nuclear-news

The coming revolution – decentralised renewable energy

Today’s younger generation is growing up on the Internet and collaborating in distributed global social spaces. Why shouldn’t they also be empowered to generate and share their own renewable energy on a distributed continental intergrid?Just as the distributed information and communications revolution created millions of jobs, the distributed renewable energy revolution will follow suit.

‘Empathic Civilization’: Jeremy Rifkin 17 Feb 2010 Where The Jobs Are Today, the information and communications technologies that gave rise to the Internet are being used to reconfigure the world’s business models and power grids, enabling millions of people to collect renewable energy and produce their own electricity in their homes, offices, retail stores, factories, and technology parks and share it peer-to-peer across smart grids, just as they now produce and share their own information in cyberspace. This is a Third Industrial Revolution and will create millions of new jobs.

The question is often asked as to whether renewable energy, in the long run, can provide enough power to run a national or global economy. Just as second generation information-systems allow businesses to connect thousands of desktop computers, creating far more distributed computing power than even the most powerful centralized supercomputers, millions of local producers of renewable energy, with access to intelligent utility networks, can potentially produce and share far more distributed power than the older centralized forms of energy–oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear–that we currently rely on……..

The Third Industrial Revolution economic development plan was officially embraced by the European Parliament in 2007 and is currently being pursued by way of various EU Commission initiatives as a means of addressing the triple challenge of the global economic meltdown, energy security, and climate change. Cities, regions, and nations across Europe are beginning to implement various parts of the plan to make Europe the first post-carbon economy by 2050 and, in the process, create millions of jobs for a 21st Century workforce.

The Third Industrial Revolution leads to a new social vision where economic power itself is broadly distributed, encouraging unprecedented new levels of collaboration among peoples and nations. Just as the distributed communications revolution of the last decade spawned network ways of thinking, open-source sharing, and the democratization of communications, the Third Industrial Revolution does the same with the democratization of energy. We begin to envision a world where hundreds of millions of people are empowered, both literally and figuratively, with momentous implications for social and political life…………..Today’s younger generation is growing up on the Internet and collaborating in distributed global social spaces. Why shouldn’t they also be empowered to generate and share their own renewable energy on a distributed continental intergrid? Just as the distributed information and communications revolution created millions of jobs, the distributed renewable energy revolution will follow suit. We need to begin the journey into a Third Industrial Revolution.

Jeremy Rifkin: ‘Empathic Civilization’: Where The Jobs Are

February 18, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change, decentralised | energy efficiency, renewable energy, renewables, solar