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Talkin' 'bout my generation
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Ode Magazine
Posted: September 19th, 2008
http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/56/talkin-bout-my-generation
In the 1920s, millions of rural Americans got their energy the same way they got their butterthey made it themselves. Off-grid when off-grid wasnt cool, they used some 600,000 windmills to run radios and power, maintaining sputtering lights with an electric current that ebbed, flowed and sometimes simply disappeared with the prairie wind. Fully 90 percent of those windmills disappeared within a generation, as even the most isolated farmers eagerly plugged in to the new centralized power system. But today the same technologies that help iPod-bedecked college students steal music are reviving the model of microgenerationclean, decentralized power that people make themselvesby linking homes into a vast network that keeps buzzing even when the wind stops blowing. Microgeneration, meet the YouTube generation. Were talking about a new meaning of power to the people, raves Jeremy Rifkin, alternative energy activist and adviser to the European Union and many European governments. Forget about wind farms and solar plants run by conventional utility companies, he says. In the new energy regime, the people are the utilities and their houses are the power plants. The cornerstone of this new grid is buildings that produce, rather than just consume, energy. These homes and office buildings convert wind, solar and biomass into electricity, which they use, store for later as hydrogen and upload onto the grid.
Note: This inspiring article comes from what may be the most inspiring news source in our world today, Ode Magazine. For more on this excellent magazine "for intelligent optimists," see http://www.odemagazine.com.
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