Energy for a New Century.

The stone age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and the oil age will not end because we run out of oil.

Don Huberts, Shell Hydrogen

(Division of Royal Dutch Shell)

The age of oil has so dominated social and economic trends for the last 100 years that most of us have a hard time imagining a world without it. Oil is cheap, abundant, and convenient--easy to carry halfway around the world in a supertanker or across town in the tank of a family sport utility vehicle. From Joe Sixpack to the PhD energy economists employed by governments and corporations, we tend to assume that we will burn fossil fuels until they're gone, and that the eventual transition will be painful and expensive.

But if you turn the problem around, our current energy situation looks rather different: from an ecological perspective, continuing to depend on fossil fuels for even another 50 years--let alone the century or two it might take to use them up--is preposterous. As the new century begins, the world's 6 billion people already live with the dark legacy of the heavily polluting energy system that powered the last century. It is a legacy that includes impoverished lakes and estuaries, degraded forests, and millions of damaged human lungs.

Fossil-fuel combustion is at the same time adding billions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year, an inexorable escalation that must end soon if we are not to disrupt virtually every ecosystem and economy on the planet.

An energy transition in the new century is therefore ecologically necessary, but it is also economically logical. The same technological revolution that has created the Internet and so many other 21st century wonders can be used to efficiently harness and store the world's vast supplies of wind, biomass, and other forms of solar energy--which is 6,000 times as abundant on an annual basis as the fuels we now use. A series of revolutionary technologies, including solar cells, wind turbines, and fuel cells can turn the enormously abundant but diffuse flows of renewable energy into concentrated electricity and hydrogen that can be used to power factories, homes, automobiles, and aircraft.

These new energy conversion devices occupy about the same position in the economy today that the internal combustion engine and electromagnetic generator held in the 1890s. The key enabling technologies have already been developed and commercialized, but they only occupy small niche markets--and their potential future importance is not yet widely appreciated. As with the automobile and incandescent lightbulb before them, the solar cell and hydrogen-electric car are steadily gaining market share--and may soon be ready to contribute to a third energy revolution. They could foster a new generation of mass-produced machines that efficiently and cleanly provide energy needed to take a hot shower, sip a cold beer, or surf the Internet.

Thanks to a potent combination of advancing technology and government incentives, motivated in large measure by environmental concerns, the once glacial energy markets are now shifting. During the 1990s, wind power has grown at a rate of 26 percent per year, while solar energy has grown at 17 percent per year. During the same period, the world's dominant energy source--oil--has grown at just 1.4 percent per year.

Wind and solar energy currently produce less than 1 percent of the world's energy, but as the computer industry long ago discovered, double-digit growth rates can rapidly turn a tiny sector into a giant. In the past two years, perhaps a dozen major companies have joined Royal Dutch Shell in announcing major new investments in giant wind farms, solar manufacturing plants, and fuel cell development. The "alternative" energy industry is beginning to take on the same kind of buzz that surrounded John D. Rockefeller's feverish expansion of the oil industry in the 1880s--or Bill Gates's early moves in the software business in the 1980s. This January, stocks of solar and fuel cell companies suddenly jumped several-fold in a month, following the pattern of Internet stocks.

The 21st century may be as profoundly reshaped by the move away from fossil fuels as the 20th century was shaped by them. Energy markets, for example, could shift abruptly, drying up sales of conventional power plants and cars in a matter of years, and influencing the share prices of scores of companies. The economic health--and political power--of whole nations could be boosted, or in the case of the Middle East, sharply diminished. And our economies and lifestyles are likely to become more decentralized with the advent of new energy sources that provide their own transportation network--for example, the sunshine that already falls on our rooftops.

How quickly the world's energy economy is transformed will depend in part on whether fossil-fuel prices remain low and whether the opposition of many oil and electric power companies to a new system can be overcome. The pace of change will be heavily influenced by the pace of international negotiations on climate change and of the national implementation plans that follow. In the 1980s, California provided tax incentives and access to the power grid for new energy sources, which enabled the state to dominate renewable-energy markets worldwide. Similar incentives and access have spurred rapid market growth in several European countries in the 1990s. Such measures have begun to overcome the momentum of a century's investment in fossil fuels.

Earth Day 2000--with its central theme, "Clean Energy Now!" --provides a timely opportunity for citizens to express their desire for a new energy system, and to insist that their elected officials implement the needed policy changes. If they do so, smokestacks and cars may soon look as antiquated as manual typewriters and horse drawn carriages do.

Christopher Flavin is Senior Vice President at Worldwatch Institute, where he writes primarily on energy. He is co-author with Nicholas Lenssen of Power Surge: Guide to the Coming Energy Revolution. Twenty years ago, he was Denis Hayes' research assistant.