Water: the next frontier in energy innovation….

Finally Bill Aulet takes the leap and writes about Water. He is both knowledgeable and spends a lot of time thinking about these issues…so when he writes, I pay attention. Click here for what I wrote on water a few months ago.

My comment to Bill:

I was hoping somebody would write on water. Thanks. While the average were running after nanotech/biotech deals 5-8 years ago, the cunning were starting to see environmental tech on the horizon. Now that the average are running after energy deals, the smart should be thinking about water.

I don’t mean any offense to those in the industry, but you are dead-on that the decision makers in the water business are slow, relatively non-techie, and risk-averse. Having worked in the next slowest industry, i.e. automotive, I can imagine how hard it is to sell into it. But is there a way to approach the customers directly who would be more willing to pay than the middle-man thinks? I can tell you my family in urban Pakistan would pay a lot more for clean water (and are more used to it) than an average American.

It is interesting that some of the issues faced by water innovators parallel those in energy: (a) geographical distribution of markets, (b) centralized vs distributed systems, (c) scalability issues, (d) mismatch between rhetoric and action at governmental level, and (e) lack of entrepreneurs/investors who are willing to stick with long-term endeavors.

I agree with your comment above that the water-energy nexus could be great for both. Energy companies could end up investing in water innovations while water companies would look for cheaper energy sources. I think we need to take energy and water technologies to regions where they are needed most to develop them fast and cost effectively, i.e. developing countries in Asia, Africa etc. And lets find long term investors (maybe the Middle East investors fit the bill) who are less scared of playing with commodities in such markets.

The Next Big Thing in Energy Innovation and Investing? Let’s Talk Water

Bill Aulet 5/20/08

Energy innovation and investing are exploding right now. Technological breakthroughs are seen as perhaps the greatest hope to solving our dire energy challenge. However, what is often overlooked is the link between finding or creating new sources of energy and the effects on food and water.

Indeed, if you think of energy as a coin, the flip side is water and food. The scary thing is that food and water are both lower on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs—i.e., they are more fundamental to human survival. Yet, the current rush to create new sources of energy—including “clean” energy—may have potentially disastrous tradeoffs on our food and water supplies. Going forward, trading off energy creation for water—meaning creating new sources of energy that depend on heavy use of water, as many do—will be less and less acceptable. That’s why the most exciting opportunities in energy entrepreneurship and investment lie in strategies that create more water or energy without adversely affecting the other. Xconomy for more…

Edward Lorenz, father of chaos theory and butterfly effect, dies at 90

I have been fortunate in my life to meet some great people. People who have accomplished so much, and have made such vast and lasting impact on humanity, and the sum-total of human knowledge, that I can only say I am left in total awe. By simply being in their proximity and company I have learned how humble and inconsequential my own work has been. Edward Lorenz was one of those figures. Ed died today at age 90.

Ed was a professor of Meteorology at MIT who was already in his late years when I completed my Ph.D. there. Even though i did my Ph.D. in the chemistry department, my thesis advisor had his office and labs in the EAPS (Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences), which was also home to Ed. He walked our hallways, he joined us at the daily 3PM coffee hour, and he provided kind, generous, and insightful comments on elevator rides with him. I remember hearing about him as the pioneer of chaos theory and then read a bit on him and his work. I can safely say it was more mathematical than I could comprehend, but the power and importance of his work was not lost on me. I was in awe, and remain. Great people impact generations to come. He was one of them and I consider myself so lucky to have experienced his company, even if just via casual conversations an elevator rides. May his soul rest in peace.

Here is news item on his passing from the MIT News.

Edward Lorenz, father of chaos theory and butterfly effect, dies at 90

April 16, 2008

Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorologist who tried to explain why it is so hard to make good weather forecasts and wound up unleashing a scientific revolution called chaos theory, died April 16 of cancer at his home in Cambridge. He was 90.

A professor at MIT, Lorenz was the first to recognize what is now called chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems. In the early 1960s, Lorenz realized that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere–or a model of the atmosphere–could trigger vast and often unsuspected results.

The Vulcan Project: High resolution mapping of fossil fuel based CO2 emissions in the USA

This is a cool video on CO2 emissions from the USA. It is from Purdue University, where a group of researchers have developed a tool for high resolution mapping and analysis of fossil fuel based CO2 emissions from power plants, traffic, industrial activity, and the residential/commercial energy consumption.

The technical significance of the work is probably best stated by Kevin Gurney, a leader of the project (source: Green Car Congress):

Before now the only thing policy-makers could do was take a big blunt tool and bang the US economy with it. Now we have more quantifiable information about what is happening in neighborhoods, on roads and in industrial areas, and track the CO2 by the hour. This offers policy-makers something akin to a scalpel instead.
—Kevin Gurney, assistant professor of earth and atmospheric science at Purdue University and leader of the project

MIT’s burgeoning role in the green movement

Under its new President, Susan Hockfield, MIT has taken a leadership role in the discussions regarding science, technology, business, entrepreneurship and policy in energy and the environment. Here is an op-ed from her in today’s Boston Globe. I look forward to attending the MIT Energy Conference this coming weekend. I invite you to visit GEO2’s booth on the friday night’s Energy Showcase.

MIT’s burgeoning role in the green movement

by Susan Hockfield

April 7, 2008

BOSTON MAGAZINE has ranked MIT’s work on energy and the environment as No. 2 on its list of “61 Best New Things About Boston.” It’s unusual praise for MIT; our research is more often noticed in academic journals. But the magazine’s listing says something important: people beyond the university research community and the green movement are eager for answers to our energy and environmental challenges.

The challenges are many. How do we meet the aspirations of people around the world for a healthy, comfortable, productive life, without irreparably damaging the planet? How will we in the developed world preserve our quality of life, while shifting to renewable technologies? At the same time, how do we enable the developing world to reach a standard of living that grants access to modern comforts? How, for example, will we get electricity to the 1 billion people who don’t yet have it?

At MIT we are inventing real energy and climate solutions - from large-scale technologies that capture carbon emissions and dramatic new ways to tap deep geothermal energy, to smaller-scale ideas such as lithium-ion batteries to revolutionize the electric car and new materials that could make solar energy as cheap and dependable as coal.

KAUST in Saudi Arabia announces its Global Research Partnership Investigators

Oil prices are at a record high, Middle East economies are flush with cash, but something is different! The new generation of Arab leaders have realized that (a) petro-dollars may not be there forever, (b) they cannot allow the ‘Dutch Disease’ to cripple their long-term growth, (c) their population is growing faster than their oil revenues , (d) they cannot continue to spend as a socialist welfare state, and (e) they need to link their economies to the value-add of energy inputs and not to the oil and gas prices in international markets.

Hence, you see a fast growth of economic zones and theme-cities, which in reality are just a creative way to create from scratch eco-systems that can cultivate, grow and sustain the technological and business innovations for the future. One important part of this city-creation is the renewed focus on education and research. As would be expected, these rich countries are reaching out to the very best of the best and luring their talents with money to help build local research institutions. This is happening Middle East wide, and I will hopefully find time to write a bit more on it later….but for now, I wanted to share the news from Green Car Congress that KAUST in Saudi Arabia has just announced its list of inaugural Global Research Partnership Investigators. A majority of research themes are clearly clean-tech oriented, and I am enthused by it. I have high hopes.

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology Announces Inaugural Global Research Partnership Investigator Winners
from Green Car Congress by Mike Millikin

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia has named the winners of its Global Research Partnership (GRP) Investigator competition. Twelve international scientists—among them Dr. Yi Cui at Stanford (silicon nanowires for li-ion batteries) and Dr. Bruce Logan at Penn State (microbial fuel cells)—were selected as KAUST GRP investigators for the 2007 round of nominations, which featured more than 60 submissions from 38 of the world’s leading research universities.

GRP investigators receive five-year individual grants to investigate a wide range of research topics. As an example, Dr. Logan’s grant is for $10 million.

Each KAUST Investigator is expected to spend between three weeks and three months per year on the KAUST campus in Saudi Arabia participating in the research and academic life of the institution. Additional personnel exchanges including the Investigators or their research personnel will be arranged according to the needs of the collaborative work established with KAUST’s faculty.

Research topics include water desalination, renewable and sustainable next-generation energy sources, genomics of salt-tolerant plants, durable and environmentally friendly construction materials, hydrocarbon utility, low-cost solar cell efficiency, and disease immunization.

Kleiner Perkins investing in alternative powertrains - Fisker Automotive

Last week was the Detroit International Auto-show. This is the largest gathering of its type in the United States where largely the large automakers around the world, especially the US big 3, show off their latest car models etc. Traditionally this event has attracted automotive engineers and salesmen of all sorts, and media that was more nostalgic about the automotive past than the real future. This year, at least to me, seemed very different. For one, this year’s show coincided with the primaries in Michigan and hence all the major presidential candidates showed up to demonstrate their unity with the auto-workers etc.

…but that was hardly the big news for me. The big news this year has been the focus on green technologies in the automotive sector and the focus on alternative drive-trains. And the big news has been the inclusion of a new type of investor in the automotive world - top notch venture capital firms. I had just finished writing about Vinod Khosla’s investments in alternate powertrains that I read about Fisker Automotive, a plug-in electric hybrid car-developer/manufacturer that just got over $10million of investment from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers.

I have written before about Tesla Motors, probably the most prominent among this new generation of car developers that promise excitement in our mobility solutions while simultaneously providing solutions to the automotive industry’s carbon foot print. The technologies deployed by such car makers are typically very impressive: light weight fiber composite structural materials, electric or hybrid drive-trains, next generation battery systems, etc. And the performance is equally impressive as well: sports-car accelerations, long mileage on single electric charges, impressive fuel economy and cabin comfort.

But the question that they must face, in addition to those around the CO2 and other emissions of the coal power plants that feed electricity into the plug-ins’ batteries, is around the supply chains that they must establish to consistently produce high quality cars in a timely fashion. Can these upstarts get dependable supply chains established (that took traditional auto-makers decades to establish?), and will they be able to reduce costs at a pace that will be necessary for mass-production? VCs will probably look for VC returns in some reasonably short period of time, and more importantly, to maximize the societal/environmental impact one would want many such vehicle son the road as quickly as possible. Hence the scalability of the solution matters tremendously. I continue to look for optimistic signs for them…

Here’s a nice article from Wall Street Journal on these new car-investments from key VC firms:

Vinod Khosla investing in combustion engine technologies?

Vinod Khosla is a prolific investor. He must work like a machine. I admire that. Khosla Ventures, the early stage VC investment firm he founded has been a star in the area of clean-tech. They have invested in many different technologies, and in some cases up and down the value chain of critical industry segments.

But given some of my interests, the news of Vinod investing in combustion engine related companies certainly caught my eye. My first reaction was wow! Given that he has dissed hybrid vehicles in the past as mere ‘toys’, I am very interested in knowing what combustion engines/power-trains is he betting on?

And I am happy to see he is investing in diesel hybrids and advances in traditional combustion. To me, this is a good example of him using what he calls his ‘Chindia test‘, i.e. for a technology innovation to be material to solving this world’s major problems, it should have the potential to be successful and profitable in countries like China and India. I fully agree. Combustion engines will still be used in huge quantities (even if hybrids become more common) in most parts of the world, including western Europe and the US, and anything that can be done to reduce the emissions and improve fuel economy would be very beneficial to climate change.

Here’s a good synopsis of his recent investments from Venture Beat:

Khosla keeps betting on combustion engines with Transonic investment

Well-known Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla has never been shy expressing his opinion. Khosla once dissed plug-in hybrid vehicles — supported by environmentalists because of their partial reliance on batteries versus oil — as “nice toys …not material to climate change.”

Clean-tech sector: A quick review of 2007 and 2008

2007 was undoubtedly the year of clean-tech. The debate around global warming frequented the front pages of major newspapers, and reached our homes and dining tables. There were too many exciting clean-tech related news to recount, and there were a few disappointments as well. I have been asked several times if there is anything ’substantial’ to be expected out of this clean-tech boom, or are these just science fair type curiosity projects, but on a larger scale and consuming tons of public sector funding? While many clean-tech blogs are highlighting technologies to look out for in 2008, ‘Automotive News’ recently published a tongue-in-cheek list of 10 potential alternative fuels that included chicken droppings and cheese.

I remain optimistic that what we are witnessing is not just a shift in our understanding of the need for cleaner energy sources, but also a unique coming together of science, engineering, health, business, investor and public policy stakeholders that ultimately need to work closely together to find winning solutions. This is no science fair - this is evolution in action. An evolution of technologies and policies, and of our abilities to incorporate better ones into our lives.

Here are some thoughts that stuck with me through 2007, and what I am expecting in 2008. Would love to hear what you think about these.

2007

1. Ethanol bubble bursts - A few failed IPOs, the spectacle of rising food prices around the world, esp Mexico, and a realization that ethanol actually gives lower fuel economy provided enough material to disillusion even some of corn-ethanols strongest supporters. On the issue of technology trajectory for ethanol, it seems cellulosic ethanol has not yet moved fast enough to be commercially viable in the short term.
   
2. Clean coal continued to garner attention, esp as gasification projects got major funding for building demonstration projects. But I am still looking for serious and convincing plays in this sector. There is much potential here but people seem scared of venturing too far into the dirty coal business.

MIT economist sees U.S. weathering $100 oil

Oil has finally hit $100/barrel. To some, it seems, this is finally the trigger that will force major societal changes - a price point for oil commodity that may now impact not just our outlook on the cost/benefit analysis of investments in renewable energy sources (i.e. non fossil fuel based), but also our consumption patterns (i.e. improving our nega-watts).

But I am no so sure. I feel, an d I qualify this by saying that this is more of a gut feeling than any kind of careful analysis, that people won’t feel the need to make a change in their behavior unless the change was rapid, sharp and highly publicized. I also worry if at such high prices, some of the more dirty fuels, such as tar-sands etc might also start getting exploited.

But what do I know….let’s read what an economist has to say about the impact on the $100 oil (source: MIT News):

MIT economist sees U.S. weathering $100 oil

Sarah H. Wright, News Office
January 2, 2008

As the price of oil doubled over the last year, hitting the $100 mark for the first time on Jan. 2, it may have looked like 1973 all over again to some observers. But research by MIT macroeconomist Olivier Blanchard, Class of 1941 Professor of Economics, shows that a return to 1970s-style gas lines and stagflation isn’t in the cards.

Blanchard’s paper, “The Macroeconomic Effects of Oil Price Shocks: Why are the 2000s so different from the 1970s?” outlines changes in U.S. and global economic policies between the two eras. Cited in The Economist (Nov. 17) as an explainer for the current situation, the paper was co-written by Blanchard’s colleague Jordi Gali (Ph.D. 1989) of the Center for International Economic Research in Barcelona.

Blanchard discussed the differences between the oil shocks in the 1970s and in the 2000s during a recent interview with the MIT News Office.

Q: Four price-doubling oil shocks have occurred in 35 years–1973, 1979, 1999 and now. How have economic reactions differed?

A: In the 1970s, there were two sharp recessions and sharply higher inflation. This time around, the economy has remained strong, and inflation has barely bulged.

Q: What’s behind the differences? Why was 1973 so different from 2007?

A: In the 1970s, the adverse effects of oil price increases were compounded by other adverse shocks–a sharp slowdown in productivity growth and large increases in the price of raw materials.

In the 2000s, the effects of oil price increases have been partly offset by other shocks, this time favorable–sustained productivity growth and strong Asian growth, for example.

E-Ink digital books - soon in color!

I have known of E-Ink (the company) and its technology since it sinception at MIT. That is one of the benefits of being close to a school where labs are spinning out innovations in quick succession (and taking a course with E-Ink’s founder, Prof. Joe Jacobsen).

E-Ink has had a taken a long path to commercialization even though in late 90’s some believed paper books were a thing of the past. Even some people I knew jumped into the e-books phenomenon in the dot-boom phase.

E-Ink came up with a revolutionary technology that made it possible to use (a) very little energy and (b) the screen could be made very visible even in sunlight. They started their journey by trying to make billboards that were ‘alive’, but that didn’t really go too far. Then in addition to other display products, they started down the path of making better screen for digital book readers, and recently made big splashes when Sony (Reader) and Amazon (Kindle) announced their own versions of the e-readers that both used E-Ink technology. I won’t do justice to the technology but the basic idea is to have colored balls (microcapsules) as pixels that would expose their ‘bright’ or ‘dark’ sides when a voltage was applied to them. I am still a bit fazed by the price or I would have got one myself. Why would I ever want to carry 2-3 books with me on long trips abroad. I could just download a dozen onto my e-reader.
(click on image above to enlarge)

But anyways - now they have come up with an even cooler technology. It is E-Ink, in color! And not only that, they also have developed technologies for flexible displays….The technology is not yet fully commercial and may be a few years away from a product you and I can afford, but I look forward to the day… this could be a game-changer. Imagine all the magazines we collect during the month becoming available for download in full color! Hey, I don’t know about you but I am sick of throwing away/recycling piles of ‘Technology Review‘, ‘Chemical & Engineering News‘, ‘Wired‘, ‘Fast Company‘, ‘Business Week‘, ‘The Economist‘, ‘Foreign Affairs’ and ‘American Scientist’ each month. And the stack doesn’t look attractive after a while and I have to keep putting ‘Town and Country‘ magazine on top to hide my geekiness from being on public display.

But this won’t be the only use. Imagine quick deployment of text books in developing countries, newspaper access, consider the trees saved from being turned into paper. Would libraries turn into plug and retrieve data centers? One can just imagine the utilities. Read on…