In a conversation the other day, Ed Kummer of Disney made a really thought-provoking observation: the spread of solar energy units to homes and businesses is an analog to other forms of user-generated content, and the overall trend towards a two-way network. While it’s possible to set up a solar system completely off the grid, most of the new customers feed power into the grid during sunlight hours, and draw from it when the daylight wanes. If we move to a solar power economy, it will be much more distributed and cooperative than the current one-way model.
It’s fabulous to put the internet and Web 2.0 into a broader context, and to think about how the new network economics that we’re seeing on the internet may be adopted in other fields. With VoIP, we’re seeing the internet subsume the telephone network. With distributed solar, and the kinds of distributed energy monitoring technology that Adam wrote about the other day, will the internet model also colonize the power grid?
Hmmm… What was I saying about the internet as the network of networks?