Some gems from Jeremy Rifkin that we've been using for inspiration

[Ed Borden]

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming
Energy, the Economy, and the World
Jeremy Rifkin

"The story line begins with an understanding that the great economic
transformations in history occur when new communication technology
converges with new energy systems. The new forms of communication
become the medium for organizing and managing the more complex
civilizations made possible by the new sources of energy. The
infrastructure that emerges annihilates time and shrinks space,
connecting people and markets in more diverse economic relations."

Communications-energy matrix.

"Infrastructure is an organic relationship between communications
technologies and energy sources that, together, create a living
economy. Communication technology is the nervous system that oversees,
coordinates, and manages the economic organism, and energy is the
blood that circulates through the body politic, providing the
nourishment to convert nature's endowment into goods and services to
keep the economy alive and growing. Infrastructure is akin to a living
system that brings increasing numbers of people together in more
complex economic and social relationships."

First Industrial Revolution
"The introduction of steam-powered technology into printing
transformed the medium into the primary communications tool to manage
the First Industrial Revolution"

The advent of public schooling on both continents between the 1830's
and 1890s created a print-literate workforce to organize the complex
operations of a coal-powered, steam-driven rail and factory economy."

Second Industrial Revolution
"In the first decade of the twentieth century, electrical
communication converged with the oil-powered internal combustion
engine, giving rise to the Second Industrial Revolution."

"The electrification of factories ushered in the era of mass-produced
goods, the most important being the automobile. Henry Ford began to
manufacture his gasoline-powered Model T car, altering the spatial and
temporal orientation of society. Virtually overnight, millions of
people began to trade in their horses and buggies for automobiles. To
meet the increased demand for fuel, the nascent oil industry revved up
exploration and drilling, making the United States the leading oil
producer in the world."

"Thousands of miles of telephone lines war installed, and later radio
and television were introduced, recasting social life and creating a
communication grid to manage and market the far-flung activities of
the oil economy and auto age."

Third Industrial Revolution
Today, we are on the cusp of another convergence of communication
technology and energy regimes. The conjoining of Internet
communication technology and renewable energies is giving rise to a
Third Industrial Revolution."

"In the twenty first century, hundreds of millions of human beings
will be generating their own green energy in their homes, offices, and
factories and sharing it with one another across intelligent
distributed electricity networks-an intergrid- just like people now
create their own information and share it on the internet."

The conventional top-down organization of society that characterized
much of the economic, social, and political life of the fossil
fuel-based industrial revolutions is giving way to distributed and
collaborative relationships in the emerging green industrial era. We
are in the midst of a profound shift in the way society is structured,
away from hierarchical power and toward lateral power."

The five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution are:
shifting to renewable energy
transforming the building stock of every continent into mice-power
plants to collect renewable energies on site
deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building
and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies
using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every
continent into an energy-sharing inter grid that acts just like the
Internet(when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of
energy locally, on site, they can sell surplus back to the grid and
share electricity with their continental neighbors)
transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell
vehicles that can buy and sell electricity on a smart, continental,
interactive power grid.
"The commercial growth in solar and wind technology is reminiscent of
the dramatic growth in personal computers and Internet use."

"However, the old energy industries continue to be a powerful force,
primarily because of deep pockets that hlp them influence the shaping
of government energy policies. Government subsidies and other forms of
favoritism artificially prop up the aging energy sector, giving in an
unfair advantage over the new green energy industries. "

"The first inclination was to go to places where the sun always shines
and create giant solar parks to collect the energy. Similarly, grab
the wind where it is most abundant…"
"For power and utility companies, not to mention banks and
governments, which were used to gathering fossil fuels that were
concentrated at limited sites, doing the same with renewable energies
seemed to make sense. And big centralized solar parks and wind farms
began popping up in scattered parts of Europe where these energies
were abundant."

"Unlike fossil fuels and uranium, which are elite energies and only
found in certain regions of the world, renewable energies are
everywhere."
"If renewable energies are distributed and found in various
proportions and frequencies everywhere in the world, why would we want
to collect them in only a few central points? We realized we were
using outmoded twentieth-century ways of thinking about energy based
on our previous experiences with fossil fuels."

"If the First Industrial Revolution gave rise to dense urban cores,
tenements, row housing, skyscrapers and multilevel factories, and the
Second Industrial Revolution spawned flat suburban tracts and
industrial parks, the Third Industrial Revolution transforms every
existing building into a dual-pupose dwelling-a habitat and a
micro-power plant." (pillar 2)

"After a century of big energy companies dominating the economy, not
to mention wielding influence over government policies and the
geopolitics of international relations, a new plan was being proposed
that would democratize the production and distribution of energy by
creating millions of mini energy entrepreneurs. As one observer
remarked, this is all about "power to the people.""

"Without storage we're sunk."

"When the sun is shining on the photovoltaic panels on the roof,
electricity is generated, most of which is used instantly to power the
building. If, however, there is a surplus of electricity that is not
immediately needed, it can be used in the process of electrolysis to
sequester hydrogen in a storage system. When the sun isn't shining,
the hydrogen can be transformed back into electricity by a fuel cell
to provide power."