You purr your pollution-free hydrogen car into your garage, plug it into the wall, and ponder your electricity meter spinning anticlockwise. The car's fuel cell not only powers your house but, through an intelligent chip, auctions off the surplus electricity to local power brokers. Sooner than you may think, your lab or university might be sending out electricity bills instead of paying them. Technologies, green imperatives and liberalized energy markets are converging to reinvent the century-old electricity grid. Alongside power plants, oil barons and high-voltage pylons, local generators will cheaply and cleanly pump out power from villages, faculties and backyards, and electricity consumers will also become vendors. Underpinning this shift, computer scientists are creating an intelligent, responsive 'energy web', where local supply and demand would be micromanaged in an electronic energy marketplace. World energy needs will double by 2050 and we urgently need sources that don't produce carbon dioxide or other pollutants. Decentralized generation puts technological choices in consumers' hands. The technology is available to bring small, local energy sources, or 'micropower', better into the electricity equation, from gas turbines, hydro and wind power and sugar-cane biomass to nanoscale solar cells embedded in the bricks and slates of houses. For countries like the United States that already have grids, decentralized generation will ease gridlock, radically improve energy efficiency, cut carbon emissions and provide better resilience to failures and terrorist attacks on vulnerable networks.
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