Jeremy Rifkin: Energy-sharing is the new internet

27th January 2012 - 5247 days ago
page 1 of 2

The Second Industrial ­Revolution, powered by oil and other fossil fuels, is spiralling into a dangerous endgame: prices are climbing, unemployment remains high, debt is soaring and the recovery is slowing. Worse, climate change from fossil-fuel-based industrial activity looms. Facing a collapse of the global economy, humanity is desperate for a new vision to take us into the future.

History's great economic revolutions occur when new communication technologies converge with new energy systems. Energy revolutions make possible more expansive and integrated trade. Accompanying communication revolutions manage the new complex commercial activities. In the 18th and 19th centuries, cheap print technology and the introduction of state schools gave rise to a print-literate workforce with the skills to manage the increased commercial activity made possible by coal and steam power, ushering in the First Industrial Revolution. In the 20th century, centralised electricity communication -- the telephone, radio and television -- became the medium to manage a more complex and dispersed oil, auto and suburban era, and the mass consumer culture of the Second Industrial Revolution.

Today, internet technology and renewable energies are about to merge to create a powerful infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution (TIR). In the coming era, hundreds of millions of people will produce their own green energy and share it in an "energy internet", just as we now ­generate and share information online. The ­creation of a renewable energy regime, loaded by buildings, partially stored in the form of hydrogen, distributed via an energy ­internet and connected to plug-in zero-emission transport, establishes a five-pillar infrastructure that will spawn thousands of businesses and millions of sustainable jobs. The democratisation of energy will also bring with it a reordering of human relationships, impacting the way we conduct business, govern society, educate our children and engage in civic life.