Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
meaningful—evenepic—engineeringonthelevelofthefirstGreatestGeneration,which
got us to the moon.
There should be a thousand great ideas coming out of the CleanWeb every month.
The declining costs of solar cells and panels will lead to lots of new uses—such as re-
placing dirty diesel generators and accelerating the demand for microgrids around loc-
al, clean power. Some of these may be “virtualized,” which means they use software to
aggregate multiple sources to help make these largely invisible and decentralized power
sources more valuable to utilities and grid operators. Think of the way some computing
is done by networked machines (rather than one big supercomputer). Coordinating this
infrastructure evolution into smooth service will require the imagination and the skills at
which American ingenuity excels.
Isubscribe to the theory that the retail electricity market in homes and businesses will
be turned on its head in the next few years by new technologies and that smaller play-
ers selling clean electricity will be better positioned than the large incumbents with their
dirty power. This is because the future of the electricity business is on the house, rather
than out front on a pole in the street. In the new scenario of the sunshine mesh, utility
companieswouldgiveupsomeoftheirtraditionaltop-downcontroloverboththesupply
andthetransmissionofelectricitytobecome,atleastpartially,anintegralpartofanelec-
tricity network involving thousands of small energy producers. In this scheme the utility
company would become the manager of the energy Internet. Its profit model moves in-
creasingly away from selling its own energy to becoming a service provider, using its
expertise and infrastructure to manage other people's energy.
Buttogettothisidealstate,corporationsandsocietyneedapush.Entrepreneursinall
formscandoalotofthework.Muchoftherestwillbedonebysolarcitizens supporting
our New Greatest Generation. It's time that those of us who believe we can forge our fu-
ture should stop talking and start
doing.
It's the only way to get the global economy and
our planet back on track. In short we can all be educators, heroes, and rock stars in the
Solar Ascent.
What You Can Do as a Rooftop Revolutionary
Be a worker for the Rooftop Revolution by joining the solar workforce.
Visit
and
other
such
sites,
such
as
www.solarjobs.us
, where you can explore employment opportunities.
Support The Solar Foundation (
www.thesolarfoundation.org
), a nonprofit or-
ganization that demonstrates the global benefits of solar energy and issues the
annual National Solar Jobs Census.
