What would Thomas Edison do if he was alive today? Would he develop renewables or carbon based energy? How would he think about the choices of how to make energy now? What if we apply his thinking to answer this question?
Thomas Edison was a giant, a genius who set the tone for the modern technological development of the Twentieth Century. His invention of the electricity grid provided a monumental shift in thinking for mankind from stand-alone machines to enormous interlinked systems that delivered us the electricity grid and paved the way for our modern convenience society. I don’t think it would be overstated if I said that between Edison and his best friend and past power station manager Henry Ford, that the two of them basically defined our modern lifestyle. Cheap available electric power enabled all of industry, our ability to live comfortably anywhere in the world and then to be able to get from A to B, even if it meant sitting in gridlock for 3 hours a day to go short distances of 20 miles. I find the immense influence that these two men had on our lives fascinating, which leads me to ask, what two such incredible thinkers would do if they had a chance to live and impact the world today. Remember they were born around the start of the Industrial Revolution in the mid 19th century.
Both strongly believed in delivering the benefits of their products to the most people they could and that generally meant dealing with the question, “what price could they afford?” which directly leads you to ask what do we need to do to deliver that. At the point when they were inventing the electricity grid and affordable private automobile transportation, there was no way to really visualize what 50m cars a year on the road or (26,000 tWh) 26,000,000,000,000 kWh of electricity a year might do to change the world we live in. Edison’s first Pearl Street Power Station in NY produced enough electricity for 400 lamps at 85 homes! Some McMansions today have 400 lamps on a single property! Today, we have more knowledge and know better. Ignoring the impact these industrial age systems have on our world should not be an option for intelligent thinkers.
Imagine Thomas Edison looking at the alternatives in front of him today and pondering “should I set up a common grid across the country or invest in local production of renewable energy at the source?” Remember 2/3 of all the power that you are paying for (and the resultant CO2 emissions and reduction of natural resources such as coal and gas and especially fresh water) are lost in transmitting the power to your home.
How would Edison think about solar panels, wind, bio? How would he turn them into a system? We are stuck with a legacy grid (not at all a bad thing really for now!) that is seriously impacting our ability to see clearly what might lie ahead for energy, water and waste if we were starting with a fresh slate. The goal of this post is to see the problem from a fresh perspective.
I imagine Edison would start with the principles of nature that we now understand to be vital for the continuation of our species. Those principles are that each of us should only use what we can provide and that nature can replace so as to leave the planet as capable of supporting life when we leave and thereby ensuring sustainability for future generations. The design of a home should therefore revolve around the amount of energy it would require and the size/cost of the energy source that would be required to produce that. To calculate what type and size of home you could afford, the cost of energy (and water I would assume) would be factored into the cost per square foot. This means the cost of the energy, water and waste treatment systems would be considered fundamental components of the cost of the home, included in the resale price and the initial mortgage to build it. Therefore builders and developers would be clamoring over each other to figure out how to bring that cost down in order to be more competitive than each other and our cycle of energy innovation would truly begin in earnest as the normal market forces of the US economy came into play for the energy industry. This is the same conversation that we are having in the automotive industry as the line between the means of transportation and the cost of running it are blurring with hybrids, costing more, but ultimately using less resources over their life span. It is difficult to make the case for future costs paid for today!
I wonder if this would mean common resources for neighborhoods. I.e. would it make sense and be cheaper for a neighborhood development to have three common sources for water, electricity and waste or would it be more efficient to provide them per home? Could Wal-Mart provide cheaper electricity by covering its whole wasted parking lot and roof with solar and surrounding the property with wind turbines so that it can sell electricity to its local customers cheaper than grid power? Never mind what their waste stream could be generating for the local community.
Imagine that between every neighborhood, there were rows (like an orchard) of solar, small lakes of fresh and reprocessing water and run off and soaking fields. Perhaps that is not the way to do it, perhaps it would be better to replace the strings of overhead cables of the grid along the sidewalk with rows of solar panels so that the sidewalks actually become shaded by groves of solar panels and therefore become more walkable.
What about Henry Ford? If he knew about the internet, would he be so keen to get everyone moving around the country in automobiles? Affordable mobility was his goal, so the internet would certainly be a technology that makes you globally mobile.
For Edison and Ford, the movers and shakers of the Industrial Revolution, scale was the goal to reach efficiencies. Big centralized facilities were the path forward. Today as the Information Revolution rolls on, power is progressively coming back to the individual. The path described above, would simply represent the next natural progression of this Information Age trend. It makes a lot of sense from a trend perspective. What does not yet make sense, as we transition our thinking from what is the right way to do this to thinking through the business case for how to make it happen, is the cost of implementing such a system when we already have a legacy system in place. This change would represent a very subtle, but important shift in power as well, which is partially why it will have to happen disruptively rather than organically. Power utilities and large chunks of government owned and run facilities such as power generation, transmission and water treatment would lose their sources of revenue and power and therefore they are not actively or positively contributing to such a change. The vested interest here is HUGE. Some Energy companies are getting in on the act by financing residential solar projects in an attempt to make sure that they are ultimately still the owners of the power generation facilities. For homes, we are talking about a reduction of 37% of electricity, 43% of water and potentially 60% of solid waste. That smells like a HUGE opportunity for a budding entrepreneur of the likes of a modern day Ford or Edison don’t you think?
Read more about the opportunity and facts in the article Your Home Is Your Biggest Opportunity To Make A Difference and The Solar Industry, Calling on the Ghost of Henry Ford and Green Finance, a look at financing options for renewables.