November 2028 is the 40th anniversary of ESD. Click here read other 2028 lookbacks.

It's late in the afternoon on a Friday and I'm looking out the window of my San Jose, California office at a beautiful sunset in Cabo San Lucas Mexico. It's not a glass window, but a virtual one made of a high-efficiency organic LED-based display the size of my wall.

I fell in love with Cabo when I vacationed there two years ago in 2026 and this makes me feel like I'm still there. I was just finishing up my vid-mail and thought, "wow... it's been 20 years since oil jumped over one hundred U.S. dollars a barrel." Today it's almost all dried up and has mostly been replaced by electricity generated from ultra-efficient solar power plants and other energy harvesting technologies. Even my rental car is electric; you can't even rent a gas-powered vehicle anymore.

Many things have changed. When I was working as an engineer back in 2008, energy was at a premium and the world's population was 6.7 billion plus and growing. When I last looked it slipped past 8 billion... amazing! Back then many of the emerging nations were trying to quickly catch up by building power plants to burn coal and natural gas.

Then nano-film solar cells and high-efficiency solar concentrator plants changed everything, making the old ways of generating power obsolete. I toured one of the old coal-burning plants last year just before it was decommissioned--a beautiful park is underway on that very site! But I feel the electronics industry contributed a large part to get us here.

Back in the day, it was thought that to power a device, you needed wires connected to a power supply or battery. I think about our new corporate building and the micro-mesh network encased in the concrete. These small ceramic spheres containing a SoC (system on a chip) for building monitoring, communications, and processing were added right into the concrete like aggregate.

They even have a name for the stuff called "CommCrete"--which includes a percentage of these tiny machines powered by periodic radio pulses that charge an on-device carbon nano-tube capacitor. The entire building is now smart and can detect structural loading, temperature, or even route communications though the structure--wires may soon be a thing of the past.

But to make those tiny machines even possible, we needed to get the power levels down to almost nothing. The first step was taking a look at where all the power was going. I remember the great Internet black-out of 2019 when during the World Series everyone jumped online to replay the Dodgers beating the Yankees in the last minute of the 9th. The instantaneous power drain caused widespread black-outs and took out network connections everywhere--even my netPhone service was down for a few hours. Everyone woke up that day and realized that the amount of power that was flowing into our infrastructure needed to be reigned in. I'd been preaching that story for years; people finally started to listen.