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Apr 24, 2009 - 5:31:05 PM |
US "guru" warns of need for Third Industrial Revolution to address challenges of the "looming oil crisis, rising energy costs and climate change"
By Finfacts Team
Apr 7, 2008 - 2:35:24 PM
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| Jeremy Rifkin |
Jeremy Rifkin, the US Wharton Business School’s economic forecasting 'guru," expert and economic and energy advisor to the EU, speaking in Dublin at the Institute of International and European Affairs today, warned that EU governments and leaders in business must make critical changes to how they produce and distribute energy, to combat the looming oil crisis, rising energy costs and climate change.
Speaking to members of the Institute at an event sponsored by NTR plc, Rifkin warned that: “To remain dependent of fossil fuels will have ominous consequences for the future of human civilisation and the ecosystems of the earth. Every government needs to explore new energy paths and establish new economic models with the goal of achieving as close to zero carbon emissions as possible.”
“Pivotal economic changes in world history have occurred when new energy regimes converge with new communications regimes. The First Industrial Revolution occurred when coal powered steam technology came together with the print press. The Second Industrial Revolution saw the convergence of first generation electrical forms of communications (telegraph, telephone, radio, etc) with the introduction of oil and the internal combustion engine.”
“The creation of a renewable energy regime will herald the Third Industrial Revolution. We need to envision a future in which millions of individuals can produce locally generated renewable energy – solar, wind, hydro, waves, biomass, etc - store that energy in the form of hydrogen and share their power generation across a Europe-wide intelligent intergrid, through sophisticated IT systems.”
“Just as second generation information systems allow businesses and individuals to connect with millions of desktop computers via the Internet, millions of local producers of renewable energy can potentially produce and share far more distributed power than the older centralised forms of energy – oil, gas, coal,” Rifkin concluded.
Brendan Halligan, Chairman of the Institute of International and European Affairs, welcomed Jeremy Rifkin: “It is an honour for the Institute of International and European Affairs to host one of the world's foremost thinkers on future trends in economics and energy".
Jim Barry, Chief Executive of NTR plc said: “In recent years, NTR has been focusing on new and innovative renewable energy solutions and we welcome Jeremy’s thought‑provoking views on the future direction of this industry.”
During his visit to Dublin, Rifkin will be meeting senior government Ministers. CNN is recording his visit to Dublin.
Extract from EurActiv.com interview with Jeremy Rifkin in Jan 2008:
According to you, the third industrial revolution relies on three pillars?
Yes. The first one is renewable forms of energy—solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, ocean waves and biomass. While these sunrise energies still account for a small percentage of the global energy mix, they are growing rapidly as governments mandate targets and benchmarks for their widespread introduction into the market and their falling costs make them increasingly competitive. Billions of euros of public and private capital are pouring into research, development and market penetration, as businesses and homeowners seek to reduce their carbon footprint and become more energy efficient and independent.
The second one is storage capacity. The EU is investing in the renewable energies, 20%. Now when we're dealing with renewable energy, we have to find a way to store it. The introduction of the renewable energy pillar of the Third Industrial Revolution requires the simultaneous introduction of a second pillar. To maximise renewable energy and to minimise costs, it will be necessary to develop storage methods that facilitate the conversion of intermittent supplies of these energy sources into reliable assets. Batteries, differentiated water pumping and other media can provide limited storage capacity. There is, however, one storage medium that is widely available and can be relatively efficient. Hydrogen is the universal medium that 'stores' all forms of renewable energy to ensure that a stable and reliable supply is available for power generation and, equally important, for transport.
But some people say that it is very expensive. The network of fuelling stations will cost vast sums of money, trillions of dollars will be needed to develop infrastructure according to a recent study, fuel cell batteries that convert hydrogen into electricity have limited efficiency and storage capacity etc., and fuel cell batteries are still highly expensive. What do you think?
Yeah sure, but it's like the first cars, the first computers. We have to get the mass distributed. Hydrogen will become the universal carrier for storing renewable energy, but there will be mixed carriers like water pumping, batteries etc.
The most important thing is that a renewable energy society becomes viable to the extent that part of that energy can be stored in the form of hydrogen. That's because renewable energy is intermittent. The sun isn't always shining, the wind isn't always blowing, water isn't always flowing when there's a drought, and agricultural yields vary. When renewable energy isn't available, electricity can't be generated and economic activity grinds to a halt. But if some of the electricity being generated, when renewable energy is abundant, can be used to extract hydrogen from water, which can then be stored for later use, society will have a continuous supply of power. Other storage technologies, including flow batteries, pump hydro, flywheels, ultra-capacitors and the like provide niche storage capacity along the intelligent utility network and complement hydrogen in maintaining a secure supply of available energy. Hydrogen can also be extracted from biomass and similarly stored.
So pillar one is renewable energy. Pillar two is hydrogen and other storage technology to store that renewable energy. But then the question is "how do you distribute it?". That's pillar three: the distributive communication revolution converges with the distributive energy revolution to create the third industrial revolution.
If I had said 20 years ago that there would be big centralised television networks; if I had said everyone will be able to communicate with each other within seven seconds, and watch the same big television networks, etc - if I had said all these things, people would have thought I was mad. You have to imagine the EU in 25 years, every home, every factory, every technology plant, every shop, every building would have become a power plant producing local energy.
The idea is to generate renewable energy locally. Then we store them with hydrogen and other technologies. And what do we do with the surplus we don't need? This is where the distributive communication revolution connects with the distributive energy revolution.
