Ch. 27 The Five Pillars of the Revolution

"The future belongs to those who can harness

the power of renewable energy

and create a sustainable economy

that is powered by the sun, wind, and water."

-Jeremy Rifkin 

The Five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution 
(Based on the work of Jeremy Rifkin and others)

1) Renewable Energy: Simply put, resources like natural gas and oil are finite. What is needed are renewable energy sources. Wind, solar, bioenergy, and hydroelectric are all examples of renewable energy resources (Rifkin, 2011).

2) Transforming buildings into micro-power plants: Skyscrapers and other large structures have huge amounts of wasted space on the outside, which could be utilized for renewable energy sources. Tall buildings are ideal for both solar panels and wind turbines, which can be placed on roofs and outer walls. 

Large buildings also tend to produce a lot of garbage, much of which can be used to generate power. Another potential source of energy is rainwater. If rainwater were to be funneled through mini turbines, it could turn buildings into mini hydroelectric plants (Rifkin, 2011).

3) Deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies throughout infrastructure: Intermittent energy like solar and wind needs to be stored somewhere, and using existing infrastructure is both convenient and cost-effective (Rifkin, 2011).

Some possible storage technologies are:

• Pumped hydro
• Batteries
• Thermal energy storage
• Mechanical energy storage
• Hydrogen

Hydrogen is going to be a big player in energy storage. Right now it's not a perfect storage medium, but there are new breakthroughs that promise to put it at the top of the list for storage and transport.

Why is hydrogen a good choice? It can be converted back to energy, uses its own power source, is cheap to transport and store for long periods of time, and has very little energy loss in the transformation. 

A new method of converting hydrogen into energy has resulted in only a 2-5% loss of energy, making it 95-98% efficient (Blain, 2022).

Best of all, hydrogen engines have exhaust that is pure H2O, in other words, water (Yron, 2016). 

Mike Strizki, a 64 year old man from California with only a community college degree, has actually built a house that runs on solar and hydrogen, 100% off the grid (Furchgott, 2020). His house not only produces its own water, it also processes its own waste.

 

4) Using internet technology to transform the power grid into a decentralized energy sharing platform: When cities utilize renewable sources like wind and solar, they can actually generate a surplus which can be sold back to the power grid. Then this energy can be shared with continental neighbors.

We already have off-the-shelf technology to help make this work in the form of smart meters and other technology. The more buildings in the network, the more power you have. Say your house is connected to this type of grid. If your house produces more electricity than it can use, you can transfer that power through the grid to other places that need it. As stated previously, once you take care of fixed costs of installation, the marginal cost of operating this renewable energy system is near zero.

While the fixed costs are going to be quite high to get the grid up and running, there is good news. President Biden’s infrastructure funding bill, which passed in 2021, includes money to subsidize just these kinds of projects. Europe and China are already hard at work creating these types of energy-sharing networks, and the US risks getting left behind if we do not take action.

5) Transitioning the transport fleet to electric, self-driving and shared vehicles: It’s a huge waste for everyone to have their own car on the road at the same time. Not only does it cause more pollution and use up more resources, but our nonsensical aversion to mass transit leads to problems like traffic gridlock and more road and infrastructure maintenance. Obviously, electric vehicles have less emissions than fossil fuel powered engines, and fleets of self-driving trucks could utilize AI to more efficiently move goods.

These five pillars will help create a democratized, cooperatively owned and affordable energy infrastructure for everyone. 

I want to point out again that everyone buying electric cars is not a real solution. It creates a new set of environmental problems, including how to dispose of the batteries when they’re no longer able to hold a charge, and the lack of rare Earth minerals that are needed to create them in the first place. 

Obviously a complete overhaul of our energy infrastructure is going to take a lot of time, and a lot of work. In the next chapter, we'll talk about why that's a good thing!