A great deal of ambiguity, conflict and promise surrounds humanity’s use of energy.
Wars are fought over access to sources of energy,
freedoms are repressed in order to maintain control over access to energy,
and the planet is poisoned while we refuse to renegotiate our addiction to particular forms of energy.
Even still, demand for energy is going to steadily increase and anyone who thinks humanity’s energy consumption is going to face a bottleneck
– e.g., peak oil doomsayers –
are victims of a lack of imagination.
In spite of their naive alarmism, we don’t suffer from a lack of access to energy or have any difficulty in finding clean, non-polluting sources of energy.
The gap isn’t in our understanding or in physical constraints; rather, it lies in our political and social momentum.
Nevertheless, technologic innovation can only be constrained along certain vectors and the drive for profit will progressively destabilize the status quo.
Regardless of the best efforts of society’s controllers, some of these innovative technologies are going to force a de-coupling from the grid.
Rather than having to connect to the city’s power grid, for example, your home will generate all the energy it needs.
Today I’d like to highlight some of these tantalizing innovations by focusing on developments in the wireless transmission of electricity.
As many of you know, Nikola Tesla devoted several years to the pursuit of free wireless energy.
Sadly, his research was opposed by Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan, Tesla’s financier:
“How can we get money from the electricity which Tesla is applying to every part of the world?”
Thankfully, this dream of wireless energy didn’t totally die with Tesla and there are strong hints that parallel lines of research will soon begin seeing their way to the consumer: