The Energy Long Tail...

A mega-value Triple Diamond club reader (as James Enck would say), said I should post something on the looming energy crisis and its effect on communications and the economy in general.
'Energy crisis? What energy crisis?' I said, switching on my second Linux server and turning the air-conditioning up a notch.
It turns out we are riding on the crest of a wave and land just came into view. There's no getting around it either. Some time this decade Oil and Gas production will peak and then we will be be on a downward curve until oil runs out, sometime around the latter half of the century.


Of course the estimates of new discoveries could be wrong, or consumption estimates could be wrong, but there's enough consensus to make it within the bounds of normal hypothesis. i.e. they won't be that far wrong.

So what does it mean for the communications industry?
Well, one of the things you think about is, how much does it cost you to leave your router on 24 hours? Your PC? The masts that constitute the UK phone network, 50,000 of them by 2007?
Communications needs power, lots of it, and right now, a lot of that power comes from oil and gas.

We can always use alternative energies? Well, yes (we're going to have to), but they're going to cost you? At the moment they could not keep pace with the rising energy consumption demands of India and China! It is going to be down to combining increased use of marginalised technologies such as wave, solar and wind power and radically altering the consumption patterns that have developed in the oil era. Rediscovery of ideas which were uneconomical at the time they were thought of - the Long Tail of Energy production.
Perhaps this is just an example of Newtons 3rd law; as the price of voice communication comes down, the price of energy to facilitate it goes up. In the end the amount we spend may well stay the same, or at least not decrease as much as people might expect. The money will just flow from the telco to the energy utility.
Transport is the second piece of this equation, and that's where it gets a bit more interesting. Cars? Well, I expect hybrid and full electric cars are on the very near horizon, especially if advances in battery technology pan out. Air travel is a different matter, I don't see electric planes in the near future, so how will we travel quickly across continents, as has been our growing trend over the last 20 years??
Paradoxically, communications will make the world smaller, yet our consumption will make it bigger again. Being there, virtually, may replace actually being there (like we used to predict in the eighties! ;)

There are various efforts already underway to mitigate some of these effects. A recent NASA prize was offered for laser-powered flight.
xG Technology has developed a communications approach that can transmit/receive broadband data over long distances with minimal power consumption.

Mesh networks can operate with no, or minimal central infrastructure.

Overall, I would expect that we start to see some disruptive activity in the energy space as well, over the next 20 years (hopefully not politically disruptive!), and the decreasing importance of national regulatory solutions to the problem, over local ones.

P2P Energy exchanges anyone? I have 200GW of online storage on GooglePower....