TECHNOLOGY:In the quest for sustainable energy, new approaches to power will create a community of users. New ideas about energy-sharing are a whole new type of social networking
TO UNDERSTAND the future of energy production, says Jeremy Rifkin, we need to think of YouTube. The American is what the film industry calls "a hyphenate", in his case this means academic-author. You could add government adviser, controversialist and futurologist to that list of attributes. Confusingly, others have called him a Luddite.
Whatever the label, he has the ear of Europe's governing elite. When EU President Jose Manuel Barroso talked of a "third industrial revolution" in relation to the energy question in Madrid last year, he was paraphrasing the title of Rifkin's next work. Chancellor Angela Merkel asked him to plot the future of Germany's energy plan.
Rifkin was in Dublin last week to give the key-note address at the first lecture in the Economic World of Tomorrow series, organised by the Institute of International and European Affairs and sponsored by National Toll Roads (NTR). During his visit he is also meeting with the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Eamon Ryan and the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, John Gormley.
Rifkin's skill is in offering simple analogies for hugely complex issues.
This is done through his Forum on Economic Trends think-tank, and via his day job, as fellow of Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written 17 books on a range of subjects. The titles of these give an idea of where he is coming from: The Age of Access, The European Dream, The Biotech Century, The End of Work.
This is a man unafraid of tackling big topics. But predicting the future is a tricky business - more often than not, you are proved wrong. Critics point to Rifkin's track record, which they say is patchy on detail. Scientists tend to be dismissive because, well, he's not a scientist.
But what he does do is tell engaging stories, or "compelling narratives", to use his own phrase.
And as world energy prices continue to rise, someone needs to tell us a good story. Rifkin as ever is out there tackling the big questions: How are we going to replace oil, gas, coal and uranium - what he refers to as the elite fuels - over the course of the first part of the 21st century? To answer this he draws a parallel with the changes in the media with which we are all familiar.
Fifteen years ago, RTÉ and the other big dogs of network television held all the aces. It controlled what we saw and when we saw it, in a world before the internet and digital television and wikipedia and digital cameras.
Those days are long gone. Now the internet links us all, and we are active participants in the global market for entertainment, news, sport and film clips of obscure relatives drinking cheap sherry and knocking over the Christmas tree.
Substitute ESB for RTÉ and we get a reasonable picture of how energy works today: big, centralised producers pushing product down a one-way distribution channel.
But what if it wasn't like that? What if, just as we have an internet linking us all together, there was a series of interconnected power grids, called an Intergrid? What if, rather than rely on a centralised power plant to supply us with energy, we created it ourselves? And what if, just as we upload film on to YouTube, we "uploaded" any spare energy we produced back on to the Intergrid?
"We need to start thinking of hydrogen as a way of storing energy in the same way as we think of digital as a way of storing media," says Rifkin. "We take all forms of media, put it into a digital form, and then convert it to another form of media. We have to do the same with energy."
He says that elite energies "are the ones you don't find in your backyard, unless you are very lucky".
Oil, gas, coal and uranium are only found in certain geographical pockets around the world, it requires huge military and political investment to secure them, manage them and distribute them.
"We end up with the energy regime we have now, which is top-down and extremely centralised," says Rifkin.
The EU has committed itself to generating 20 per cent of its energy from renewable energies by 2020, which has been criticised as being overly ambitious. We know what we need to do, but the big question is how.
"Up to now we've been thinking about big wind farms, or solar parks, big incineration operations," says Rifkin. "But we can't get enough power by centralising these forms of energy to run a global economy."
To enable Rifkin's vision of the future to work, major changes in the way we build houses and workplaces are required. "Twenty-five years from now, every new building in Ireland will have a dual purpose," he says. "It will be both a habitat and a power plant. They will use energy, but also collect it and distribute it back in to the grid."
The first part of this statement is already taking shape, with a number of initiatives around the world leading the way. American snack giant Frito Lay has announced it will source all of its energy "off grid" by the end of this year. Spanish construction firm Acciona has opened a new office building which has the ability to load its own renewable energy completely off grid.
In France, Bouygues Construction is designing a new office complex in Paris which it claims will be an "energy-active building" that will produce more energy than it needs, enabling the company to sell surplus energy back to the main power grid.
Likewise, the Walqa Tech Park in Spain produces all of its energy locally, off the grid, and stores the surplus in the form of hydrogen, for transport vehicles and for remission as electricity back to the Spanish power grid.
The big problem lies in storing the energy created. "Ireland is going big into wind power, but what happens when the wind stops blowing, or it blows in the middle of the night?" asks Rifkin.
"Because renewable energies are intermittent, they have to be stored efficiently."
The European Union is investing €2 billion to find an answer to this problem, which is central to meeting the 20 per cent renewables figure by 2020. The hydrogen development plan will be funded by public and private money.
The European SmartGrids Alliance, made up of the leading IT, engineering, and utility companies across Europe is taking the first steps toward the Intergrid. A Joint Technology Initiative with the European Union is scheduled to hit the desks of politicians by the end of this year.
This is the first stage in transforming the EU power grid into an intelligent utility network. The cost is vast - early estimates put it at €750 billion over the next 20 years.
Similar plans are in train on the other side of the Atlantic. The GridWise Alliance, made up of 56 major utility companies and companies from the IT sector, such as Microsoft and IBM, is working towards transforming the national grid into an Intergrid.
Four American utility companies, CenterPoint Energy in Houston, Sempra in San Diego, Edison in Los Angeles, and Xcel in Boulder will have the first rudimentary smart grids online, serving homes and commercial buildings by the end of this year.
"This development is as significant for the 21st century as the laying down of the first rail lines in the 19th century, and the establishment of the telephone network and first generation electrical grid in the 20th century."
The final piece of the jigsaw is distributing the power back to people's homes.
This will require a huge undertaking in how a new generation of "smart houses" are constructed.
The vision is that everywhere on the grid will be connected by software. "The grid will know how much energy your washing machine is using," says Rifkin.
"When there is too much demand for electricity across the grid, and the price is going too high, the software will tell your washing machine to go down by one rinse per cycle. Or tell your air conditioning to go down by a degree. And when this happens you get a credit. The software will tell you when to pull back, or when you should put some energy back into the grid."
Similarly the transport system will be plugged in. He points out that hydrogen buses are already employed in various European cities and that the first H2 cars are being test-driven. General Motors, Toyota, Honda and Daimler have announced plans for commercial mass production beginning in 2011 or 2012.
"The new system will see hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, along with electric plug-in vehicles, both able to store and sell energy back to the main power grid."
"It's like going from a centralised communication to a distributive system of blogs and podcasts, YouTube and MySpace," says Rifkin.
"It's not new technology. We are seeing the early convergence of renewable energies. Buildings are just beginning to do this, the shadow of this is coming together and it will take around 25 years to build a juvenile structure and another 25 for it to mature.
"This is a powerful economic revolution that will change everything. Just like the first and second industrial revolutions. We'll see radical new business models, just like Linux and wikipedia, we will see collaborative and distributive models for energy."
The way Rifkin tells it, the next century's most important revolution really will give power to the people.
ECO HOMES
THE BRITISH housing market gives mixed messages to builders seeking evidence of a demand for a new generation of eco homes. The British government has pledged that, by 2016, all new homes will be zero-carbon. Fifty seven proposals for the first new towns for nearly 50 years could provide up to 100,000 homes, according to government sources.
The new projects will be built to zero-carbon standards with modern insulation and green technologies. A panel of environmental, design and economic experts will be set up to monitor the progress of the schemes and ensure they conform to the government's vision.
But does anybody want to live there?
Research carried out by the National House-Building Council Foundation questions the appetite for carbon-neutral housing. The 2016 deadline has sparked a wave of innovation, and research and development by the country's housebuilders, racing to comply in time.
But the research showed that without intervention and explanation from government and the industry, homeowners could be discouraged by some of the features of zero-carbon homes, such as airtightness, as well as the potential additional costs and the reliability of some of the new technologies involved.
