by John Traveler

Created on: August 07, 2010

Any review of the historical record illuminates the fact that economic trends are closely tide to technological innovations. In recent history, the industrial revolution and subsequent economic boom associated with it was motivated by the invention of the steam engine and laying of millions of miles of track for the iron horse to run on. Likewise, the economy of the past sixty years was securely lashed to a zeal for technological supremacy in the cold war.

Today, we find ourselves in a deep economic recessionary void awaiting the next technological advancement that will reinvigorate the economic landscape. Many economic prognosticators predict that such economic upturn will be found in renewable power generation technologies.

The world appetite for oil and coal (carbon based fuels) has virtually exploded over the past half century, but reserves of both are limited. Based on current known oil deposit reserves, there is enough of it to last 20 to 30 years, and coal perhaps 300 years. If “necessity is the mother of invention” (Plato), then the necessity to develop renewable sources of energy for power generation is a certainty. That the development and commercial exploitation of renewable power generation technologies will reshape economic trends in upcoming years is an inescapable conclusion.

Already the production of solar panels and wind turbines is creating business opportunities and jobs. When you put money in peoples pockets they spend it, and when money moves the economic trend is going to be a good one. But wind power is certainly not a new innovation, and unless engineers can vastly improve efficiency while lowering the cost of solar panels, they can never effectively replace current power generation methods. In the short of it, something new and truly revolutionary with respect to renewable power generation is needed, and maybe that something is already on the drawing board somewhere.

What ever this revolutionary new method of power generation is, maybe something truly exotic like cold fusion, there can be no doubt that when it hits the market a whole new economic trend will be set in motion. New factories to build the technology, trained technicians to implement it and millions or perhaps billions of consumers will purchase it. Small businesses will spring up across the land to address  little niches of economic opportunity. A new economic trend of prosperity will dim memories of joblessness, unemployment lines, bankruptcies and foreclosures. It’s happened before and we can bet it will happen again, and there will be plenty of venture capitalists on Wall Street trying to by a piece of the action when it does.

Economic trends are often characterized as episodes of boom and bust. Over the past ten years we have certainly become well acquainted with the dismal outlook of an interval of bust, and it is safe to say, just about anyone and everyone is ready for a change in direction of the economic winds. Renewable power generation is an inevitable technological necessity, we know that. In economic terms, it remains only to realize and harness such technologies, thereby establishing a new economic trend.

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