May I Ask a Favor of You Re: the CleanTech Industry, Please?
I was hoping that I could ask you a favor. As the editor of 2GreenEnergy, I’m constantly looking for new business models and strategies, and, like anyone, I focus on areas that seem to be good fits for my capabilities.
Sure, there are aspects of the clean energy industry that yield great success for people in endeavors like selling rooftop solar PV, renting e-bikes, designing LEED-certified buildings, etc. But personally, I have no particular skills that would distinguish me in any of these arenas.
Having said, that, I do have a few assets that I can bring to the table:
• A capability, demonstrated over a period of several decades, to solve some of the world’s thorniest business problems that are related to the marketing/popularization of technology
• Understanding of the science underpinning renewable energy, and sustainability more generally
• Passion for ethical business, and a commitment to the welfare of humankind
• A reasonable level of ability to express business/technology concepts in writing
Now, let me ask you this: What activities within the sphere of the cleantech industry require all or most of these? I’ve spent untold hours pondering that question, and, while I’ve come up with some answers that have generated some solid results, I’m always on the prowl for new and better ideas.
Maybe I’m so close to the problem that I struggle to see a solution that’s right in front of my face. If you have an idea that might help, I’d sure appreciate hearing about it.
Virtually any biomass, wet or dry, may have its molecular types separated, depolymerized or converted into biofuels and valuable chemicals using Winwick drillhole reactor technology. Typically, these processes use the extraordinary powers of decavitating microbubbles and sub/supercritical conditions to effect the conversions. They use no active compression, catalysts sometimes, and require little external heating. Most by-products generate co-products. In short, the processes will be found to be both more economical and more sustainable than current industrial methods.
What is lacking is an entrepreneurial scientific team with a bench-top pressure-temperature reactor that is prepared to put in sweat equity to establish proof of concept – plus producing some seminal publications on the way.
Readers of 2greenenergy should include such venturesome souls. Craig might care to provide the introductions, technology triaging, and market assessments.
Sev: As usual, I’m flattered by your remarks, but in truth, I’m no more qualified to do “technology triaging” in your specific space than I am to perform brain surgery. Keep up the good work. I’m rooting for you, but, at this point, that’s the best I can do.
Hi Craig – Since you are a writer, you may want to pick the top five or ten most promising global emerging and or deployed sustainable strategies that are and will have the greatest immediate and future global impact and go on the road to talk with and investigate the companies and people involved in those strategies and write an on-the-road blog, compile a lot of “go pro” video interview and location footage for a web documentary after the road trip. Produce the web video of the trip and write another book. You could probably do it all in CA but to give it a true global feel you may need to travel to China, India, Brazil as well.
I like your idea–in fact, if I had the financial strength I had as a younger man, I’d be all over it–and I’d have Ken Burns in tow preparing all this for PBS. But now I’m hoping for something that I can turn cash-flow positive.
In any case, thanks; the fact that you’re making a positive suggestion means a great deal.
You may respond that I’m shooting at the moon here, and you may be justified…
A national program – on the scale of the moonshot effort – to install a chain of ten thousand Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants, with proven storage, and a High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) grid supplement, straight across our Sunbelt. Just half that number would give us 50% of our electricity sustainably.
As you know, CSP is safe, clean, proven technology, and modern energy storage systems make it viable.
Harvesting modern sunshine is much cleaner and safer (and cheaper in the long run) than sucking up and digging up filthy prehistoric sunshine out of the ground, dragging it dangerously all over the planet, burning it up, and pouring gigatons of the resulting prehistoric carbon into our modern sky year on year.
Of course, CSP is completely doable and is, in fact, inevitable – given sufficient time (and there’s the rub). It’s already on the grid in California, Arizona, Spain and the United Arab Emirates, and many other places around the globe. The vast majority of the material needed is concrete, steel and glass.
If we as a society and as a species wait much longer, the fossil energy needed to build the system may lift the cost well beyond easy reach. The present barriers against this elegant solution are neither technical nor resource-based, nor even financial – they’re purely political barriers that are erected and reinforced by bribery, and by those intractable fossil interests that do the bribing.
How about crowd-funding a PR campaign to overturn that bribery and get the project off the ground (or rather, on the ground)? Is there a way to make that a financially worthwhile project?
Thanks for this. What a remarkable coincidence. I just got finished watching a live webinar featuring Lawrence Lessig, about whom I’ll be writing more shortly. In the meanwhile, you may want to see what he’s up to. It’s extra-ordinary, and I think he’s going to be successful.
I found a way to lower CO2 , reduce droughts, and deserts expanding. My problem is ,
it’s too Big for me to bring forward, and could use the help of someone with your skills and knowledge.Please email me if you’re interested. Thank you
I’m always interested in stuff like this. Please see my email on the subject.
i’D THINK MOST OF THEM ARE VERY IMPORTANT! “Passion for ethical business, and a commitment to the welfare of humankind” being perhaps the most important.
having said this, I’d appreciate if some more features/links are added to your email. eg. comparison of various techs on cost terms, ‘low hanging fruits’ ie things that a lay person may try at his home/work place with little expense etc.
Craig, – if nothing else your request could start another but more focussed discussion.
With your listed experience you may be able to combine facts/science regarding renewable energy and to communicate that to business and political (if interested) leaders, to be used for sustainable and ethical business. That simple!
We are at the start of a huge and much needed potential, not only with practical solutions for new energy, but which may be used for breaking down old walls/prejudice.
More than ever there are opportunities/solutions on many levels and depending on place of production and end use, and if for residential or industrial use.
It’s very much a global issue.
Hi Craig,
As to your several decade-timeframe to business, I would say nuclear fusion and ocean thermal gradients. Also, besides being not renewable but to take several centuries long to finish, I would say thorium-based nuclear fission energy.
Best,
Vicente Fachina.
There are a variety of solar technologies, in addition to PV, by which to ‘Solarize’ buildings. No need to tear up desert or green fields. No transmission problem with the customer directly below that roof. Or behind that wall in South Wall products.
Converting much, if not all, of the vehicle fleet to ‘Hybrid’ architecture would represent the flip side of the coin.
I manage stocks based on energy technology for 15 years. Bob Preston
Craig – It’s hard to monetize the skills you demonstrate in the “Green” world. Too many of our fellow citizens really don’t believe that there is/will be a problem. “Climate change”, “End of oil”, etc., are not visible enough for most to want to change the lifestyle we’ve known since the end of WW2. Our generation has known only increasing “standard of living” while most of the embedded costs are hidden and not acknowledged.
When I talk to others, while there is no understanding of the ethics involved, people look interested only when I tell them that I haven’t paid for electricity in 8 years.
Whether it’s renewable energy, or fresh water protection, or ethical “real” food, the instant reaction is that “it’s too expensive”. Even my closet is full of cotton shirts metaphorically drenched in pesticides.
So, much as I hate to say it, there will be no great change until the price of oil forces it.
On the other hand, thanks to you and all the others who refuse to let the discussion die, I find I can get a positive reaction when I talk to “middle school” students. They’ve heard a lot of the comments, and are young enough to be idealistic, to think that they can make a difference.
So I volunteer to talk to elementary school classes and assemblies. Can’t make a living doing it, and I find the teachers burn out on the subject after just a few years so I’m constantly looking for new ways in, but I’ve heard from a number of highschool students how a talk I gave years ago stuck with them and that, for a while at least, they modified their behaviours.
I’m old enough to remember how the “apostles” of the human rights and women’s rights issues were just “voices in the wilderness” but they persisted, and now things are better. I believe that the same approach (visible, persistent) will work for all “green” issues, even though you and I may not see a conclusion.
So, since I read your post as essentially “job hunting”, and I wish you and all the other “apostles” well, I suspect we’ll all have to be content with the emotional/ethical satisfaction of knowing we did the best we could, that we didn’t give up even in the face of massive apathy and that, in the end, we made some small contribution. We just didn’t make any money doing it.
Roger, it seems more like a survey of approaches to a problem however defined. While I agree about the ideologic aspects of ‘Climate Change,’ I see an Air Pollution issue remaining when all is said and done, and a business argument for EE/RE.
Hi Craigh,
The word business which you used several times is the system that dominates our time, and is celebrated as a model of virtue to hide its ineffectiveness. A simple examination about energy facts would highlight that truth.
The progress, as perceived today, drives the planet to a dead end.
Our economic model is anti-economic, year after year, to survive, it requires more from our planet and from human beings.
There may be a great opportunity to try to investigate how to consume less rather than to continue to produce more–to satisfy a constantly growing demand. Green energies must continue to be developed in parallel, but consuming less is really the paradigm shift.
One cannot take more from our planet that it produces or that it already has. To discuss the issue from this angle seems fundamental.
In the short term, I don’t disagree. We will be turning to coal soon – queue the “dark satanic mills” that characterized England in the 19thC. – and air pollution will be massive. For a while.
But in getting to the Age of Oil, we used up a lot of the accessible coal, and much of the world lacks the infrastructure to deliver coal in any meaningful quantity, let alone using if for transportation fuel.
I power my house with solar panels, but I would not like to try to power the factory that makes them that way, nor the whole production chain that leads to my lead/acid batteries. It can be done, but the cost both health and environmental will be staggering.
Cold fusion? Would be great but right now most of “civilization” is implicitly (if not explicitly) relying on fossil fuels as if the supply is infinite. Not only is it not, but we’ve used all the easy, cheap stuff.
Don’t get me wrong – I really believe that if we started a massive push to both conservation and renewables, we could achieve some amazing things. My fear is that we won’t do it in time. Imagine the civil disruption if food suddenly started to cost 30% or 40% of income, if the horse and bicycle were the only affordable modes of transportation, if the leisure time that we all take for granted was suddenly needed for providing heat, light and water.
We’re not ready for it – we don’t have the right mind-set, and for much of the urban world, we simply can’t. Suburban lawns can become gardens and pastures, but what about the highrises in city cores? Without cheap transportation, maybe we can reclaim some of the “surplus” roads and parking, and lots of buildings could be modified to grow food, but will we find the “will”? Or will we all fight tooth and claw to hang on to the life we have, at the expense of our neighbours?
Ouch – I’m sounding very negative. But those are the thoughts that occupy me in the “dark hours”.
Craig,
Something that always bugs me: the plastics that food comes in (packaged and fresh) inevitably gets tossed into the landfill. Cookie bags, veggie bags, even the rigid separators that cookies sometime are set in are target material here. Our (local) recycling industry just doesn’t accept anything without the triangle [1-7] symbol on it. And some packaging hasn’t changed for years, still without that magic triangle number on it. That amount to most of my garbage, as I recycle most everything else. Some cities don’t even have garbage pickup anymore. EVERYTHING needs to be compostable or recycled. That’s my concern, & possibly something to run with?
Somewhere I watched a video (YouTube, no doubt) about some gentleman making a high-temperature (800 degrees F) ‘reactor’ that allowed small quantities of plastics to be “cooked” to make a low grade fuel which would be usable in his vehicle. Now given the purity levels of gas/diesel today, and the high cost of cars and their repair, I’m not sure pouring something into the tank would be wise. (That’s one reason I like non-infernal combustion mobility.) But perhaps there is a business here, where people could ‘cook up their own’. Safety issues aside, (our local fire marshal tells us the storing any more than 5 gallons of fuel on premises is forbidden), and the cooking has to produce some fumes, possibly toxic or flammable – but it would seem that such a “device” could do well to reduce the quantity of “not so really clean” plastics that end up in landfill throughout this great land of ours. Some recyclers are brutal concerning ‘contaminated batches’, and toss the whole load if someone didn’t follow the rules to a tee.
Maybe someone other than yourself reading this can take this seed and plant it, making something out of it? We’ve all heard about the Great Pacific garbage patch, also described as the Pacific trash vortex… that’s really sad.
Meanwhile, just remember EV + PV = near self-sufficiency in energy, and sunshine will NEVER cost $4/gallon!
Best,
Ron
Hi Craig,
Great discussion you have fostered.
The crux of the issue is energy independence versus environmental disaster.
If we can communicate how dependent we have made ourselves to the big energy companies and that in doing so we have abdicated our environmental stewardship responsibilities, then we will have made some progress. Add to that understanding the importance of using energy prudently with much less waste and throw in an understanding of how competitive all the emerging renewable energy technologies have become based solely on price, then real change may well be achieved.
As to given technologies, you know that I like anaerobic digestion for both energy and soil improvement. What I have read about ammonia as a substitute carbon free fuel source is exciting.
Together we can change the world, we just need the understanding of the problems and solutions and the will to carry out the change that is needed.
Craig – a couple of quick comments. Re: Ron’s comment about cooking it in an 800F reactor, that might work for simple destruction/combustion of plastic waste (and that’s a laudable goal!) but I can’t see how it would return more energy than it consumes.
And I would love to see the international petroleum companies forced to clean up that “Great Pacific Garbage Gyre”. They’ll undoubtedly add it to the price we pay for petroleum products, but that’s fair. The mess it’s creating belongs to all of us – we all need to be contributing to the clean up. The only unacceptable reaction is to ignore it and pretend we don’t see it.
of course, if you’re as paranoid or cynical as I am, you’ll probably assume that oil companies will try to overcharge for the cleanup. Simply solution – every dollar in disputed, potential overcharge will be offset by a $100 confiscation of assets or attachment of funds intended for dividends and bonuses. (Doesn’t have to be proven, just disputed.) Then, when the dispute is settled (however many years down the line), the assets/cash are returned.
I’m guessing that a very fast, transparent and environmentally appropriate solution will be found, and that those who benefited from following an irresponsible path will quickly find it to their own benefit to clean up. Which is, after all, what we want.
There is more than enough heat value in many of our waste streams to enable the thermochemical processes (like pyrolysis) that break them down to continue indefinitely. For example, municipal solid waste contains, on average, 4500 – 5000 BTUs per pound, only a little more than half as much as wood, but more than a sufficient level to be interesting to those of us trying to build waste-to-electricity or waste-to-fuel plants. We’re extracting the extra energy and doing something useful with it. See: http://www.fs.fed.us/woodybiomass/documents/Yakima_County_Biomass_Report.pdf
And yes, re: the second part of your comment, that’s precisely what we need: an environment in which the polluter pays for the clean-up.
Certainly, if polluters had to pay and oil companies got no subsidies the whole equation would be different, but let’s deal with the situation we have and come up with valid solutions.
We need to make the connection in the public’s perception that every time the economy heats up the price of fuel rises putting a damper on the economy. It was no mistake that just as the economy was crashing in 2007 gas was at record high prices. The oil companies posted record profits that year. Reliance on oil hold back our economy. Energy efficiency and renewable energy grow our economy.
Bruce, I understand your point – that an educated public will see the relationship between increasing fuel prices and damage to overall economy – but since we’re agreeing that the more the public knows the more rational it will be (Ok, not always but that’s the point of education), why not educate them in areas that are in our long term interest?
As opposed to the short term interest of the oil companies?
Tax carbon to the point that demand falls significantly. The carbon footprint decreases (good), funds are generated to develop renewables and conservation (also good), and the petroleum industry loses one of the prime motivations to develop the tar sands and fracking.
There’s no reason we can’t have electric cars as cheap or cheaper than gas cars, and charged with roof top solar. Or buildings that are efficient in heating, lighting, etc.
It has to come as we run out of oil – why not start now? Education is the key.
Hi, to my opinion you my consider getting into the field whom lots of clean-tech founders and innovators would be grateful to you: Crowed Funding for new technologies and ventures that will bring this planet to a much safer and cleaner place to leave!
Crowd source funding may well be one key to solving the problem. I find the hardest thing is to find an open mind willing to discard old misconceptions.
In educating about green building, I am regularly regarded with disbelief when I say that spending 5-10% more on proper design, insulation, air sealing and solar orientation and shading can yield 90-90% lower energy costs to heat and cool the building with a dividend of improved health and productivity of the buildings inhabitants.
Even though 26% of new houses built last year in this country were certified to some level of green, our local builders consider the local market unwilling to spend more for a better product, so they build to code and keep their prices the same as their competitors because they do not understand market differentiation. Meanwhile visionary builders in other areas are pushing the envelope of how well a house can be built and are experiencing boom times.
I think that with renewable energy and green building we are approaching a point where it will become common rather than rare, but it is spreading out from more progressive areas to less progressive areas at a snails pace. Crowd source funding could be used to speed that spread. It is still a matter of educating the consumer so that they want what we want to offer.
Energy is the currency of nature…decarbonization reduces the cost of energy. Look for global stocks that understand this process. Bob Preston robertsprestoniii@gmail.com
I’m with you 100%. See http://altenergystocks.com, run by my friend Tom Konrad.
Clean and affordable energy is order of the day ! With technology and knowledge that is evolving human beings should lay foundations to alternate energy which syncs with environment for peaceful coexistence of all living beings on earth ! 2greenenengrgy.com is one such wonderful effort and am happy to be a part of it and willing to contribute in any manner within my means ! Best wishes!
What a lovely note. Thanks.
We would all value your contributions. Would you like to write a series of guest blog posts?