opinion

Snow on the San Gabriel Mountains (photo by Jerry Thompson1, CC 2.0 license)

On December 30 of last year (six days ago), my wife and I were in Pasadena, CA visiting the Greene and Greene exhibit at the Huntington Library. It was one of those glorious and rare smog-free days in the LA basin. The air sparkled, you could see for miles in every direction, and mountain range after mountain range was visible - all the way out to the snow-covered San Gabriels. Nowadays, the air is only ever this clear around the Christmas holiday, when the freeway traffic is substantially reduced and a lot of factories shut down for the week. It got me thinking about how the future - say ten to twenty years hence - may be unrecognizable in both dramatic and mundane ways. For example, smog-free days may no longer be rare in LA, once the economy has shifted off fossil fuels. (I suspect the traffic will remain, unfortunately!)

Like LA’s typical skies, the energy future is murky in the short term - this year and 2010 - and I’ll leave those predictions to others. But the big trends - sustainability, carbon fighting, and technological breakthroughs - enable us to make better sense of the mid- and long-term. Therefore, In the spirit of the New Year, the incoming administration, and the tipping point that the world has come to about climate change and sustainability, here are ten things I believe are very likely to happen in the next ten years.

1. Residential solar PV will be cost effective in most U.S. locations (via a combination of price reduction, new design thinking, much more efficient homes, and a carbon tax on fossil fuels).
2. Home energy storage - via batteries, hydrogen reforming, fuel cells, or other technology - will be available and installed in 10% of new homes in California, for when the sun don’t shine.
3. More than 10% of new homes in California will be zero-net energy.
4. 50% of new residential construction in California will be zero-net energy “ready.”
5. The current LEED standards will be considered obsolete.
6. More than 20% of peak grid electricity will come from excess capacity from residential solar PV.
7. There will be general consensus that efficiency and frugality alone will not provide enough CO2 mitigation to prevent major climate change - we will need a technological solution to actually reducing atmospheric CO2 or artificially cooling the earth.
8. There will be a mid-priced carbon fiber, plugin hybrid passenger car in production that gets more than 75 miles per gallon. The company making it will be the “next GM.”
9. 10% of the cars on the road will be powered by 100% renewable energy and will be essentially non-polluting.
10. New technologies for capturing carbon from the atmosphere will be available, powered by excess solar capacity.

What do you think? Am I off base here? Too optimistic? Too pessimistic? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear your thoughts, challenges, and predictions for 2018.

Zero-net Energy Series Coming Up

Over the next few weeks, I will be publishing a series on “zero-net energy” residences (related to predictions 1-6 above). This area is about to explode. We already have all the technology, and some people have the experience, to build “zero-net energy ready” houses cost effectively. And although there’s currently a premium to get to zero-net energy, over the next ten years this premium will go to zero, and probably it will be cost-effective to get to positive-net energy - where the house is generating more energy than it needs! Talk about a world-changing situation - it really is possible to have energy too cheap to meter, but it’s going to come off our roofs, not from a nuclear plant or one of those imaginary fusion reactors.

The best pieces I’ve read on the auto industry bailout/failure/bankruptcy are Bob Sutton’s giant flame, “Thoughts About Why GM Executives Are Clueless And Their Destructive ‘No We Can’t’ Mindset” and Umair Haque’s “Detroit’s 6 Mistakes and How Not to Make Them.”

While neither of these articles are about green energy or hybrid cars or sustainability per se, they both get at some of the big issues that industry and finance worldwide have to overcome for the the world to change as it must.

Sutton is a measured and careful writer, whose primary beat as a teacher (at Stanford School of Engineering, B School, and D School), business consultant, and writer, is using effective techniques for creating innovation, and using evidence to understand whether the decisions you make are taking you in the right direction. His post, in a measured and careful way, excoriates GM for decades of practices that go against those precepts:

I could list hundreds of management, cultural, and operational reasons why I believe that GM is such a flawed organization, but to me, a pair of root causes standout: Most of the senior executives — and many of the managers — are (1) clueless about what matters most and (2) suffer from a “no we can’t” mindset.

Haque, on the other hand, looks to the good future of what he calls “the new rules of 21st century business,” using Detroit as the example of the old rules.

Old rule: Choose evil. Industrial era business is unrepentantly and almost sociopathically evil: shifting costs onto others, while striving to internalize benefits. Detroit chose lobbying, marketing wars, and low-cost hardball - to always and everywhere try to socialize costs and privatize benefits. Never was this truer than Detroit’s lobbying against public transport throughout the 20th century. Why does public transport in the States suck? Because Detroit’s lobbying machine doesn’t.

New rule? Choose good. In the 21st century, every moral imperative is also a strategic imperative: doing good - for customers, employees, suppliers, or society - is a radical strategic choice that unlocks new pathways to innovation and growth. The opportunity cost of defending evil for Detroit was never learning how to choose good - and that’s a crucial mistake other auto players didn’t make. Tata chose to make a car that was accessible to the world’s poor. Porsche and BMW chose to invest in talent, people, and imagination. Honda and Toyota chose to invest in renewables and partnerships with the public sector. All opened new avenues to growth for an industry at the brink of extinction.

Tomorrow I’ll be posting again about the auto industry, focusing on Obama’s pledge on Saturday for “public works on a massive scale” and Tom Friedman’s Sunday op-ed, in which he suggests we tie any bailout to a commitment by the car makers to having their entire fleets running on hybrid power plants in 36 months.

A pretty antique Dutch train (Photo by Gen Gibson)

Over on Will Blog for Food, John agitates for a much extended use of trains in the U.S. to partially address our current dependence on cars.

As an example, I spent three weeks in Holland a few years ago. I could get anywhere in the country by rail and back to Amsterdam the same day. But here’s the kicker: I never had to wait more than 5 minutes for a train to Amsterdam from any where in the country. Even in former communist countries like the Czech Republic you can get anywhere by rail and/or bus.

In the comments I took some issue with this idea, and thought I’d expand on those comments in a post.

Interestingly, Holland is about four times the size of… LOS ANGELES! It’s also one of the most densely populated countries in the world (LA is dense also).

So I’ll accept that you could build a kickass train system in the greater LA area, and it would be more or less the equivalent to the entire national train system in Holland. BTW, if you include Orange, San Bernadino, and Ventura Counties in with LA, you get a region larger than the entire Netherlands. And that doesn’t include five of the largest cities in California (San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento, and San Jose), much less even the largest cities in the neighboring states.

My point is that saying “Europe has good trains, so we should too” is just a bad analogy. And we’re not even talking all the cultural, geographic, and infrastructural differences. For example, the fact that a huge proportion of the population lives in sprawling suburbs mitigates strongly against effective public transit. In places where the density is sufficient, public transit has worked in the U.S. - New York, Boston, San Francisco. It’s arguable that LA is sufficiently dense - but it might not be, with the sprawl down to Long Beach, Orange County, and San Bernadino County.

My feeling is that cars are here to stay in the U.S. (and obtw, in China and India too, at a very rapid growth rate). Instead of fantasizing about trains in the U.S., we need to figure out how to build cars that don’t pollute, use sustainable energy sources, and are recyclable. Interestingly, one reason our cars aren’t built from carbon fiber today? Not recyclable (yet). On the other hand, 90% of the materials in a regular Detroit car are recyclable and recycled today. In fact, I just read today that Subaru’s plant in Indiana is “zero landfill” - they actually don’t throw anything away!

What do you think about trains in the U.S.? Do you think they’d be a good replacement for cars? On what terms - how would you go about it? Let me know in the comments - I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Taleb's The Black Swan. Image via Wikipedia

In his Edge Magazine essay Life Is Not A Casino, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the trader and author (of The Black Swan and Fooled By Randomness) discusses why he no longer thinks that using statistics and probability to make decisions is wise. The problem, he says, is that:

When it comes to low odds, decision making no longer depends on the probability alone. It is the pair, probability times payoff (or a series of payoffs), the expectation, that matters. On occasion, the potential payoff can be so vast that it dwarfs the probability—and these are usually real-world situations in which probability is not computable.

Taleb is a very interesting speaker. I highly recommend a couple of his talks which are available as podcasts. He spoke to the Long Now Foundation in February on “The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought” (mp3, summary), and at PopTech in 2007 (mp3, description).

Bringing us back to our usual topic of energy and climate change, he makes this observation at the end of the essay:

Correspondents keep asking me if the climate worriers are basing their claims on shoddy science and whether, owing to nonlinearities, their forecasts are marred with such a possible error that we should ignore them. Now, even if I agreed that it was shoddy science; even if I agreed with the statement that the climate folks were most probably wrong, I would still opt for the most ecologically conservative stance. Leave Planet Earth the way we found it. Consider the consequences of the very remote possibility that they may be right—or, worse, the even more remote possibility that they may be extremely right.

“Extremely right,” for Taleb, means that climate change will be much worse than we thought, or much faster, or have a much larger impact than expected. The danger of that, despite its low probability, making it a “black swan” in his parlance, means that investing to prevent it is worth it, even if costly. (Of course, I argue elsewhere that it could be profitable, not costly.)

woodleywonderworks

Top Five Stories

August was a great month for energy storage breakthroughs! In addition, a big talking head talks big, and a business-of-green-energy announcement make my list of top stories.

1. Hydrogen from water
2. Fuel cell breakthrough #1: cheap catalyst
3. Fuel cell breakthrough #2: better cathode
4. Al Gore’s call to action: The U.S. should “produce all electricity from carbon-free sources by 2018.” (Actually from late July, but my blog didn’t start until August!)
5. Green energy investment up 60% YoY in 2007, on target for 60% YoY growth in 2008

Moore’s Law depended (and still depends) on a constant flow of breakthrough technologies, processes, scale, and designs. You can’t necessarily predict how Moore’s Law will continue to hold two years from now, or five years from now, but you can be confident that through some combination of technologies, processes, and designs, the price/performance of IT will continue to decline at an exponential rate.

The top five green energy stories of 2008 give an indication that the same types of forces are at play in the green energy world. Numbers 1, 2, and 3 each represent a potential 10x reduction in the cost of the most expensive part of a particular energy flow. For number 4, Gore used the bully pulpit of a Nobel Prize and Oscar (and, oh yeah, he was nearly president) in a most constructive way. And number 5 illustrates that green energy technologies are on a growth rate of doubling about every 18 months.

Did these stories excite you as much as they did me? Were there other green energy stories in August that you feel are more important?

top stories, green energy, gore, fuel cells, nocera