Consider how the energy landscape has changed in the past 20 years. In 1993, the price of oil was a bit over $18 a barrel; it’s around $100 a barrel now. In 1993, the life of a cellphone battery was hardly a concern because there were only 34 million cellphone subscribers world-wide, compared with more than 6.8 billion today. The battery for electric cars mattered even less: It would be another three years before the General Motors EV1 went into production and a year after that before the first Prius went on sale in Japan. Wind farms were a novelty, and solar energy barely registered in the statistics. And how about these numbers: Since 1993, China’s consumption of oil has more than tripled, and its electricity consumption has quintupled. Now, try to imagine what the energy landscape will look like 20 years from now. That’s what this Journal Report […]