While oil, coal, and natural gas will continue to provide a substantial portion of the world’s and the European Union’s energy well into the 21st century, there is a growing consensus that we are entering a twilight period where the full costs of our fossil fuel addiction is beginning to act as a drag on the world economy. During this twilight era, the 27 EU member states are making every effort to ensure that the remaining stock of fossil fuels is used more efficiently and are experimenting with clean energy technologies to limit carbon dioxide emissions in the burning of conventional fuels. These efforts fall in line with the EU mandate that the member states increase energy efficiency 20 % by 2020 and reduce their global warming emissions by 20 % (based on 1990 levels), again by 2020. But, greater efficiencies in the use of fossil fuels and mandated global warming gas reductions, by themselves, are not enough to adequately address the unprecedented crisis of global warming and global peak oil and gas production. Looking to the future, every government will need to explore new energy paths and establish new economic models with the goal of achieving as close to zero carbon emissions as possible.
Renewable forms of energy – solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, ocean waves, and biomass – make up the first pillar of the Third Industrial Revolution. 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. Today, renewable energy manufacturing, operations, and maintenance provide approximately two million jobs worldwide. In Germany, alone, the renewable energy industry boasted an annual turnover of 21.6 billion euros and 214,000 workers in 2006, and the industry projects to grow to between 244,000 and 263,000 jobs by 2010, 307,000 to 354,000 jobs by 2020, and 333,000 to 415,000 jobs by 2030.
While renewable energy is found everywhere and new technologies are allowing us to harness it more cheaply and efficiently, we need infrastructure to utilize it. This is where the building industry steps to the fore, to lay down the second pillar of the Third Industrial Revolution. Buildings are the major contributor to human induced global warming. Now, new technological breakthroughs make it possible, for the first time, to design and construct buildings that create all of their own energy from locally available renewable energy sources, allowing us to reconceptualize the future of buildings as “power plants.”
The introduction of the first two pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution – renewable energy and “buildings as power plants” – requires the simultaneous introduction of the third pillar of the Third Industrial Revolution. To maximize renewable energy and to minimize cost it will be necessary to develop storage methods that facilitate the conversion of intermittent supplies of these energy sources into reliable assets. There is 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 assure that a stable and reliable supply is available for power generation and, equally important, for transport. The fourth pillar, the reconfiguration of the power grid, along the lines of the Internet, allowing businesses and homeowners to produce their own energy and share it with each other, is now being tested by power companies in Europe.
The central question that every nation needs to ask is where they want their country to be in twenty-five years from now: in the sunset energies and industries of the second industrial revolution or the sunrise energies and industries of the Third Industrial Revolution. The Third Industrial Revolution is the end-game that takes the world out of the old carbon and uranium-based energies and into a non-polluting, sustainable future for the human race. The shift from the second industrial revolution to the Third Industrial Revolution is going to require a carefully constructed long term transition plan. The EU understands this, and has committed itself to pursuing a two-track process: track one, increasing the energy efficiency and reducing the carbon footprint by 20 %, respectively, by the year 2020, in order to clean up the mature fossil fuel energies of the second industrial revolution; track two, aggressively pursuing a 20 percent renewable energy target and laying down the foundation for a Third Industrial Revolution during the first half of the 21st century. We need to aggressively pursue both tracks simultaneously if we are to ease the transition to a post-carbon era.
