Shrugging Atlas*

June 19, 2009

The weight of the world is on our shoulders these days it seems, considering the burden of the seemingly intractable energy issues we bear:  swelling populations that harbor swelling aspirations to dramatically increase their energy use, national security insecurities and doubts about the security of energy supply, the depletion of finite fossil fuel resources, climate change and the things we might not know about costs to the natural systems that sustain life, wild swings in the price of fuel. Ugghh.It's bad. Really bad.

But maybe bad is the best thing that could happen to us. Maybe being hemmed in by problems sets the stage for particularly excellent creative response. As Margaret Boden suggests in her Stanford treatise creativity and unpredictability: "constraints, far from being opposed to creativity, make creativity possible. To throw away all constraints would be to destroy the capacity for creative thinking."

The Most Important Mistakes Are Made On the First Day

April 04, 2009

"The most important mistakes are made on the first day of the project." This durable piece of thinking from the world of the architect and builder underscores the importance of setting off in the right direction. The cost of being a few degrees off, of setting up on the wrong bet, can multiply painfully as a project progresses. 

We are at the whistle clean beginning of so many monumental projects: the Smart Grid, the recharge grid for plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles, an array of renewable options, electric rail, the mileage fee; none existed at any sort of scale, even in our imagination, at the turn of the century. Yet all are being conceived and planned and implemented at a torrid pace, right now. We are ripe for making our biggest mistakes... RIGHT NOW.

Take the vehicle recharge grid. Several companies are developing charging stations and the attendant infrastructure for cars (Better Place, Electricite de France, Portland General Electric). If they got distracted by their focus to emerge from the array of technical possibilities with the best solution, or to be victors in the marketplace, we might make the important mistake of overlooking what is best for broad implementation of a charging infrastructure for cars. 

For example, not standardizing the charging station interface (the plug and the receptacle) to let any car use any station, the world over. Different car makers, different grid operators, maybe dozens of plug and receptacle types. A confounding interoperability impediment avoided simply by clicking a few degrees right or left, by agreeing to collaborate around a standard.  From the missed opportunity to collaborate, a recharge grid with features so messy and costly that a decade and a million charging stations down the road it is dismissed by the fickle consumer, with no marketplace victors.

Hopefully, attitudes like Better Place founder Shai Agassi's will permeate these undertakings. (When Wired asked Shai whether he was worried that competitors might steal his ideas, he responded: "The mission is to end oil, not create a company.") From such visionary underpinnings, the ventures launched today may well be driven by minds geared to avoid the most important mistakes. 

The most important mistakes are made on the first day of the project.

We are on the first day of the project.

Photo: W.J. Cendak II showing just a little of the iron and muscle that follows the first day of the project, bringing up a tower crane.

The Smart Grid Will Cost Too Much

January 19, 2009

Maybe we shouldn't go after that colossal, transformational Smart Grid infrastructure project. Looking at the last big one, Eisenhower's National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, it cost a lot more and took much longer than anticipated. In 1956, the plan was for federal government to seed the "self-liquidating" effort with $25 billion, so that 43,000 miles of interstate could be created in 12 years (the self-liquidating part was to come from increased gas taxes). Well, the Feds ended up dumping $114 billion into the project over 35 years. A huge miscalculation. A 456 percent budget overrun.

Ike's vision, his drive to see this massive highway undertaking through, was informed by his participation as a lieutenant colonel in a 1919 army convoy to service-test military vehicles on our nation's roads, from D.C. to San Francisco. The snail-paced journey took 62 days (58 miles a day), claiming nine of the seventy-three vehicles used, as well as twenty-one soldier casualties. The dismal convoy experience was contrasted in Ike's mind by the American army's swift movement on the German autobahn in World War II. From these juxtaposed experiences, Eisenhower knew in his bones the potential of a well -built, end-to-end national highway system.

In the end it cost a lot more than Ike thought it would. But the huge miscalculation, the budget overrun that brought us the interstate highway system, is buried by the inestimable contribution to American productivity and prosperity those highways have delivered year over year since. So while the Smart Grid may have a big price tag, and it may get even bigger than we now envision, the payoff offers much. It will leverage the capital and innovation of the free market. It will deregulate and place in the free market what to date have been the monopolies of the utilities. We will use electricity more efficiently and intelligently. We can tailor electricity to our needs, as well as to the limitations of the grid. The stage will be set to use electricity to power vehicles. Our grid will be more resilient and resistent to terrorist attacks and natural disasters. And as with other transformational efforts (like the internet) it will bring things we haven't even considered yet (like the internet's ability to track goods and mail, YouTube, Skype).

The Smart Grid could bring untold productivity and prosperity to future generations, much as the Eisenhower's visionary highways brought them to us.

Photo: courtesy of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library & Museum

Forward Looking Infrastructure

December 23, 2008

   

We're getting ready to do lots of infrastructure. But exactly what "infrastructure" is has become a loosely defined, elastic territory at the critical juncture of being made firm. And while the shovel ready stuff is needed to create jobs quickly, more important for long term success is the transformative undertakings listed below. Some don't create lots of jobs right away, but they don't require as much capital either, and it makes sense to get them (and their big, long lead times) rolling now.

Here are some good bets for infrastructure that could unleash untold (and as of yet unimagined) waves of innovation and progress by creating abundant energy and transport (as computing and the internet created easy, abundant information):

• Smart Grid
• Urban renewables (to include enhanced geothermal)
• More transmission from the sunny, windy and watery places that can produce industrial scale solar and wind power
• Infrastructure needed to implement the Mileage Fee
  • at Gas Stations
  • the standard inclusion of GPS in vehicles
• the Electric Recharge Grid
• Batteries for hybrid and electric vehicles, at production scale
• Electric Rail

Photo: Steve Kelley on flickr