Let there be light, and there was light!

'Fiat Lux'-- 'Let there be Light', from the perspective of a non-religious, slightly geeky, green energy enthusiast, such as myself, came from the of work of Thomas Alva Edison. Good Ol' Edison, of whom we normally learn in our second grade, as we know, invented the electric bulb. However he also performed backward integration for his invention by pioneering the concept of power generation and distribution to homes, businesses, and factories – a crucial development in the modern industrialized world

However, Edison, a brilliant man, overlooked a couple of things.

Technically, he propagated the use of DC (Direct Current) power for power distribution, and got into a legendary rivalry with other greats of that time, Westinghouse and Tesla. Eventually, of course, AC (Alternating Current) power won due to its obvious benefits.

Edison also pioneered the concept of generation of centralized power from fossil fuels. This paved the way for a wide variety of industries based on fossil fuel extraction, refining, and in a strange way also laid the foundation stone for the current clean tech industry. If only Edison had thought of designing portable Diesel Generator sets instead of designing large fossil fuel power stations, how quickly people would have become aware of the pollution their DG sets create in their houses, and would have shifted from buying Diesel/Coal for their backyards to Solar or small geothermal decades ago.

The biggest challenge in combating climate change is changing human behavior. And human behavior change is very difficult to achieve unless one feels the impact of continuing the current actions, be it economic, ecological, and sometimes moral. The current system of large scale power plants polluting the atmosphere does not affect the regular Joe, because he lives far away from the CO2 rich air around the power plant. I would give ten million Zimbabwean dollars(I still run a start up) for every person who honestly says that he thinks about the pollution caused by the the electricity consumed by his Light bulb.

However, this is changing. We are slowly rectifying the two key mistakes of the Edison era. One, we are replacing the fossils with cleaner fuels, and two, we are moving towards distributed generation resulting in reduction of transmission losses. Your children will mostly likely be charging their laptops with electricity generated from your rooftop or backyard.

A test: If you have a blog with a white background and i told you that an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. And if you had 50 visitors a day who visited for 10 minutes each, you would save 50 Kw a year by just converting the colour of your blog into black! Would you do it?

Well, you just might do it today as its cool to be green, but a decade ago, it might not have brought about the same result. For our previous generation, energy wasn't green or dirty, it was just something that charged our light bulbs.

It is just this shift in way of thinking that makes our world today an extremely exciting place. We are reviewing the way we see energy. The fight started by Al Gore by invoking our moral responsibility towards the earth, combined with a threat of survival due to Climate change, is now fought by clean tech entrepreneurs who fight on an economic battlefield with carbon credits and Renewable energy Certificates as weapons of mass (ecological) reconstruction. However, the real question is not whether climate change is real or not, it is 'Do I want to breathe clean air and drink clean water?'. I would buy into green energy even if climate change was the biggest hoax of all time (which i assure you, it is not!).

In this blog, we will explore how we are changing the world around us to rectify some Edisonian mistakes, and making our world a better place to live in.

I just hope dear Thomas was given a roomy grave to turn in!