Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, is calling for a national energy network modeled after the Internet. Make it smart, resilient, with cheap, plentiful power, he says.
Earth2tech summarizes his main points, which include
- “It’s easier to teach energy to the entrepreneurs than to teach entrepreneurship to the energy industry,” so take advantage of Silicon Valley-like high tech and entrepreneurship to do it.
- Screw conservation, let’s create “a squanderable abundance of cheap and clean energy” and change the planet while we do it.
- Learn from the mistakes the Internet has made and use its distributed structure as a model for a smart grid.
- Accept that bubbles will happen. The clean energy bubble is the next one. Deal with it.
After wading through dozens of moaning posts today from financial and political bloggers yowling about how screwed-up everything is, it’s a joy to read what Melcalfe says. In fact, the entire world of cleantech is basically ignoring the doomsters and instead, creating a better world for all of us.
I’m with cleantech on this, and so bored with doom.
“When we started building the Internet, and I remember this clearly, we did not set out to build a network to support YouTube.”