Power shock: the next energy revolution.

• Author: Flavin, Christopher

We live in a futuristic world of cyberspace, genetic engineering and other mind-boggling technologies. Yet when it comes to energy, most experts seem to think that our decades-old oil- and coal-based energy systems will barely change. Developments around the world are already proving them wrong, however. We may soon witness the most dramatic changes in the world energy economy in a hundred years.

At a small news conference in Landover, Maryland last October, two major U.S. corporations made an announcement that may one day be seen as a big step in launching the energy systems of the twenty-first century. Bechtel Enterprises Inc., once a leading builder of nuclear power plants, and PacifiCorp, a giant utility that operates several huge coal-fired generators in the northwestern United States, announced that they were teaming up to invest in solar energy and other "human-scale energy systems."

The new joint venture, called EnergyWorks, will pursue projects around the world based on wind turbines, biomass generators, industrial energy efficiency, and other technologies that most large energy firms have spurned as puny systems that cannot possibly meet the expanding energy needs of close to six billion people.

But those energy executives who still cast their lot with large oil refineries, nuclear reactors, and the like would do well to remember the lessons of IBM, which discovered too late that personal computers were more than a boutique industry that could never challenge the dominance of mainframes. Once technological change gathers momentum, it can move at lightning speed.

In fact, historians of technology may one day argue that by the mid-1990s, the world energy, economy was already in the early stages of a major transition. One sign, for example, is that relatively small, efficient jet engines are coming to dominate the power industry, sweeping aside less efficient coal-fired models. Another is that advanced electronics have improved the efficiency of lighting by as much as four-fold. Meanwhile, the fastest growing energy market in the early 1990s isn't oil, coal, or even natural gas - it is wind power, which expanded from 2,000 megawatts in 1990 to 4,500 megawatts in 1995.

Around the world, advanced electronics, new kinds of synthetic materials, and the techniques of mass production are allowing engineers to substitute clever technologies for brute force. The result is a variety of new modular, mass-produced energy systems that have the potential to be more economical and flexible than the traditional energy systems they replace.

Here, as in the mercurial worlds of computers and telecommunications, it is impossible to predict the future. But the broad outlines of a new energy economy are beginning to emerge. Its chief feature is likely to be a radical decentralization, akin to the computer industry's shift from mainframes to PCs. The new technologies will make it possible to decentralize power generation, even down to the household level, harness the world's most abundant energy resources - solar energy and wind power - and greatly reduce the burden that current energy systems place on the world's atmosphere.

But these changes may add up to more than the sum of their parts. Using technologies such as fuel cells and mass-produced solar generators, it should be possible in the long run to replace virtually all fossil fuels with a hydrogen-based energy system, something that author Jules Verne dreamed of more than a century ago. The hydrogen would be produced using sunlight harnessed on rooftops as well as in remote desert collectors, and would be conveyed to homes and industries via pipeline. Although this vision may sound futuristic, most of the inventions needed to make it real have already been made.

PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM

Technological change has been compared to the evolutionary development that occurs in nature, and the similarities are not all coincidental. Technology is, after all, a systematic extension of human biological capability - an increased capacity to use available energy to do the things that eyes, hands, and legs do, only on a vastly magnified scale. It's not surprising, then, that if there have been longstanding misconceptions about the nature of evolution, the same misconceptions have distorted our vision of technological change.

For nearly a century after Charles Darwin wrote Origin of Species, biologists thought of evolution as an exceedingly gradual process, with an almost infinite number of incremental stages between one species and its successor. During the 1970s, Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould proposed an alternative theory: that most evolutionary change occurs in sudden bursts - driven in part by changing climates and other environmental influences that force species to change rapidly in order to survive. According to Gould, these bursts may be preceded by long periods of stasis - giving the impression that evolution is glacially slow. Gould's theory, known as "punctuated equilibrium," has since earned broad acceptance among biologists.

In the evolution of technology, the same pattern of punctuated progress can be seen. The telephone, for example, developed rapidly in the late nineteenth century and then changed very little through the middle decades of the twentieth century. Now the telephone is again in a period of explosive transition - simultaneously becoming digital, wireless, and portable, while also becoming a carrier not only of voices but of a wide variety of other kinds of communications - from facsimile pages to debit card transactions.

To those who make a living out of projecting future energy trends, the current system appears close to immutable. For more than 70 years it has been dominated by big oil refineries, internal combustion engines, and steam-cycle power plants, devices that have become more efficient and larger, but have never been displaced. It is no wonder that these analysts see the future as marked by increasingly small refinements to the existing system.

Reflecting this bias, official energy projections published by the International Energy Agency, the World Energy Council, and various national governments conclude that future energy systems will merely be more efficient versions of the current one. Their studies suggest that our grandchildren will still be driving automobiles powered by internal combustion engines - and using electricity generated by power plants that waste two-thirds of the coal they consume - well into the 21st century.

These prognosticators are mesmerized by how little energy systems have changed in recent decades, but ignore the fact that in the more distant past, energy systems have changed rapidly. The energy economy we have today was created in an explosion of invention between 1890 and 1910. During that short period, many cities were dramatically transformed, with horse-drawn carriages replaced by automobiles, and gas lamps by electric lights.

The carriages and gas lamps had prevailed for centuries, but once the conditions for rapid change were present, the old technologies were replaced with breathtaking speed. Today, we may be at a similar turning point, as revolutionary new energy technologies emerge at the same time that consumers demand a cleaner environment and more flexible, less costly ways of meeting their energy needs. The technological upheavals sweeping so many other industries are unlikely to leave the old energy system intact.

Today, even the conservative business press is beginning to take such ideas seriously. In its October 7 issue, The Economist magazine stated: "Once [renewable energy] was the province of mad scientists and dreamers. . . No longer. Little noticed, the costs of many renewables have recently been tumbling. Fossil fuels are still almost always cheaper, but a...