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From Internet to enternet, creating the energy network

At the Green: Net '09 Conference in San Francisco, Bob Metcalfe, a general partner at Polaris Venture Partners, explained how Washington actually helped the Internet, and where the best place to look for green innovations now are. He says that as the enternet--the energy network--develops, creators will look to the structure of the Internet as a guide.

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>> Now Washington did actually help the Internet it, in the early 80's, capital gains taxes were dramatically cut which led to venture capital which led to all of the companies that built the Internet. The government broke the monopoly of AT&T and IBM helped us break those monopolies to make way for the Internet with the Carter Phone decision and the Antitrust activities of justice. The government set standards I would hasten to add 2 standards CCIP being one of them but also the ISO protocols of the Commerce Department but that standard setting, even though there were two of them, was useful in the end. But more importantly what Washington did for the Internet was to sponsor research and so that's what we should be going to Washington for is to get money for research. Because when you have decades to solve energy you have time for science and I will argue although not right now that the best place to do science is, the best way to get innovation done is to do your science not at monopolies like Bell Labs or Microsoft Research and not to do your research at government labs like all the DOE labs which are basically geographical earmarks but to do the research at research universities. In Boston we have 10 research universities I think there's a few around here too. And then what we'll get from those research universities is what I would call silver bullets and often you'll hear people say in energy there are no silver bullets. Well that's rubbish they should spend more time finding the silver bullets than disclaiming them we need silver bullets as they were on the Internet and my favorite silver bullet on the Internet is, of course, dense wave division multiplexing the long haul, transport and optical fibers of data which made it possible for me to call my mother without thinking about how much it costs. And let me argue also that when the research is done at these universities it will come out in the form of research professors with their graduating students and entrepreneurial teams and venture capitalists and that's how we're gonna solve energy. And this is a current diagram of -- I only have a minute and 15 left so I'm zeroing in on closing here; this is a diagram of the energy system which is way too complicated. But there are lessons in the Internet for how to take on this kind of complexity we need an architecture for the Internet it should probably be layered. The layering of the Internet worked it allowed us to live rich I lived at levels one and two, Tim Burners-Lee assumed spelling lived at level 7; this is the 20th anniversary of the worldwide web. Imagine that Ethernet and TCPIP were invented in 1973 and the worldwide web was invented in 1989, what a testament to the efficacy of layering especially in its stimulating serendipity, so layering should be in the architecture standards. Will this architecture be centralized or distributed, dah, if the Internet is any guide it will be distributed you go for the mainframes and the upper left to the -- those are microturbens in the lower right. Distributed energy if the Internet is any guide it'll have a topology the Internet is likely to be more symmetrical if the Internet is a guide it's likely to be overkill put much more bandwidth, much more capability than is currently needed and it will have storage.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Techologies ====