Developments around the world are already proving them wrong, however. We may soon witness the most dramatic changes in the world energy economy in a hundred years. At a small news conference in Landover, Maryland last October, two major U.S. corporations made an announcement that may one day be seen as a big step in launching the energy systems of the twenty-first century. The new joint venture, called EnergyWorks, will pursue projects around the world based on wind turbines, biomass generators, industrial energy efficiency, and other technologies that most large energy firms have spurned as puny systems that cannot possibly meet the expanding energy needs of close to six billion people. But those energy executives who still cast their lot with large oil refineries, nuclear reactors, and the like would do well to remember the lessons of IBM, which discovered too late that personal computers were more than a boutique industry that could never challenge the dominance of mainframes.
Technological change can move at lightning speed.
In fact, historians of technology may one day argue that by the mid-1990s, the world energy economy was already in the early stages of a major transition. One sign, for example, is that relatively small, efficient jet engines are coming to dominate the power industry, sweeping aside less efficient coal-fired models. Another is that advanced electronics have improved the efficiency of lighting by as much as four-fold. Rate Their Significance Around the world, advanced electronics, new kinds of synthetic materials, and the techniques of mass production are allowing engineers to substitute clever technologies for brute force. New modular, mass-produced energy systems have the potential to be more economical and flexible than traditional energy systems they replace.