Al Gore goes off the beaten grid

AFP/JOHN THYS

Newsweek Enterprise focuses on energy this week, with contributions from Al Gore and Fareed Zakaria. The premise of Daniel Yergin’s cover story is that sustained high oil prices will lead to a renewable energy bonanza that “could rival the Internet boom.” (Which raises the question: what’s the Pets.com of this new craze?) 

The similarities between the two eras go deeper than just spiraling stock prices, if Gore’s analysis is right. Long (incorrectly) ridiculed for claiming he “invented the Internet,” Gore compares our energy future to our online past:

Taking a page from the early development of ARPANET (the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network)—which ultimately became the Internet—we will rely on new kinds of distribution networks for electricity and liquid fuels. We will be less dependent on large, centralized coal-generating plants and massive oil refineries. Societies of the future will rely on small, diversified and renewable sources of energy, ranging from windmills and solar photovoltaics to second-generation ethanol-and biodiesel-production facilities. Widely dispersed throughout the countryside, these streamlined facilities will make the industrialized world more secure and less dependent on unstable and threatening oil-producing nations. Off-grid applications of renewable power sources can provide energy for the 3 billion people now stuck in poverty.