Edison Predicted Cheap Energy

132 years ago today, Thomas Edison first demonstrated his incandescent lightbulb and told spectators: “We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.”

Not a bad prediction, when you think about it. Few people grouse about the price of electricity, which is one of the main reasons that the migration to renewables is so difficult; in many ways, we’re trying to fix something that at first blush doesn’t appear to be really broken. It’s only in the very recent past that we began to realize that our system of delivering energy to a world population had huge hidden costs.

As we enter the new year, let’s all pledge to heighten the awareness of those costs, and do everything we can to push the planet in the direction of clean energy sources.