And lest we think this is a lot of academic patter, Germany, since the Chancellor's come in,
Pillar 1: they're at 25% green electricity already and they're heading to 35% by 2020.
Pillar 2: Germany's converted one million buildings in the last seven years - they're producing small amounts of [excess] green electricity and a third of a million net jobs. They've just begun. Denmark's doing just as well. So when people say: "It can't be done" it can be done. And when people say: "Well, show me!" let's take the number one economic power per capita in the world Germany and you'll see it being done right there - at near zero marginal cost for energy.
Pillar 3: Storage. The sun's not always shining...the wind blows at night and you've got to have the electricity during the day... The water tables can be down for hydroelectricity due to climate change drought... These are intermittent energies and we've got to store them. We at the EU level are in favor of ALL storage: batteries, flywheels, capacitors, air compression, water pumping, we like them all! But I must say we put most of our focus at the center of all these storage networks on hydrogen [using electrolysis and fuel cells]. Engineers, this is a tiny thermodynamic loss compared to bringing oil, coal, gas, and uranium every step of conversion and loss to the end user.
Pillar 4 - this is where the internet revolution combines with the new distributed renewable energies to create a nervous system for the new general purpose technology platform. We're using off the shelf internet technology and IT technology and we're transforming the power grid in Europe into an energy internet - a distributed smart grid. If you hear political and business leaders saying: "Oh, we like that smart grid" ask them what kind - centralized or distributed? Centralized means they put an advanced meter on your home and you get all the information only going to them at headquarters and it's all proprietary. That has nothing to do with this. This is an energy internet - a distributed smart grid. It'll connect everything to everything so that when millions of buildings are producing just small amounts of electricity and storing it as hydrogen... Then if you don't need some of that green electricity during the day or week or month, you can program your software right there with your own killer app from home and send that green electricity across an energy internet that in our case extends from the Irish Sea to the doorstep of Russia. Just like we create information, store it in digital, and share it on-line. Deutsche Telekom has tested successfully the smart grid across Germany. Storage is now in with E.ON and Hydrogenics as well - they're just putting it on-line.
Pillar 5 - logistics. Electric vehicles are here; fuel cell cars, trucks, and buses between 2015 and 2017 by the six major auto companies - this is a done deal - these are fuel cell vehicles. We'll be able to plug-in our vehicles anywhere, wherever we park across the country there'll will be a parking [spot] plug right there...plug it back into the main grid which is distributed and get green electricity. Let's say you're at work - keep that computer on. So if that electricity price goes up on the grid the computer will tell your car to send your electricity back to the grid. We're already beginning to do that in Europe [on a small scale].
These five pillars are nothing - they're components. It's only when we connect them that we have what we call the general purpose technology platform. It's an infrastructure technology platform. Do not make the mistake that President Obama made...he got bad advice. He wanted a green economy, he still wants a green economy, he spent billions and billions of dollars of tax money for a green economy - it isn't here. Because he spent it on isolated, siloed, pilot projects. So they'd invest in a solar factory in one state, an electric car factory in another state - unconnected! This is an infrastructure revolution.
The second industrial revolution all the industries had to come together - it wasn't enough to have the internal combustion engine. Then it required centralized electricity so that Henry Ford could have mobile electric power tools so the work could come to the worker so that he could build cheap cars and get everyone on wheels. Then we had to have the roads put in at the same time so people had somewhere to travel. But then they needed the gasoline and oil pipelines set in so they could propel the engines. And then they needed centralized phones to come in so they could move the wires to rural areas to create suburbs and take advantage of the interstates... And the biggest prosperity in history was between 1956 and 1988 when we matured the system, put in the interstate highways, did the suburban roll-out, put electricity to the rural areas, and then we peaked in the late 1980s, went into a housing recession. And then after that we lived off our family savings and personal debt. ...our housing and mortgage fiasco, and then we ended up with 14 trillion in debt in 2008 when it all collapsed when oil hit $147 a barrel. A short history.
