Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman

Author:Thomas L. Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141918501
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

That view from Mount Everest would look like nothing you’ve ever seen. Actually, being a part of it would be like nothing you’ve ever experienced, either. It would feel like all the power systems in your home were communicating with all the information systems in your home and that they had all merged into one big seamless platform for using, storing, generating, and even buying and selling clean electrons. It would feel like the information technology revolution and the energy technology revolution, IT and ET, had merged into a single system. It would feel like you were living with an “Energy Internet.”

I realize this may sound like science fiction or magic. But it’s not. Many of the technologies that would make up an Energy Internet—a term used by The Economist to refer to the “smart grid”—already exist or are being perfected right now in garages and laboratories. What we need most now are the integrated government policies—laws and standards, taxes and credits, incentives and mandates, minimums and maximums—to guide and stimulate the marketplace to drive that innovation further, to commercialize these new ideas faster, and to bring this revolution to life sooner.

This chapter is the first of four that will describe what the key elements of a Clean Energy System might look like when implemented in the real world and how we might bring that about. This chapter will describe how an Energy Internet would enable you, me, and your next-door neighbor to do extraordinary things by way of saving energy and using clean power efficiently, and do them around the clock, all the time, whether or not you’re thinking about it. The next two chapters will describe the integrated government policies we need to guide and stimulate our businesses and investors to commit the capital we’ll need to erect such an Energy Internet and to invent the abundant, clean, reliable, and cheap electrons we would need to feed it. Those will be followed by a chapter on preservation: how we can also create the policies for the preservation of the natural world—the plants, animals, fish, oceans, rivers, and forests that sustain life.

While many of the pieces required to make this system a reality already exist in some form, it will not be easy to implement—no revolution is. But this definitely is not science fiction. So keep an open eye and an open mind, and remember what the late, great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously observed: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Before we lift the curtain on this magic show, I first need to do something really mundane. I need to explain how our current electricity system in America, primarily based on a network of publicly regulated utilities, actually works. Probably the last time you stopped and thought about utilities was when you landed on one in Monopoly and had to decide whether to shell out $150 to buy the Electric Company. That was certainly the case for me before I started researching this book. I knew how my car worked and where the closest gasoline station was.

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