I came across this awesome video that discusses energy production, how much energy we use and why it is important to invest in technologies that can power the world 30+ years from now.

In short, there is a professor at MIT, Dan Nocera who does a great job of explaining how energy is made, and how his team of students produced a device that would power a house off the grid for a day on about 2 liters of water and sunlight.  He discovered this by studying how nature converts sunlight and water into energy.  And he did this all for about $100 worth of materials. There is a lot of content in this video, and it explains how we’ve gone from a society that has used mainframes then PCs then laptops and so-fourth, but we are still running these things off of a power grid that was designed before mainframes.

Imagine what this could do for people in not so developed parts of the country? Imagine what this could do for cloud computing? The video is about 20 minutes long, but well worth the watch. Nocera is an excellent speaker.