The Five Pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution

Jeremy Rifkin lays out the path of what he refers to as "The Third Revolution" in his The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World (2011) .  A path that combines Internet technology and renewable energy - - imagine hundreds of millions of people producing their own green energy in their homes, offices, and factories and sharing it with each other in an "energy Internet," just like how we now create and share information online.

Rifkin sees five pillars in The Third Industrial Revolution - -

1. Shifting to renewable energy.
2. Transforming the building stock of every continent into micro-power plants to collect renewable energies on site.
3. Deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies  in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies.
4. Using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy-sharing intergrid  that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of energy locally, on site, they can sell surplus back to the grid and share electricity with their continental neighbors).
5. Transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid.