I have something interesting in common with Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz.

That is a fascination with a scene in history. The year is 1881, and in J.P. Morgan's mansion on Madison Avenue an experiment is taking place. It's overseen by Thomas A. Edison, who has installed a generator downstairs and wires all around the house in order to introduce the great financier to the miracle of the age, electric lights. Do away with noxious, unhealthy gas. In with the new, bright, quiet, safe, odorless electricity! (We forget what a miracle that once was.)

Schwartz is fascinated with the expense of Morgan's set-up, and the requirement to have an engineer on staff. I think more of the fact that Edison's set-up ran Direct Current, and it was the replacement of DC with Nikola Tesla's AC which made the present grid possible. (The AC-DC fight led to Edison splitting with the company he founded to pursue electricity, called General Electric.)

The fade-out of the petroleum age should require us to think again about how and where we get our power, and the role of the distribution grid. Already electrical companies are filling city halls with proposals for things like wind farms. That's fine, but even windmills have environmental problems, believe it or not, especially when they're scaled-up. And the current system of generating power and transporting it hundreds of miles to cities is horribly wasteful. You could replace the present copper lines with carbon nanotubes, but that would be horribly expensive.

What to do?

Well, there are many ways in which you can generate electricity right on your property. A simple windsock on the roof could spin and create a little power. Solar panels could create a little more. There are enormous stores of geothermal power underground, and water goes by many houses.

Each of these point sources provides just a little power, maybe not enough to even light the home it's attached to, full time. But what if the grid were not a one-way transport mechanism? What if it were a two-way street? What if you could sell power to the grid, have it stored for a while, then buy power back later?

You wouldn't have to store the power in batteries, you know. Simply transport it to a central point and use it to turn water into its constituent parts, into oxygen and hydrogen. Use the hydrogen to power fuel cells. You could even, as technology improves, create hydrogen in your own home, then tap into it for your car, your batteries, whatever.

Strange thoughts. But it's time, now, to think such thoughts, and get to work on such proposals. The wars and death of our time are like the sputtering of an engine running out of fuel. Some day, probably soon, the fuel is going to run out. And we need to be ready with the next generation. Or we die.