If you believe in the benefits of energy innovation, support national security or consider climate change to be a non-negligible threat to our planet, you need to stop listening to Al Gore and start reading Adam Smith.

Free markets and big-knuckled capitalism may not be perfect, but the basic principles they encompass are the point of departure – especially in the context of the electric power grid – for responding successfully to the energy challenge facing the United States. The key word is “successfully.”

The “energy challenge” actually encompasses three separate challenges. Richard Lester, a professor nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, deconstructed the world’s energy “problem” during a talk he gave at the National Governors Association Centennial Meeting in 2008.

“So far I’ve been talking about our energy problem,” said Lester. “But this is incorrect. Because we really have three separate problems, each on its own very difficult to solve.”

via America’s Other Energy Revolution And Why It Matters – Forbes.