Visions of the Future (80 page)

The creation of a global energy network has many advantages and has indeed been revisited in different ways by other experts, like electrical engineer Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com. Metcalfe coined the term “Enernet” to describe such an energy network based on its similarities with the Internet. He has said that the Enernet “needs to have an architecture, probably needs some layers, standards, and storage. The Internet has lots of storage here and there; the current grid doesn’t have much storage at all.”

Today, the storage problem is a major obstacle for the Enernet and future smart grids. For example, energy and space expert Gregg Maryniak explains that “our present fixation with energy generation ignores the ‘time value of energy’. Instead of concentrating all of our efforts on generation, we need to pay increased attention to energy storage.” Fortunately, new developments like liquid-metal batteries have the potential to scale up quickly and solve the storage problems during the next two decades. Localized renewable resources like solar and wind will create more decentralized systems, where local storage will also be a priority.

The Enernet, just as the Internet, will create major positive network effects. A larger and more efficient energy network with good storage will help balance energy requirements across different regions. The first smart grids have already improved the efficiency and resilience of energy transmission and distribution. Future technological developments are expected to continue improving energy systems all the way from generation to final use. China is currently developing some advanced smart grids, and India will probably follow shortly. Since China and India are two huge energy markets, their plans are just the beginning of more advanced energy systems in the following decades. Even pessimistic observers have been surprised by the incredible changes in energy infrastructure in China, soon in India (after the 2012 blackouts), and hopefully even in Africa.

According to Metcalfe, the Enernet will bring fundamental changes in the way we produce and consume energy, from generation to transmission, storage, and final utilization. The Enernet should really create a smart energy grid with distributed resources, efficient systems, high redundancy, and high storage capacity. The Enernet should also help the transition to clean energy and renewable sources, with new players and entrepreneurs taking the place of traditional “big oil” and utilities, and old monolithic producers giving more control to energy prosumers (producers and consumers). Finally, we will continue the transition from expensive energy to cheap energy in a world where energy will be recognized as an abundant resource. Table 1 shows most of these major changes possible thanks to the Enernet.

Table 1: Some Possibilities of the Enernet: From the Past to the Future.
Source: Cordeiro based on Metcalfe (2007)

Metcalfe has talked about the transition from conservation and expensive information and bandwidth to abundance and almost free Internet services: “When we set out to build the Internet, we began with conserving bandwidth, with compression, packet switching, multiplex terminals, and buffer terminals aimed at conserving bandwidth.” Additionally, Metcalfe has explained that energy and power with the Enernet might follow the same exponential growth as information and bandwidth with the Internet since its beginning:

Now, decades later, are we using less bandwidth now than before? Of course not. We are using million times more bandwidth. If the Internet is any guide, when we are done solving energy, we are not going to use less energy but much, much more—a squanderable abundance, just like we have in computation.

Having abundant and almost free energy might seem hard to believe today, but that has been the trend for many other commodities. As economist Julian Simon said:

During all of human existence, people have worried about running out of natural resources: flint, game animals, what have you. Amazingly, all the evidence shows that exactly the opposite has been true. Raw materials—all of them—are becoming more available rather than more scarce.

It is also worth considering an analogy between energy and telecommunications. The modern telecommunications industry began with very expensive telegraphs in the early 19
th
century, followed by costly fixed-line telephones in the late 19
th
century. The first transatlantic phone calls would cost over $100 for a few minutes in the early 20
th
century. Today, most national and international calls cost nearly zero; in fact, Skype and similar services have revolutionized telecommunications by allowing virtually free calls as long as there is an Internet connection. Niklas Zennström, the Swedish entrepreneur who cofounded the KaZaA peer-to-peer file sharing system and later also cofounded the Skype peer-to-peer internet telephony network in Estonia, is famous for saying: “The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It’s time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.”

Telephone rates have decreased very rapidly, while there has been a continuous increase in the use of telecommunications. The rapid fall in telephone rates can also be compared with the long-term cost reductions in energy (together with the exponential growth of both information and energy usage). For example, economist William Nordhaus calculated the price of light as measured in work hours per 1,000 lumen hours (the lumen is a measure of the flux of light) throughout human history. He compared estimates for fires in the caves of the Peking man using wood, lamps of the Neolithic men using animal or vegetable fat, and lamps of the Babylonians using sesame oil. After reviewing the labor-time costs of candles, oil lamps, kerosene lamps, town gas, and electric lamps, Nordhaus concluded that there has been an exponential decrease of lighting costs, particularly during the last 100 years. However, some of these outstanding costs reductions, a ten thousand-fold decline in the real price of illumination, have not been captured by the standard price indices, as economist James Bradford DeLong has emphasized. Figure 3 shows the staggering reduction of lighting costs through human history. The exponential decrease in energy cost has been even larger during the last century (while energy production has also increased exponentially).

Figure 3: Price of Light (Work Hours per 1000 Lumen Hours)

Source: Cordeiro based on Nordhaus (1997) and DeLong (2000)

Another example of such accelerating changes can be seen in the semiconductor industry. The exponential increase of capabilities, and the corresponding reduction of costs, is commonly called Moore’s Law in semiconductor manufacturing. Caltech professor and VLSI (very large scale integrated circuit) pioneer Carver Mead named this eponymous law in 1970 after scientist and businessman Gordon Moore (cofounder of Intel with fellow inventor Robert Noyce). According to Moore’s original observations in 1965, the number of transistors per computer chip was doubling every two years, even though this trend has recently accelerated to just about 18 months. Figure 4 shows Moore’s Law with an exponential scale in the vertical axis. A further increase in the rate of change can also be identified from the late 1990s.

Moore’s Law and similar conjectures (since they are not really physical laws) have been observed for many processes, for example, the growing number of transistors per integrated circuit, the decreasing costs per transistor, the increasing density at minimum cost per transistor, the augmenting computing performance per unit cost, the reducing power consumption in newer semiconductors, the exponential growth of hard disk storage cost per unit of information, the accelerating expansion of RAM storage capacity, the rapidly improving network capacity and the exponential growth of pixels per dollar. In fact, in the specific case of USB flash memories, the Korean company Samsung follows Hwang’s Law, named after a vice president of Samsung, which states that the amount of memory in such devices doubles every 12 months. Concerning the eponymous Moore’s Law, Gordon Moore himself said that his “law” should still be valid for at least the next two decades or so, until transistors reach the size of single nanometers.

Figure 4: Moore’s Law

Source: Cordeiro adapted from Intel (2015)

The 20
th
century experienced a dramatic increase of energy production and consumption in the developed countries. During the 1950s, the peaceful development of nuclear fission contributed to the rapid growth of energy production and to the reduction of energy costs. Naval officer and businessman Lewis Strauss, during his tenure as Chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, said:

Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter… It is not too much to expect that our children will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.

Strauss was actually referring not to uranium fission reactors but to hydrogen fusion reactors that were being considered at the time, even if they were not constructed later on. His prediction was ahead of his time, but it is possible that it will finally turn into reality soon. Thus, energy and the Enernet will eventually become “too cheap to meter,” just as information and the Internet have basically become today.

The “Energularity”

It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge what energy is.

—Richard Feynman, 1964

The idea of a “singularity” has been known to science for many years. For example, there are mathematical singularities (like dividing by zero) and physical singularities (like a black hole). The concept of a “technological singularity” as an intelligence explosion was considered by English mathematician Irving John (I.J.) Good in the 1960s and then by computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in the 1980s. Vinge further developed this idea in his 1993 article entitled “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” where he predicted that “within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” Thus, several authors now define such technological singularity as the moment when artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence.

In 2005, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil published his best-seller
The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
, which brought the idea of the technological singularity to the popular media. According to Kurzweil, we are entering a new epoch that will witness the merger of technology and human intelligence through the emergence of a “technological singularity.” Kurzweil believes that an artificial intelligence will first pass the Turing Test by 2029, and then the technological singularity should happen by 2045, when non-biological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of all humans. It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Eventually, intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, and our environment, solving human problems like pollution and poverty, providing vastly extended longevity, incorporating all of the senses in full-immersion virtual reality, and greatly enhancing human intelligence. The result will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the technological evolutionary process that it spawned.