Going to Washington. I’ve also heard that the green energy movement is going to Washington, probably right after the elections in November. For the Internet we went to Washington to build Al Gore’s Information Superhighway. And the Internet bubble burst. Remember, live by the sword, die by the sword. When innovators go to Washington, it’s a Pro-Am match—professionals versus amateurs—and innovators are the Ams. The status quo can be dangerous and downright mean, and they own Washington. The status quo’s monopolies are very good at lobbying and litigation.
When you go to Washington to get stuff, sometimes you get the wrong stuff, like subsidies for corn ethanol—the wrong feedstock for the wrong fuel. The best thing about corn ethanol is that taxpayer money is being misspent in the Middle West instead of the Middle East. Washington thought that the markets for corn—feed, food, fuel—were separate. Wrong.
When your movement goes to Washington, you also get things like the Department of Energy. The next time we go to Washington, could we start by fixing the DOE? The department developed bad policies, such as not building nuclear power plants for 30 years. The DOE is also malfunctioning by soaking up energy research dollars in its huge and inefficient, congressionally mandated labs—dollars that would be better spent at competing research universities. Be careful when you go to Washington, thinking it’s going to fix things, thinking that’s the way to scale up energy innovations.
Scale. It is indeed a big challenge. The world needs scalable solutions. But be careful about demands for scale early in the process of technological innovation. One of the weapons used by defenders of the status quo is to set high hurdles for innovations. They say, “It’s got to be safe, of course, and it has to scale, or we and our friends in government are not going to let you do it.” In Washington legislators make laws that discourage new technologies when it is not immediately obvious how the technologies are going to scale. The telephone monopolies got Washington to make rules about the Internet that said, “If you can’t serve everybody, then you can’t serve anybody.” Which meant innovators couldn’t start small and grow new technologies, driving them down steep cost curves. You had to serve everyone, all at once, right out of the lab. That’s too high a hurdle for new technologies. So watch out when people demand that we consider only energy solutions that scale, which often turns out to mean only mature technologies already in the hands of the status quo.
Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Learning from the Internet".
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5 Comments
Add CommentIt is important to remember that when the dust settles "they" will always win but that is not always a bad thing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy "they" I mean the large coorporations and goverment insitutions.
Using AT&T as an example. The long distance arm was spun off in 1984 and forced to compete under regulation. By the time of the internet it was a large innovator and enabler. It was not totally the bust in the internet that killed it. It was a combination of:
1) Internet bust
2) Competiting with imaginary companies such as Worldcomm (before your book cooking competitors get caught it's hard to gain investment capital)
3) Lack of law enforcement - Don't forget that the year 2000 FCC CHOOSE not to enforce the telecommunitation act of 1996.
So AT&T was purchased by a monopoly.
But at the end of the day at least the internet is still here even though innovation and cost reduction has all but stopped. Has your telephone, cabel, and/or mobile bill gone up or down over the last 8 years?
Back to the articles point. The pre-computing era was dominated by paper. The computing era produced even more paper. The internet has at last reduced paper while increasing information. In the same way hopefully we can go from the past "1.0" carbon ... followed by the present "2.0" hypercarbon ... to the "3.0" carbon reduced with more energy.
The new development of Gravity Power Towers occur every 2 to 4 miles along transportation pathways networking with each other through digital communication and acting intelligently drawing the eternal limitless energy from gravity force acting on vertically mobile heavy masses, and delivering to or recovering power from, multiple rolling units in horizontal direction, along the rail or road or runway, actually is a net work of distributed intelligent energy providers with no limits!(http://gravitypoweredtranspsort.blogspot.com and also click on Newton's image at www.atrilab.com ) The gravity Power is real and limitless, can add energy equivalent of entire Saudi Oil fields to USA with hardly one time investment of $150 b. Gravity Power Towers can leverage one unit of energy from existing sources, to produce three times more work, in transportation. USA now has the invention with them since last 2 months. Yes the evolution is following the internet model- actually humans survive because they also intrinsically survive by networking! Central command control model invariably crumbles.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Will cheap and clean energy come from centralized power stations? Internet history makes me think not."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMost untapped "natural" energy is diffuse. We've already exploited concentrated energy: dams, coal, oil, uranium,. These natural resources require "big industry" to effectively exploit. Diffuse resources: wood, solar, wind, and even biomass is best used locally. In fact, local users tapped these resources quite successfully in pre-industrial days: windmills for water pumping, milling, and small local industry, low head water, wood for heating and local industry, biomass for shelter and heating. To successfully use these diffuse resources in our post-industrial world infrastructure is required. Concentrated energy sources paid for the construction of rail, highway, and electrical lines. The later distributed concentrated energy to a diffuse consumer base. It is, thus, most immediately available for reverse flow from a diffuse source to a concentrated consumer.
Solar and wind electrical generation can be harvested in a diffuse manner and sent over existing electrical power systems to a central source for redistribution to diffuse consumers and to concentrated energy consumers. It is in place today.
Eventually, other diffuse sources could harvest energy and send it via reverse flow through gas and water lines. Decisions about the most effective harvesting of biomass can be made based on the cost of shipping the biomass vs shipping the energy produced by small dispersed generation plants.
I suspect that the most ecological friendly approach is to consume biomass near it's source and send surplus energy to to a concentration center. waste products from the energy generation process is most likely reusable near the production site (post production ethanol waste as cattle feed stock and as fertilizer).
A solution to our "energy problem" is available. All that is required is the political will.
What we need is more people using renewable energy in their own home applications. For instance, if everyone had their own solar and wind generators, then our reliance on coal and nuclear power would be significantly reduced. The cool thing that would happen there would be that the mass production of such technology would drive their costs down. Also, the reduced demand on "big energy" will cause them to find cheaper ways to produce energy so that they can compete with the "personal energy" sector. The trick then would be to have enough regulations and government subsidies in place that would encourage them to lean towards "greener" energy sources and discourage them from polluting.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThen as far as "big oil" goes, we just need to attempt to switch to either electric, hybrid, bio-diesel, or vegetable oil powered personal vehicles. The industrial sector needs the power that current methods produce, so they can lag behind. In the mean time, if more people want more efficient cars and more "green" cars, then "big auto" will start developing them. Right now, we're still to infatuated with gas guzzling behemoths and hot rods.
Noticing a pattern here? It's all about a change in what the individual is doing, not with big business or Washington is doing. Big business will do with is profitable, if using polluting and inefficient sources of energy aren't profitable, they will stay away from them. If they see that there is a demand for renewable, sustainable, and green energy, they will attempt to profit from it.
The biggest problem is that this technology is expensive to make at the moment, and it isn't disposable. Big business makes their money from selling things that we use and then throw away... that way we have to keep buying more. If the solar power industry where to put solar cells on every roof on the planet, they probably won't have to make many more over the next 20 years... because they'll last that long. If they where cheap and didn't last but 5-10 years, then they might consider it a bit more.
Innovators who hate Washington money never seem to remember that the Internet and nuclear power and scientific agriculture and orbital satellites and modern highways were originally developed with Washington money. There are no hard and fast rules about what organization and funding for R&D works best. The feds could never do Silicon valley, but Silicon Valley could never do the Manhattan Project.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDavid Burress
Ad Astra Institute
Lawrence, Kansas