

Era gating mirrors historical technology availability. Solar PV becomes cheap in the Nuclear & Early Renewables era; tidal and floating-solar unlock in the Sustainable Future era; offshore drilling is available early but its pollution profile becomes punishing once policy cards land.

Card-level grounding

• Solar_Panel_Oversupply (Event, -5 tokens on next solar build) and Solar_RD_Grant (Policy, next solar plant free) model the supply-side and innovation-side drivers of the global solar cost decline.
• Perovskite_Solar_Breakthrough is an era-3 Policy card that raises solar facility tolls by three tokens — rewarding solar holders on the revenue side rather than the output side.
• Feed_In_Tariff is an era-2 Policy card that adds three tokens to tolls at all facilities the player owns — a board-wide revenue lever loosely modelling Germany’s EEG-style price guarantee on generation income.
• Smart_Grid_System (era-2 Policy, +1 energy across all facilities) and Microgrids (era-2 Policy, immunity to blackouts, cyberattacks, solar storms, and wildfires) address SDG 7.3 efficiency and resilience rather than 7.2 share.
• Nuclear_Treaty_Signed (Event, -15 token discount on next nuclear plant) and Nuclear_Safety_Regulation (Event, era-4 upkeep tax with meltdown risk) model the policy environment that incentivises and constrains nuclear deployment.
• Nuclear_Fusion is an era-3 Policy (costs 20 tokens) that adds three energy output to each nuclear plant the player owns — the most powerful nuclear-uplift card in the deck.
• High_Efficiency_Turbines (era-3 Policy, doubles wind farm energy) and Decentralized_Grid (era-3 Policy, immunity to energy theft) sit on the efficiency / resilience axis.

How the win condition encodes SDG 7

The Renewable Pathway ending fires when, by round 18, the combined renewable facility count across all four players reaches ≥60% of total facilities AND global pollution is below 300. This is a structural encoding of the SDG 7.2 target: the win requires system-level renewable share, not individual virtue. A single solar-heavy player on a board of three coal empires loses to Tipping Point before round 18.