The five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution are 1. shifting to renewable energy; 2. transforming the building stock of every continent into micro-power plants to collect renewable energies on-site; 3. deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies; 4. using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy-sharing intergrid that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of energy locally, on-site, they can sell surplus back to the grid and share electricity with their continental neighbors); and 5. transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid (excerpt from Jeremy Rifkin. The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy and the World, 2011).
Read more in this article about Rifkin’s work with the European Union, predicted to draw one-third of its electricity from green sources by 2020. You may also be interested in the summary report from 60 scientists from across Canada, entitled Acting on Climate Change, released two week ago which calls for a similar transformation in Canada. Let's not put ourselves in a catch-up situation but embrace the required changes now.
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