Ch. 24 Ridiculously Expensive and Wildly Inefficient
"But what if I were to say to you that 25 years from now, the bulk of the energy you use to... operate every part of the global economy will likewise be nearly free?" - Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society The current Second Industrial Revolution energy and transportation system we find ourselves stuck in is, as has already been said, ridiculously expensive and wildly inefficient. This may seem like an exaggerated or hyperbolic statement, but by the end of this chapter, this assertion will be hard to deny. Let's talk about inefficiency first. Our current system is centralized, top-down. It's a closed infrastructure, proprietary system. Fossil fuel plants are dozens, if not hundreds of miles away from the endpoint users. One power plant feeds out to multiple users, hundreds and thousands of them. Every structure connected to this grid has to have power lines running to it, and they are nearly always above ground. We'll start with the inefficiency of the...