As a result of the collapse of Enron and the slowing of retail deregulation due to the situation in California, Energy and Utility companies are going back to the basics. They are focusing on taking additional costs out of the business, getting more out of their assets, and shoring up the balance sheet by selling non-core assets and exiting non-core businesses like energy marketing and trading. Meanwhile energy and utility stocks are trading at 104 week lows with over USD300B in market capitalization being lost over the last 52 weeks. The current focus by most energy and utility management teams comes as no surprise. All of these actions are necessary to position them for the next wave of growth through acquisitions or ventures into unregulated activities. On the surface, this focus appears to be on the old business pre deregulation, an asset intensive business that may involve exploration and production, generation, transmission, pipeline, distribution and customer service and care. Most leadership teams are focusing exclusively on the present dilemma. However, two disruptive technologies are gaining momentum and acceptance. When fully deployed, these technologies will significantly alter every aspect of the energy and utilities business. These disruptive technologies are nanotechnology and the hydrogen economy. Nanotechnology is the science of building previously unfathomable small things. It is taking pervasive computing to the atomic or subatomic level. Think of special purpose sensors in everything, wirelessly sending their status and the health of whatever they are watching to a remote monitoring system. The monitoring system using Artificial Intelligence watches for trends and patterns that alert other systems and operators of the onset of problems long before we previously could have detected the beginning of a transient or failure. The hydrogen economy is all about replacing our dependence on hydrocarbon based fuels with technologies that run off pure hydrogen. Hydrogen is a very abundant renewable energy source easily separable from water, which covers 70% of the earth. Replacing hydrocarbon fuels with hydrogen will clean up the atmosphere - no air pollution, support energy independence, and proliferate the equivalent of the PC revolution in the generation of electricity.
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