Brent Marsh, a new “2GreenEnergy Associate,” arranged for me to speak on Skype with David Chen yesterday. “Oh, this is going to be terrific,” I thought, believing that this was the David Chen who speaks so compellingly on novel ways to finance energy efficiency. And the fact that the caller was in Shanghai made me even more convinced.
Wrong David Chen.
But it turns out that the call had great value anyway, as this gentleman (David T. Chen) and I discussed the development of an angel investor consortium to fund a bunch of cleantech start-ups. Someday I hope to direct a publicly traded entity that provides capital for a number of different start-ups simultaneously, a kind of hybrid between a mutual and venture capital fund. It’s a good idea; someone needs to make this happen.
I was in the process of editing the transcripts of the interviews I’ve conducted for my next book on renewable energy, when I realized: I don’t have a title that I really like. I have a few ideas, of course, but I’m not too fond of any of them. Perhaps you can suggest one.
OK, so what is the book about? It’s really a deeper exploration of the so-called “Tough Realities” that surround the migration to renewables. If this is something our society has to do, why is it taking so long? Why is the US lagging the rest of the world in implementation? Are there large, powerful political and economic forces that oppose it? What does our future look like, and why?
Interviews include economists, social observers, philosophers, venture capitalists, and stock portfolio managers.
If you have any original suggestions for a cool title, please note them as a comment below. Thanks very much!
… Heck, a few engineers I know who would happily allow the label “denier” be applied have purchased hybrids. The ability to store otherwise wasted energy is COOL to them. I compare that to all modern technology crazes. For example, do iPads really fill a gap or meet a higher level human need, or are they just the next level of cool, enabling technology? Imagine how far we can go with that mindset.
John: You are 100% correct, IMO, and I cover this exact point whenever I’m asked to speak on the EV Adoption Curve. What happens when “green” becomes cool? It’s not inconceivable that, in a very short period of time, we could have a society in which it’s no longer cool to ruin the environment, and in which the people who don’t get the message are regarded as we currently do people who wear mink coats, i.e., as pariahs, as so many Cruella DeVille’s.
Here’s a short video in which I present the business case for a company with a patented technology surrounding the processing of coal-ash. I’ve not seen the process in action, but I’ve read that it involves a proprietary resin that is mixed with the ash, enabling building products, with characteristics similar to wood, to be extruded. The process is not cost-competitive with wood in the form of fence-board, but it is quite competitive with other building products, e.g., roofing shingles, which actually have superior characteristics in terms of durability.
Here, we have the ultimate in terms of turning lemons to lemonade: we take a feedstock that represents an environmental hazard, and inexpensively create products of considerable value.
It’s common wisdom that environmentalism means pain, sacrifice, and inconvenience, in the form of smaller, slower cars, higher energy prices, less comfort, etc. But I wonder if this is necessarily true.
The subject arose on a radio show I just taped called “Guys Gone Green,” which will air this Saturday in Houston, TX. The interview went very well; I was on for two lively segments – a total of about 20 minutes. The host, who spends most of his on-air life as a football announcer, has more bombast in his little finger than I have in my entire body — yet I think I did a reasonable job in not sounding like a wet blanket by contrast, maintaining the normal level of enthusiasm I have for the subject.
During the course of the interview, the host cautioned me about the remarks I was making on the petroleum industry, pointing out that Houston loves oil — which hadn’t escaped my notice, and is, of course, true. But I didn’t see any way to mince words, even if I had wished to. Oil and renewables really are at odds with one another, like razors vs. electric shavers; they’re essentially competitive goods.
Of course, this analogy breaks down quickly once one realizes two simple facts. A) Manufacturers of razors and those of electric shavers are economic competitors of approximately equal magnitude, and B), the health and safety of mankind is serviced pretty-much equally well by each. But in the case of fossil fuels and renewables, we have a very different balance of forces.
In particular, oil and coal are true “industries,” replete with all the good stuff that comes with that status — especially lobbyists; the oil lobby is the largest in the known universe. By contrast, renewable energy is just a gleam in the eye of a relative few who look into the future and ask questions like: What’s going to happen in a world of post-peak-oil? What will occur when the U.S. wakes up and realizes that it has severely compromised its national security vis-a-vis its enemies in the Middle East? Will we experience a kind of “seller’s remorse” once we’ve bargained away our economic future to the Chinese?
Of course, a centrist viewpoint is possible, in which the US migration to clean energy takes place over a period of time; in fact, it’s the only reasonable position. The U.S. should adopt an energy policy in which we steadily and aggressively phase out fossil fuels, while we replace them with renewables. We should set stiff targets, and adhere to them, while we employ literally millions of people in the process.
In fact, let’s start with something even more fundamental and non-controversial than renewables: energy efficiency. I propose a large but short-term public program that calls for the retrofitting of our buildings with energy efficiency systems, and I point out that the job-creation implications of this are crystal clear. In an average project of this type in which $1 million is spent, eight jobs are created directly, and another eight jobs indirectly, meaning jobs for the suppliers, or jobs created through a multiplier effect, i.e., through people having more money because they have jobs and then spending their money.
So you’ll get 16 or 17 jobs per each million dollar expenditure in retrofit projects. When you realize there are $800 billion in projects to be completed (not all of which will be done, of course), that’s quite a number of jobs. It’s a win for everyone.
As I said on “Guys Gone Green, the question isn’t: “Do we have an appetite for pain in order to get to a long-term gain?” It’s: “Why can’t we experience a gain for all U.S. interests (except the oil companies)?” Sorry I had to say this in Houston, but it’s the truth.
I’ll post the link to the show when it’s available.
I’m trying to come fully up to speed on a few of the areas of chemistry and physics that are most germane to renewable energy and electric transportation. Though I studied all this stuff at a certain level when I was in college about a million years ago, for me, the largest gap in my understanding of these disciplines was — and is — in thermodynamics. And this is not a good place to have a gap, as the subject applies so broadly, especially in geothermal, concentrated solar power, and bio/synthetic fuels.
So I decided to take a short course. Fortunately, nowadays there is tons of excellent content online for free. A good example is these four lectures byRamamurti Shankar, a truly wonderful physics professor at Yale, recorded in 2006. (Linked here is the first one, #21. The others, #22-#24, are easy to find.) I really enjoyed these, and I hope you will too.
About Ludwig Boltzmann, the most important player in the development of the subject, the professor Shankar remarks in the last of these talks, “When theoretical physicists visit Vienna, we skip the orchestras, and visit Boltzmann’s tomb, on which is engraved the crowning achievement of his life’s work, the equation representing the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”
I’ve noticed that a lot of the interviews I’m asked to do around “Renewable Energy – Facts and Fantasies” have very little to do with the subject matter of the book directly. I’m headed back to New York City in a couple of weeks to tape a TV show called “Getting Your Money’s Worth,” which, as the name suggests, helps viewers make better purchasing decisions.
Of course, there’s a tie-in here. Are consumers willing to shell out a few extra cents a kilowatt-hour for green electricity? That’s an interesting question. And here’s what Dr. Jason Scorse, behavioral economist, told me on the subject:
There is a phenomenon known as “status quo bias,” which means that people tend to keep doing what they’ve been doing. The inertia of change is very strong and hard to break, even if it’s a rational interest to do so. (more…)
I was disappointed to learn that the gigawatt solar project in Blythe, CA decided to switch from CSP to PV. The issue, at least on the surface, is “bankability,” i.e., maturity of the technology, along with the obvious fact that the price of PV is falling sharply – 30% in 2010 alone. But at a certain point, I’m hoping that someone somewhere sees the awesome potential of CSP and really starts to crank on it.
When that happens, we’ll start to see ideas like Ahura Energy start to come into greater focus, if you’ll pardon the pun.
Solar thermal, of course, comes in many different flavors — some (like Ahura) claiming to have made breakthroughs in cost and/or efficiency. I’ve met with these people, like the concept as I understand it, but still haven’t been told the details of the secret sauce.
Here’s another note on the value of electric vehicles vs. internal combustion engines.
I’m intrigued with the points that Glenn Doty has raised regarding the spurious logic that the DoE and others have used in their “well to wheels” comparisons. As I pointed out here, I’m not convinced that he’s entirely right, but I grant that we may be over-estimating the amount of coal we’re saving as we move to EVs.
Having said that, we need to acknowledge the non-ecological damages caused by oil, one of which is national security. Each day, we borrow another billion dollars and send it to regimes largely antagonistic to the US and its interests. Each day, our young people fight and die in the Middle East, as we prosecute wars that would not exist if it weren’t for oil.
As loathsome as coal is, it exists in large quantities right here.
I was on the Jack Taylor Radio Show in Chicago this morning, and in the process became one of his more than 55,000 guests that have ranged from Marlon Brando to Presidents Ford and Reagan. Yes, Mr. Taylor has been at this a long time; he came to WGN-TV in 1958, the year after I got out of diapers.
I don’t take the time to study up on the individual personalities on these radio shows beforehand – and in most cases, this is fine; I normally get softball-type questions with which I can do anything I want. And I usually get a few words of introduction in advance: the type of audience, the style of questions, the focus of the interview, but here, … no. Without a syllable of preparatory talk, I’m being grilled full-force by a guy with 55,000+ practice rounds under his belt. First question: “What qualifies you as an expert? What are your credentials?”
Of course, I don’t bill myself as an expert in renewable energy. If listeners conclude that I know what I’m talking about, that’s fine, but I’m most certainly not going to be asserting that. “I’m flattered that you think of me in that way, Jack, but if I have a talent here, it’s asking good questions of people who know far more about this than I ever will. And that’s why my book…. ”
But I think it came off well; I’ll post a link to the interview as soon as it’s available.
May I ask you a favor?
I’m trying to come fully up to speed on a few of the areas of chemistry and physics that are most germane to renewable energy and electric transportation. Though I studied all this stuff at a certain level when I was in college about a million years ago, for me, the largest gap in my understanding of these disciplines was — and is — in thermodynamics. And this is not a good place to have a gap, as the subject applies so broadly, especially in geothermal, concentrated solar power, and bio/synthetic fuels.
“When theoretical physicists visit Vienna, we skip the orchestras, and visit Boltzmann’s tomb, on which is engraved the crowning achievement of his life’s work, the equation representing the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”
Here’s another note on the value of electric vehicles vs. internal combustion engines.
