Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation: Good news! Energy Costs Could Soar, Spurring a New Era in Which People Make Clean Power for Themselves

By Blaine Greteman

In the 1920s, millions of rural Americans got their energy the same way they got their butter—they made it themselves. Off-grid when off-grid wasn’t cool, they used some 600,000 windmills to run radios and power, maintaining sputtering lights with an electric current that ebbed, flowed and sometimes simply disappeared with the prairie wind. Fully 90 percent of those windmills vanished within a generation, as even the most isolated farmers eagerly plugged in to the new centralized power system.

But today the same technologies that help iPod-bedecked college students steal music are reviving the model of microgeneration—clean, decentralized power that people make themselves—by linking homes into a vast network that keeps buzzing even when the wind stops blowing. Microgeneration, meet the YouTube generation.

“We’re talking about a new meaning of ‘power to the people,’” raves Jeremy Rifkin, alternative energy activist and adviser to several European heads of state. Forget about wind farms and solar plants run by conventional utility companies, he says. “In the new energy regime, the people are the utilities and their houses are the power plants.”

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Photo: istockphoto.com/zamanyahreIllustration:istockphoto.com/molotovcoketail