Speaking at the International Trade Forum
I’ve been asked to speak at a conference next month in Connecticut, and I thought readers may be interested in my outline for the talk:
- Why cleantech is destined to become the defining industry of the 21st Century
- Tech in general is dominating the world (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Tesla) – soaring market cap, leaving everything else in the dust
- E.g., AI and Autonomous cars (in addition to cleantech)
- US not predestined to be the leader, given China’s aggressive approach
- Two huge factors are driving the growth of Cleantech:
- Pure market economics (cheap solar, wind, storage, efficiency, new regulations for our power utilities, better batteries, meaning electric transportation coming into the mainstream, etc.)
- Environmental concerns (climate change, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, human health issues), which will result in internalizing the externalities of fossil fuel consumption. This is being driven by grassroots, certainly not Washington.
Either one will make this happen in a big way, but both are occurring simultaneously
- Carrot/stick: Incentives to lower emissions, carbon tax
- The footprint associated with producing red meat
- Population growth
- OK, but will all arenas within cleantech achieve success? Hell no. Technology innovation, economics and politics (the “tough realities”) all conspire to make this very interesting. So where is this going? I can’t predict the future, but I CAN explain the basic forces affecting the success or failure of each of the following:
- Solar PV
- Solar thermal (CSP)
- Wind
- Biomass
- Hydrokinetics
- Geothermal
- Advanced nuclear
- Electric transportation
- Energy storage
- Smart grid/cities
- Utility reregulation
- Daunting issues facing the fossil fuel concerns: increasingly difficult and thus expensive extraction, being forced to write down stranded assets, competition from clean energy, consumer litigation and DoJ actions, e.g., the criminal investigation of ExxonMobil
- Conclusion
- Q&A
Looks like it will be a great talk. You’ll have to cover a lot of ground quickly.
Yes. I’ve given this talk many times before, and it’s best done in about 90 minutes. But I doubt I’ll have that long here.
Craig,
Good luck and I’m sure your contribution will be very well received.
Craig why not seize the moment and give your audience something poignant and memorable to take away and think about. How about the topic “Preparing for Global Climate Control Technologies 2050 and Beyond”.
I know you have a lot to offer in the context of a visionary two way discussion on important issues but your corporate audience most assuredly have other narrow focused imperatives to satisfy due to their immediate and vested interests.
I fondly recall an engineering symposium I attended in Berlin a few years ago. The subject for the week was “Emerging Solar Thermal Technologies”. At the time I headed up a small research project in China with company ProSunPro to integrate Solar Thermal and Solar PV together into a single format technology and I had a paper to deliver on day four on this topic.
There were 120 engineers, scientists, and academics attending and I was one of only three non-German professionals there. By day four I had not seen sunshine, it had snowed non-stop across Germany, the sky was impenetrably bleak, and the temperature did not rise above -5 degrees all week. Germany and Solar Irradiation were not in sync.
As I walked to the podium with my notes on “Integrated Solar Thermal & PV Technologies” I couldn’t help ponder how “solar technologies unfriendly” the last week had been in Berlin, so I screwed up the notes and slipped them in my pocket and decided to soak up my allotted time discussing a new topic that I introduced on the spot “Germany Solar Energy Installations – Return on Taxpayer Subsidised Investments over the last week”.
It struck an immediate chord amongst this group of eminent professionals and added a completely new dimension to further discussions that followed. Interestingly the Q & A session laid bare the subterfuge and myths surrounding “co-generation technologies principles and processes” and its critical (but not well reported) role in German society.
It proved quite an eye opener for me as well.
So my recommendation Craig – is go for the jugular, and say what’s actually on your mind, rather than what you might feel is expected of you.
Lawrence Coomber