Intel CEO Andy Grove published an article at The American called, “Our Electric Future” in which he suggests energy independence is not only the wrong goal, but actually impossible to achieve in an increasingly global economy.

He suggests, rather, that our goal should be “energy resilience”—meaning we should be focused on shifting to electricity as our primary “energy source” since it is possible to create electricity from many different sources (e.g. wind, solar, diesel, oceans, etc.)

From a software engineering perspective, this makes a lot of sense—it’s like building a properly decoupled system where each layer can act on its own. For example, software engineers know that the “model, view, controller” paradigm is a useful one because it is important to be able to represent data in multiple ways—as charts, or as graphs, for instance, as well as in a spreadsheet or on printed paper. In Grove’s terms, this is “data resilience”, meaning that the data can be used to render multiple views without restructuring or re-writing the models.

Sounds good, Mr. Grove! Let’s work toward energy resilience (get your car converted to electric? ).