Winners and Losers in the Great Global Energy Struggle to Come | The Nation

Think of us today as embarking on a new Thirty Years’ War. It may not result in as much bloodshed as that of the 1600s, though bloodshed there will be, but it will prove no less momentous for the future of the planet. Over the coming decades, we will be embroiled at a global level in a succeed-or-perish contest among the major forms of energy, the corporations which supply them and the countries that run on them. The question will be: Which will dominate the world’s energy supply in the second half of the twenty-first century?

How will things shake out? We don’t know. But:

Were I to wager a guess, I might place my bet on energy systems that were decentralized, easy to make and install and required relatively modest levels of up-front investment. For an analogy, think of the laptop computer of 2011 versus the giant mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s. The closer that an energy supplier gets to the laptop model (or so I suspect), the more success will follow.

via Winners and Losers in the Great Global Energy Struggle to Come | The Nation.