Everything's Coming Up Green

October 16, 2007

This past Friday was a busy day. In the afternoon, I attended the IEEE’s International Symposium on Wearable Computers (see October 14 post). After that, I zipped over to the MIT Museum for the MIT Energy Night—a showcase of about 40 different research projects and startup companies focused on energy.

It was rainy and kind of cold and I was already hungry when the cab pulled up to the museum, and so I didn’t stop for very long to admire the Chevrolet Volt parked on the sidewalk. Apparently it had arrived rock star-like in a shiny red semi-truck that sat idling curbside all night.

Inside, the place was shoulder to shoulder with people, drawn not only by the promise of free food and beverages, but also by the plethora of energy concepts. Suffice it to say, I was too hungry and thirsty to stand in line for sustenance, and so I wandered around with my friend Bob Buderi, founder, CEO, and Editor-in-Chief of Cambridge, MA-based Xconomy.

Immediately, I felt overwhelmed. Most of the presenters were academics, who had enlarged their research results (graphs, charts, equations, illustrations) into giant, full-color posters propped up on easels. Color: good. Content: way over my head. I saw poster titles like “Carbon Nanotube Enhanced Double Layer Capacitor,” “High-Temperature Characterization of 2D Tungsten Photonic Crystals,” and “High Amperage Energy Storage Device.” I’m pretty sure the research reflected in these posters was noteworthy and interesting. But as a hungry, thirsty, somewhat weary non-scientist, I didn’t know what to focus on.

Who does? It occurred to me that if one evening’s energy event in Cambridge, MA, could be so jammed-packed, confusing, and utterly bewildering, then what must the world be undergoing? It seems like every time we turn around, someone is talking about, researching, promoting, negating, or blogging about energy. It’s all the rage and somewhat reminiscent of the Internet boom in the 90s. Then, everyone was hopping on the dot com bandwagon, launching a startup. Now, it seems that everyone is hopping on the gas-electric sports wagon, promoting the next big solution.  Bob turned me onto this idea, referring to it as the “dot clean.”

The question is, what will shake out? And when?

In an October 14 article from NY Times, Nelson D. Schwartz quotes Kevin Landis, a tech-oriented mutual fund manager as saying,  "Alternative energy isn't where the Internet was in 1999…. It's where the Internet was in 1980."

What do you think?

After Bob left, I gave in to the idea of waiting in line for food and got into a good energy discussion with an MIT student named Elan. Among other things, he was advocating nuclear energy. What about the war? Waste? I asked. He brushed it off, said load the waste onto a rocket ship and fly it into the sun. Better than burying under a mountain, I say.

Well, by then I realized that standing in line was futile, because the hors d’oeuvres and beverages were gone. So I said goodbye to Elan and walked over one my favorite restaurants in Cambridge to refuel: the Middle East.

Comments

[Chris Davis]

If energy is where the internet boom was, we're okay. The Boom was a chaotic, messy phase of brainstorming, and finding things that worked. If we tend to look back on the dot com era with some disdain, we should consider that the messy undertaking bore incredible fruit (even fruit that relates to energy issues: minimizing the need to travel or to go to work every day, for instance). Diving into energy issues holds similar promise for something that, maybe more than any other thing, defines our future.

[Mysterymeat]

Nice piece. Particularly like the statement by Landis re: "where the internet was in 1980" and your "refueling in the Middle East". I wish Landis was wrong, but unfortunately, he seems right on.