The second crisis related to the sunset of energy regime is increasing political instability in the oil producing countries. We need to understand that one out of three civil wars in world today, one third, is occurring in the oil producing countries. So, if we peak these countries as our hotspot today, image what is going to be like in 2009-2010-2011 and 2012 etc. Everybody wants the oil. The oil is getting more expensive. There is a drying in supply and we are going to see more military and political conflicts in the oil producing countries.
And finally, there is the question of climate change. If we simply take the European Union's targets for Co2 reduction, an the EU is the most aggressive in the World, even if we go with the EU targets, and China, India and other countries don't want to do that, we can go up 6° Celsius in this century and - this is quote from the scientists - "and the end of civilization as we know it". Let me say that what we need now is an economic plan that may be ambitious enough, and maybe powerful enough, to address the enormity of peak oil and climate change.
And so, let me say that the great economic revolutions in history occur when humans change the way they organize the energy of the Earth - number one - and then - number two - when we change the way we communicate with each other to organize these new energy revolutions.
In the early twentieth century the telegraph and telephone communication revolutions converged with oil and the internal combustion engine to give us the second industrial revolution.
Right now we are at the sunset of that second industrial revolution. So the question is, how do we open the door to the third industrial revolution. We can now communicate peer to peer, one to one, one to many, many to one, many to many. I am communicating with you now over the Internet. So this distributed communication revolution - that is the key word: distributed - this flat distributed open source communication revolution is just now beginning to converge with a new distributed energy revolution. And the coming together distributed communication and organized distributed energy, that is going to give us the third industrial revolution.
Distributed energies are found in the backyard. They are all over Italy, all over the world: the Sun shines everywhere on the Planet, the wind blow across the Earth, in we like on a coast we have ocean tides and waves, underneath the ground we have thermal heat. We have small hydro, with water. So, these are distributed energies, they are literally found everywhere, so the European Union is committed to pillar one of the four pillar of the third industrial revolution, which is distributed renewable energy.
Number one: we are going to renewable energies, they are distributed. The European Union has made that commitment: 20% renewables.
Number two: we are going to buildings as positive power plants. Millions of buildings that collect their energy. And the first building as power plant is already up. They already exist.
Then, pillar three: how do we store this renewable energy. Because the Sun is not always shining, even in the beautiful Italy, the wind is not always blowing, and you can have water tables down because of drought for hydroelectricity. So pillar three is: we are going to introduce storage technology and the main storage is going to be hydrogen. Hydrogen stores renewable energy the way digital stores media.
Then pillar four: this is the last pillar. This is where that distributed communication revolution, that I mentioned earlier, connects with distributed renewable energy to create a third industrial revolution. We take the same technology that we use for the Internet. It is identical. And the take the power grid of Italy and the EU and the World and we turn it into an inter-grid that acts just like the inter-net. So that, when you and I and millions of others produce our own energy, just like we produce our own information out of our computers, we store our energy in hydrogen just like we store our media with digital, and then with a smart power grid manager we share the surplus across Italy and Europe on an InterGrid that acts like the Internet. That is the third industrial revolution.
Let me say I work with the many of the leading power utilities companies in the world. I advise and consult. Let me give you a business perspective, not an ideological perspective. I don't think nuclear power is going to be very significant in the future. I think it is essentially a dead-end and it would be a very poor course of action for any government. Let me give you the reasons. We don't have Co2, with nuclear power. So, shouldn't it be part of the solution for climate change? Alright? Now, let us look at the numbers. There are 439 nuclear power plants in the world today, it is all there is. They make up 5% of the energy that we create. That is all. These nuclear power plants are very old. They are grand-fathering out. They are going to be de-commissioned. Has anyone in Italy, or in the world, really believed that we are even going to replace the exiting 439 power plants in the next twenty years? But even if we did that, it gets back to that 5% of the energy. It will have no impact on climate change. It is very well considered that if we want to impact climate change, nuclear would have to take up 20% of the energy. Just like renewables. But, in order for nuclear power to be responsible of 20% of the energy, we have to put under construction three nuclear power plants every thirty days for the next sixty year. Did you hear that? That is two thousand power plants. Three news one every thirty days for the next sixty years. We don't know how to get rid of nuclear waste. We are sixty years into nuclear power. The industry told us sixty years ago: "build the power plants, then give us enough time, we will figure out a way to dispose nuclear waste". Sixty years later, this industry is saying: "trust us again, we can do it". But the still don't know how to get rid of the nuclear waste.
The International Atomic Energy Commission says we face potential uranium deficit, between 2025 and 2035, just for the existing 439 power plants that make up only 5% of the energy. We could take the uranium we have and recycle it to plutonium. But then we will have the threat of nuclear terrorism. Do we really want plutonium all over the world in an age of potential terrorist attacks? I think that is insane.
Then, finally, this is what all the people that watch this should discuss with their neighbours. We don't have that water. This is something that utilities companies know, but the public doesn't know. Take France. France is the quintessential nuclear power company. Over 70% of their electricity comes from nuclear power plants. Here is what the public does not know. 40% of all the water consumed in France last year went to cooling the nuclear reactors, for their nuclear industry. 40% of all the water in France. You recall thee years ago, when all the elderly people died in France during the summer because of the air conditioning - they didn't have it? What you don't know is there was not enough water to cool the nuclear reactors. So that nuclear reactors had to move down the amount of electricity they where putting out. So where is Italy or any other country going to find the water? If France doesn't even have it. So, what we need to do is to democratize energy.
The third industrial revolution, this distributed revolution is power to the people. And for generation that grew up on the Internet this is the conclusion and completion of that revolution. Just like we can now rely on things like this Internet: we are now sitting and talking on the Internet at each other and you can have hundreds of thousand of people on the Internet and it is all free and you don't have to rely on some centralized television network and it is all open source and you are sharing it. Is it correct? Why can't we do that with energy?
Italy is the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy. There is some much distributed renewable energy in your country, it frustrates me when I come to your country and I see that is not moving like Spain is moving, for example. Spain is moving aggressively into renewable energy. All across the regions. For example. You have Sun. You have so much Sun from Rome to Bari. You have Sun. You are a peninsula, you have wind coming in all the time. You have the ocean waves surrounding you on all sides. You have rich geothermal deposits in Tuscany. You have forestry waste up in Bolzano and Northern Italy. You have snow for hydro from the Alps. You just are overflowing with renewable energy possibilities. You are not using them. I don't understand why.
I guess the bottom line is, what I would say to the Italian government is: what is your game plan? If your only game plan is to stay on the old energies, then Italy will not be competitive and will not get the economic multiplier effect of moving into the door to a new economic revolution and will fall further and further behind other countries as we proceed into the twenty-first century. But if Italy decides that it is important to move into the sunrise energies and industries of the third industrial revolution, the opportunities are enormous for Italy. And enormous for the citizens of Italy.
I have been keeping in touch with what you have been doing with this website in the Internet now for a number of years, and I wish we had some voices like him [Beppe Grillo] in other countries.
That allows some many people to become engaged and it is instructive of the way we need to go. "

A nice overview in all, though how will we store and transport hydrogen? Does it pipeline? Could it be practical for bigger industries, while (from what i understand) impractical for transportation?

Will Berlusconi see the light?