NP but Grid-related

[pynchonoid]

"In a hydrogen economy the centralized, top-down flow
of energy, controlled by global oil companies and
utilities, would become obsolete. Instead, millions of
end users would connect their fuel cells into local,
regional and national hydrogen energy webs (HEWs),
using the same design principles and smart
technologies that made the World Wide Web possible. 

[...] Unevenly distributed, difficult to extract,
costly to transport, complicated to refine and
multifaceted in the forms in which they are used,
fossil fuels, from the very beginning, required a
highly centralized command-and-control structure to
finance exploration and production, and coordinate the
flow of energy to end users. The highly centralized
fossil-fuel infrastructure inevitably gave rise to
commercial enterprises organized along similar lines.
Recall that small cottage industries gave way to
large-scale factory production in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries to take advantage of the
capital-intensive costs and economies of scale that
went hand in hand with steam power, and later oil and
electrification. In the discussion of the emergence of
industrial capitalism, little attention has been paid
to the fact that the energy regime that emerged
determined, to a great extent, the nature of the
commercial forms that took shape. [...] "

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021223&s=rifkin

Enjoy!

-Doug




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