Keynote: National Rural Electrical Cooperative (NRECA), Nashville, Tennessee – The Future of Energy

The future belongs to the fast – particularly in the world of the fast moving energy industry!

There’s a massive amount of change going in this sector – small, local, community energy producers.   The electric grid, for example, is bound to become less centralized as residential ratepayers print three-dimensional solar cells from their home computers or run their heating and cooling systems from their cell phones. The acceleration of technology for backyard energy production and the ongoing reduction in costs of solar and wind and biomass. Quite simply, it’s an era in which private grids, and where small-scale generators sharing continues to take hold, will continue to upend the traditional utility-customer business model.

There was a great blog post, The GIS Of Trees: Location Intelligence and Maps are the Future of Just About Everything!  to which I responded, from one attendee that captures the essence of my talk.