Welcome to the Energy 2.0 blog. As you can see in the description above, this blog is about promoting and reporting on affordable alternative energy products and solutions for consumers.
My motiviation for this blog is simple. I live in Hawaii on the island of Maui. I find it amazing that living in the tropics with abundant solar and wind energy, that we are still so heavily dependent on oil to generate our electricity here. Maui has two diesel genereating plants that generate 79% of the energy on Maui. The recent addition of a wind farm that generates approximately 9% of our energy needs is a step in the right direction. Bio-mass accounts for the remaining 12%. But we're an island chain in the middle of the Pacific. We should be 100% self-sustaining in our energy needs!
A frustration I feel, is that despite all the talk and rhetoric of government acknowledging the need to become less dependent on oil, the red tape and long-lead times to plan and build large-scale alternative energy facilities just drags on and on while we remain hostage to oil. So, I think it's up to the power of the consumer masses and creative small businesses to step in and lead the way. How?
Just as PCs revolutionized the computer industry by bringing the power of affordable computers to consumer masses, and the Internet has democratized publishing, so too, small and/or affordable alternative energy consumer products and devices can bring the power of affordable small-scale energy self-dependent products to consumers all over the world. With increasing availability of alternative energy-powered consumer products, consumers, businesses and homeowners can increasingly take ownership for at least small portions of their own energy production. In the 1950s and 1960s the thought of ordinary consumers owning their own computers was unthinkable. Computers were something that only large companies and government could afford. I suspect that just as PCs transformed the global computing industry, so too can alternative energy products on a small distributed scale transform the world's energy use.
My first notion of this possibility came several years ago when I was surfing the web for solar energy products. I stumbled on a website about how to make a solar powered generator. How cool. This is something that most homeowners could very easily build and use not only for a backup generator during power outages, but also use on a daily basis and cut their electric load ever so slightly. So, I thought, wouldn't it be cool if hundreds or thousands of households throughout Hawaii had one or two of these. Small-scale power production to the masses! Power to the people and FROM the people.
Since that day a few years ago when I discoved that website, the environmental crisis has come center stage to the collective concious of Americans and so-called "green-tech" is all the latest rage in business. Entrepreneurs, small business and big businessses alike are dreaming and scheming of all kinds of alternative energy products, many of them small and affordable products that everyday consumers can purchase and use and take back the responsibility for their own energy needs. So, that's what this blog is about, promoting and reporting on alternative energy products that we as consumers can use and do a small part in relieving our dependence on oil and other carbon-based means of energy production.
I like to think of this revolution as Energy 2.0. About a year ago, the term Web 2.0 was coined to describe the increasingly collaborative nature of the Web. Little did I know at the time that the term Energy 2.0 had already been coined in association with an energy conference at MIT. Their view of what Energy 2.0 represents is slightly different than mine since they don't seem to capture the collaborative, democratized aspect of power generation (at least that I can tell).
What can you expect from this blog? I'm not sure yet. That's still evolving. In the short term, I'll mostly be reporting on links to news articles and reports on the web of products, people and businesses that seem to jive with this notion of mine. And in the spirit of collaboration, I welcome all relevant input I can get on the subject.
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