Institute For The Future

PROVOKING THE FUTURE OF ENERGY: 19 micro-forecasts from the Blended Reality 2008 crowd-sourcing experiment

At our Fall 2008 Technology Horizons Conference, we crowd-sourced five questions (via Twitter, blogs, email, and SMS) about Blended Realities in 2019. Here are the massively collaborative energy results!

Question #3: What are your energy sources for your mobile, home and business life? How are they advantageous? Disadvantageous?

A greater share of our energy use in 2019 is devoted to electricity. Plug-in cars and hybrids are about 30% of the fleet. GM (they made it, largely intact) and Toyota are both working on big trucks that run on natural gas instead of diesel. They're about ten years behind schedule. Maybe eight. There are three major emerging competitors in the electricity market: coal, nuclear, and biofuels. Biofuels haven't made much headway in consumer vehicles, but there are still heavily subsidized efforts to burn them to create electricity. The first new nuclear facility since the 1970s will open in 2024, in Salem County, New Jersey. There is a brisk market in various products that make coal burning marginally more efficient and less polluting. There is no silver bullet, but some progress, and petroleum use and prices are fluctuating. China has made similar strides, but India, Russia, and the Middle East are recalcitrant. People still talk rapturously about wind and solar, but they haven't increased in share relative to demand in over a decade.

justinpickard: @cascio - My shiny third generation netbook runs on USB-ethanol cells. Portable, and I can refill them when I get home. #2019

Electricity: About 20% of our energy will be coming from Renewable Energy. We will be seeing new Nuclear Power Plants being built.

Mobile: Most of the new Car sold will be Plug In Hybrid the infrastructure for support Plug in Electric Car will be build.

Detroit figured out a solution to the energy crisis: automotive cannibalism, cars run on cars.

After creating world peace, the government has converted the State Department into the Department of Humor. Stephen Colbert is first appointee to serve in position.

In 2019, my car still runs on gas. Yup. Texas tea. Sorry, no batteries yet. No hydrogen. BUT. My car gets 200 miles to the gallon. And now, b/c cars are more valuable as mobile generators than as, um, cars, we look at them as investments, not expenses. You buy a car thinking about the return you'll get for the next 5-10 years, selling power back into the grid when it's parked. This also means people have many *more* cars, b/c hey, why not, if you've got the space to park them? Our cities are -- if you can believe it -- even *more* car-clogged in 2019. And living in a big ol' Tata RV, generating power and making money as you drive from town to town (in search of the best price!), is actually not a bad life

sixblueten: #2019 ENERGY: Power will be still primarily oil and 'clean' coal due to Obama's lack of commitment and slow next gen infrastructure build.

Denser and denser population centers have forced legislatures in the most desirable states of the US to begin to charge punitively high prices for water usage, and by proxy, residence. Especially in the Southwest where the confluence of rising temperatures and overpopulation have drained the Colorado River bone dry in the summer months, water bills have become the leverage making depopulation possible. Areas like San Francisco and Manhattan remain enclaves of the superrich, who can take yet another exorbidant expense in stride. But for the supporting communities like Oakland and Brooklyn, magnets in the previous decade for young, creative professionals, major coastal metropolises have ceased to be a viable option. Youth magnets of 2019? Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and other states the reap the benefit of the plentiful and comparatively cheap Great Lakes watershed.

Principal energy sources are nuclear and clean coal for electricity for home/auto, with large component of thin film solar for home use.  Biomass to liquid fuels are still in research, windmills are regarded as unsightly.  Security is a much larger concern following Mideast wars.

I expect that by 2019 the sources of energy for my homelife/business/and

mobile* needs will be:

- wind energy (currently my apartment is powered by 100% wind energy

through purchases in other parts of the energy grid)

advantages: clean and renewable

disadvantages: What happens when the wind doesn't blow?; damage to birds

- nuclear energy

advantages: can produce a lot of energy at once

disadvantages: difficulty of waste storage, NIMBY challenges

- wave energy (there are proposals for wave energy experimentation in the

Hudson/Atlantic)

advantages: New York is surrounded by water

disadvantages: pollution from the corrosion of equipment, technology still

expensive and unproven

- coal/natural gas

advantages: unfortunately both will still be cheap even with a carbon tax

or cap & trade system disadvantage: environmental damage from mining/extraction activities,

carbon storage technology will take time to develop, both cause global

warming * I use all public transportation so the sources of energy for all three categories are theoretically the same.

Clean coal, wind,  solar and nuclear.

(Coal would be the sources to adjust other clean sources.)

Business/home life

What are the advantages and disadvantages of these sources of energy?

-Coal (advantages: cost, adjustable, disadvantages: not purely clean)

-Nuclear (advantages: cost, reliable, disadvantages: hard to maintain and

adjust)

-Wind/solar (Advantages; clean, Disadvantages, not reliable)

Mobile

Solar (Advantages: clean Disadvantages not reliable)

Energy is provided to the home much the same way as now, through the

power grid.  Most homes have solar cells on the roof with appropriate

inverters, and perhaps some battery/hydrogen energy storage.  Many homes

have neutral power consumption/supply averaged over long times.  Much of

this is due to more efficient appliances and appliances that consume

virtually zero power when not in use. Small mobile electronics are powered with rechargable batteries, much

like today.  Larger mobile electronics have fuel cells, as do some cars.

Many cars still run on gas, which is just getting slightly more

expensive than fuel cell systems.  

Business life energy is very similar to today; energy comes off the

grid.  The power company will use more alternative (by today's

standards) methods of power production.  As for air traffic; jets will

I think it would be a combination of solar energy and lithium batteries.

Disadvantage with solar energy still is, it takes too much space. Advantage is that it is very friendly with the environment. As to lithium batteries, disadvantage is its cost structure. Advantage is

its environmental  friendiness.

Personal electronics are powered by motion (piezo-electronic systems)

and/or highly-efficient solar coatings (nanotech applications). Home and

biz are still mostly grid-powered, but the rising use of solar panels is

biting in to this, and grid power is increasingly nuclear rather than

coal-driven.

interstar: #2019 my identity is largely defined by a bunch of web-services I signed up for between 10 and 15 years ago ...

It's 2019, and live theatre is still holding on. The Metropolitan opera now simulcasts every performance to movie screens, smaller venues broadcast live on the web; performances are archived directly to youtube. And yet somehow there are small audiences who will hop on the light rail and come fill the seats to be up close with a real person pretending to be someone else. Maybe it's because the pretending is somehow more raw without the digital intermediary, maybe because it's retro or quaint. Maybe they come to be reminded of how people used to interact. Whichever it is, I'm still employed. But now I'm lighting the shows entirely with LED fixtures, with all of the theatre's power coming from the fuel cell downstairs. (There was a theatre on the West End of London that did this fuel cell thing back in 2008... they sure were prescient). It's much harder to get people to turn off their technology at the door. We had a big enough problem with people texting through shows in the first decade of the century... now people provide running commentaries that caption our video stream. Critics comment on the shows live, then, if they feel particularly strongly, blog a postmortem review when they get home. As long as they stay engaged, I guess it all works out.

falconrod: @anthonymobile #2019, invest in solar panels for home or "buy" a windmill up at the altamont pass

Energy market is full of energy sources: portative atomic power plants (which aren't really secured and also cannot be allowed in the flight crafts - due of security problems), solar energy (which is also not so efficient in the times of climatic changes, and after all cannot be recycled without damages for a nature). But the best new energy will be the very old one: kinetic energy. At the beginning it's just a new fashion, new trend: people build in their shoes and their dresses kinetic power systems, so they can load with energy their players and mobile videophones permanently while of walking. But then the industries understand the power of kinetic energy and make many electronic devices based only on this human produced energy. It cannot be useful for the whole home or town energy supply, but for standalone electronic systems it's very efficient. This is the future of the energy: in our very past. The problem is: ill people, whose movements are limited, cannot provide this energy sources. But they will be escorted by Humengenicans ("human energy generators"). It will open new job market for everybody who can move, because people, even if they haven't skills for difficult work, can just move and produce energy. It isn't slavery, they can everytime escape this job and look for another work. But many people will be professionally Humengenicans, because of simpliness of their tasks - and because of high acceptance in the society.