Burning Man and Greentech: Following the Money
Date: Monday, August 06, 2007 @ 17:03:48 UTC
Topic: Testimonials


Hi Vlad, It's not exactly ZPE, but you might find it interesting. It can also be freely reproduced if you wish.

My report, Burning Man and Greentech: Following the Money, is now on line.

It is about how a counterculture grapples with the desire to do good for the planet, the lack of real energy solutions, the promotion of snake oil, and the intriguing Mr. Russ George, Planktos, and his mission to dump iron dust into the oceans.


http://newenergytimes.com/SR/Planktos/BurningManGreentech.htm

Printer-friendly PDF: http://newenergytimes.com/SR/Planktos/BurningManGreentech.pdf


Best regards,

Steve

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Monday, August 6, 2007
By Steven B. Krivit

Copyleft* 2007 by Steven B. Krivit
Original report: http://newenergytimes.com/SR/Planktos/BurningManGreentech.htm
Printer-friendly PDF: http://newenergytimes.com/SR/Planktos/BurningManGreentech.pdf


PART ONE: GLOBAL ENERGY OUTLOOK

I spend most of my working hours carrying out journalistic investigations into energy research.

This report will cover a few distinct topics, all of which are inter-related and were triggered by my attention to a festival in the Nevada desert that is going to feature innovations in energy research.

The festival is called Burning Man, and contrary to mythology, it is not a pagan event, a modern version of Woodstock, a rave, or a hippie festival.

It is an eclectic, creative and wild private party, festival of art, culture and radical self-expression that takes place once a year in the Nevada desert. It celebrates its 21st anniversary this month.

But before we get to the energy innovations that have created their own little tempest among the attendees of Burning Man, giving a little background on the global energy situation would be helpful.

My favorite energy research topics to watch are out on the fringe. I like the fringe for the same reason that venture capitalists like high-risk ventures: potential for high reward - in this case, potential for breakthrough answers to the energy challenge.

Maybe I'm silly for my willingness to look like a fool by covering these areas. Maybe not. We'll see. I have been called bad names, people close to me have been the targets of insults and I have even had a few lightly veiled threats to my physical well-being. But these sorts of things tend to propel me on rather than deter me from sorting out the facts from the fiction in the wild world of leading-edge energy research.

Fictions in the energy field abound; the facts, many of them obfuscated by complex layers of marketing-speak, are not often accessible to the layperson.

Fringe energy research is even more challenging: A vast ocean of the unknown abounds. Most of the claims probably will turn out to be garbage, a few outright snake oil, but a small percentage may end up being golden.

Conventional renewables, such as solar or wind power, are not mysterious. These technologies have been around for a long time, the underlying science is well-understood, and there are few disputes, political, scientific or environmental.

However, solar and wind are not now global solutions for base load electricity or transportation fuels. On a national scale, they are a drop in the bucket compared to coal, natural gas and nuclear for electrical production.

Any suggestion that solar or wind can now or will soon save the planet or save us from resource wars is unsupported.

Technological breakthroughs in any area of research are always possible and likely, and solar and wind energy research are certainly worthy endeavors.

With significant increases in research funding or commercial market share, which would provide better economies of scale, major breakthroughs are possible and likely.

To claim that solar and wind are the answer, to the exclusion, or worse, to the derision of other solutions, is either ignorant or indicative of self-interest.

I was surprised and dismayed to hear Larry Page, co-founder of Google Inc., propose such an agenda, praising the virtues of wind and solar and bashing nuclear during his keynote speech at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Feb 16, 2007.

As I sat there in the San Francisco Hilton listening to Page, I wondered how his Google teammate, Jack Ancone, principal of New Business Development, who sat at a table near me at the National Energy Symposium organized by John E. Cox Jr. of The Communications Institute in Los Angeles last year, missed the message about the limitations of solar and wind. (Audio and video recordings of the symposium are available through the National Energy Symposium Web site.)

Henry Lee, director of the Environment and Natural Resources Program at Harvard University voiced the consensus of these energy experts.

"There is no silver bullet," Lee said.

I'll get back to this in Part 2 of this report.

Midway through the day's presentations in Los Angeles, I walked up to Ancone and introduced myself. He was surprised and asked whether I had known that Google was interested in energy and the environment. I said no, but I assumed that they should be, considering how integral energy is to their business.

But I've been mulling this over. Maybe Ancone heard a different message.

Perhaps after listening to national experts on solar, wind, biofuels, and fusion paint their universally grim outlook on foreseeable energy solutions, he decided that solar and wind were likely to be a lucrative business opportunity.

I suppose I had assumed that Google, the great equalizer of free and accessible information, also might be a great provider of free, accessible energy information that was neutral and unbiased. I may have been mistaken.


PART TWO: WIND AND SOLAR REALITIES

So why is wind not a silver bullet?

On a global or even national scale, there is not enough where we need it, when we need it, and its energy does not come in the form we need it most.

So why is solar not a silver bullet?

Nathan Lewis, a Caltech chemist who is a proponent of solar energy, hits the nail on the head, as quoted in The New York Times on July 16.

“The scale on which things actually have to happen on energy is either not fully appreciated or transmitted to the public,” Lewis said. “You have to find a really cheap way to capture that light, for the price of carpet or paint, and also convert it efficiently into something humans can use for energy.”

One venture capitalist in the heart of Silicon Valley's venture capital neighborhood has had the courage to say what the other venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road don't want you to hear. According to Vinod Khosla, quoted in

a July 16 article by Andrew C. Revkin and Matthew Wald in The New York Times, solar technology is, at the moment, nothing more than a boutique investment.

“Most of the environmental stuff out there now is toys compared to the scale we need to really solve the planet’s problems,” Khosla said.

Part of the problem that Khosla and others have found in investing in solar research, however, is that the volatility - circumstantial or intentional - of crude-oil prices has turned solar research and investment into a roller-coaster ride.

According to the Energy Information Administration (http://www.eia.doe.gov/), solar energy provided a mere one-tenth of 1 percent of the total U.S. electrical supply nationwide.

No wonder. How many people who pay $100 a month for their electric bill will pay $700 voluntarily? This is derived from the production costs of electricity, based on 2002 statistics, that Lewis showed in his 2006 presentation at the Los Angeles Energy Symposium.

According to the Times article, "'even a quarter-century from now,' says the Energy Department official in charge of renewable energy, 'solar power might account for, at best, 2 or 3 percent of the grid electricity in the United States.'"

The Times article says that, "in the meantime, coal-burning power plants, the main source of smokestack emissions linked to global warming, are being built around the world at a rate of more than one a week."

Some people dismiss the whole idea of global warming, but few people dispute that supply of oil and gas soon will be overtaken by demand. The world needs to find a new source of energy within a few decades or face an unprecedented downturn in the quality of life, as we become slaves to our energy addictions and warriors for these resources.

Richard E. Smalley, who was a professor at Rice University and earned worldwide recognition for his work in nanotechnology, laid it out simply in a 2003 presentation given at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

World population is expected to reach 10 billion people by the year 2050, many areas of the world are becoming more industrialized and the per capita demand for energy is increasing. Cheap oil and gas will be history by the year 2030, if not sooner.

"At a minimum," Smalley wrote, "we need 10 teraWatts from some new clean energy source by 2050" and "for worldwide peace and prosperity, we need it to be cheap … the remaining oil reserves are not where we want them … for transportation fuels we currently have no choice."

...

Read Part III to VII: http://newenergytimes.com/SR/Planktos/BurningManGreentech.htm







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