Justin Hall-Tipping has a stunning TED presentation up on the web.

It’s title, “Freeing energy from the grid.”

He looks into the essence of matter and explores the possibility of turning totally upside down our

energy economy.

He asks” “What if we can gain exquisite control over the essence of energy, the electron? … We can generate all the energy we need.”

And he makes two assertions:

“The power plant of tomorrow is no power plant.”

“The grid of tomorrow is no grid. And energy… will one day be free.”

Now something like that was once predicted about nuclear energy, which was supposed to become so cheap it would no longer be metered. Never happened.

The basis of Hall-Tipping’s projections is the work he and some colleagues have been doing in nanotechnology. We will be exploring the promise of nano in our January issue of EnergBiz.

Change – possibly disruptive change – is coming to the world of energy. New oceans of information wait in the wings. New technologies will be summoned to market. And the way we move about will also change.

Presentations like Hall-Tipping’s are valuable not so much in the specifics of their content. He may or may not be right about many of his predictions. The value of his speech, however, is its inspirational nature, encouraging us to shed our biases and blinders and to think broadly, creatively and innovatively.