Imagine you are sometime in the early 1800’s and you wanted to send a letter to the United States from England – well – with the newest technology built into ships, the best maps and experienced captains would take you only two weeks. That’s a heck of a lot better than Marco Polo taking a decade to get back from China.
Now, let’s jump to 1858 – the first TransAtlantic Telegraph Cable led to the first near instant communication across a great ocean. It was an amazing creation! Through the existence of human beings – communication of information was dangerous, expensive and time consuming. Today, of course we have The Internet. And you can not only communicate around the planet instantly from a tiny smartphone in your pocket – but you can actually Tweet to and from humans living in space. That’s right – literally out of this world communication ability in less than a single second.
What will we do next? Talk to Mars?
First Steps to a Global Power Grid
When Tesla and Edison first fought battles in the late 1800s – they were fighting for all of us. They wanted to find the best way to get electricity from large, dirty power stations into your and my living rooms. They succeeded in bringing electricity – and a changed human species – to planet Earth. Where people used to die of lung disease burning candles and cooking food indoors, now homes were clean and bodies were healthier. We were revolutionized.
However – a new problem began to arise. The lung disease that killed us indoors, moved outside. We began to feel what happened when we were too successful – when we could build so much, so high and so dense. And now, instead of revolution in science and technology – we began to revolt. Thus came clean energy…
Can Solar Power “SAVE THE PLANET!!!”?
Of course it can, but let’s be real – we know the sun shines only in the daytime. We know batteries are expensive, we sure as heck are not going to install gas and diesel generators at our home because we’d have dirty, distributed power…sorta like the 1800s. What far in the future solution might grab on and allow the globe to exist in a solar utopia? Why of course, an Global Internet of Electricity.
“The technology now exists to transmit massive amounts of electricity over long distances without significant losses, thereby allowing operators to balance consumption and generation across an entire continent—or, potentially, the globe. If an outage occurs in one country, the sudden change in line voltage and frequency could trigger a generator thousands of kilometers away to compensate for the shortfall.”
Engineers see it already – they’ve already run the numbers. In much of the world, Solar Power is already as cheap as the grid. The banks are already figuring out how to price the system. All that remands is Human Will.