SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Author's note: GreenBiz.com editors Jonathan Bardelline, Leslie Guevarra and Tilde Herrera contributed reporting to this article.

During the third and final session of our just-concluded VERGE event, more than four dozen top executives from organizations that are leading the push for a clean economy gathered to share insights into the future of buildings, energy, IT and vehicles.

The panel discussion, convened by GreenBiz.com at the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco, looked at how the four technologies that are quickly coming together offer nothing less than a reinvention of the way business and society operate.

"This convergence is happening whether we like it or not, it's happening organically, and the result of innovations built on other innovations, the natural progression of technology advances," Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz.com, explained to the audience.

Makower described four areas that VERGE technologies are already creating:

• Autonomous vehicles that can drive themselves.
• Hyperefficient buildings that are intelligently controlled to maximize comfort and energy use.
• Intelligent cities that can, among other things, reduce emission and enhance safety of residents through smarter management of resources from parking to lighting.
• Platooning technologies that let (autonomous) vehicles travel in close range and at high speeds, eliminated traffic jams and making unproductive work commutes a thing of the past.

"These are all trillion-dollar markets -- this is a massive business opportunity," Makower said. "This is going to transform how companies operate."

What followed was a look at not just what is coming in the VERGE economy, but how we get there.

Information

Kicking off the three-hour session was a look at the information component of VERGE. Arguably, technology is the backbone of the revolution, because IT will be responsible for both generating and analyzing the massive amounts of data that come out of connected buildings, grids and vehicles.

And while there is no shortage of big-picture, medium-term ideas about what the converged world will look like -- or, as Stephan Dolezalek, Managing Director at VantagePoint Venture Partners, put it during his brief opening presentation, "how the movie will end" -- there is still a huge obstacle in terms of getting there.

Google's autonomous vehicle is one that has already made an appearance in the world --

"Things have to happen in a certain order -- if i'd come up for the idea of Facebook in 1980 and envisioned it exactly as it is today, what would it have cost me and what would it have taken me to build Facebook in 1980?" Dolezalek asked. "A lot more and a lot longer" is the simple answer.

But there's a flip side to the bad news that it will take a lot of effort for us to get where we know we're going: We often overestimate just how much more and how much longer it will take.

Dolezalek said that he talked to America's Big Three automakers in 2004 and 2005 to find out how long they thought it would take them to get an electric vehicle on the road. They each expected it to take at least 15 years -- EVs by 2020 -- Dolezalek said.

"And yet today virtually every major manufacturer has an EV on the road, or will have one in the next five years," he added. From the Chevy Volt to the Ford Focus to Chrysler's minivan -- not to mention the Nissan Leaf or the steady evolution of the Toyota Prius into an all-electric vehicle -- EVs are coming to market in a big way.

"One of the big things behind this is Tesla [the electric vehicle pioneer], in some ways it's a breakthrough, but in some ways it's just taking off-the-shelf parts and concepts and combining them," Dolezalek said.

And this example lights the path ahead for all of the newly converged technologies, he added: "We can use the parts bin from other technologies to move products forward."

Next page: How energy figures into the VERGE future