The thirst of modern agricultural practices, industrial practices, and the bottled water industry have pushed those systems toward collapse. We canno… - Peter Diamandis

any entrepreneur take advantage of the amazing power of exponential organizational tools such as crowdsourcing.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter how cheap solar gets unless we can store that energy, and storage on this scale has never been achieved before. Grid-level storage requires colossal batteries. Today's lithium-ion batteries are woefully inadequate. Their storage capacity would need to be improved ten- to twentyfold, and — if we really want them to be scalable — they have to be built from Earth-abundant elements.

With the smart grid for energy and the smart grid for water — what's technically called resource consumption optimization — we're seeing the second wave. Next up is the automation and control of far more complex autonomous systems — such as self-driving cars.