Saket Vora

Another week gone by, and I’d say things are finally firing on all cylinders. I got a lot of homework done over the weekend and on Monday, which was a big help. The two days down in Cupertino were jam-packed. I went from having just a few things to do, then was called into a meeting with Joseph and suddenly had a ton of stuff to do — all before I was to leave by 4.

On Tuesday night, we had the BASES E-Challenge and Social E-Challenge Kickoff event. I ran into a lot of friends – even Brent Rowe came. We had a panel to talk about entrepreneurship and to give students interested in competing in the business plan competitions advice. We had:

• Anne Marie Burgoyne, Portfolio Director, Draper Richards Foundation
• Debra Dunn, Associate Professor at the Stanford D.School, board member of the Skoll Foundation
• Jeff Clavier, Founding & Managing Partner, SoftTech VC
• Dave McClure, Founder, Startup2Startup

Having gone through the competition circuit and developing two business plans, I was so impressed by the panel — the perspective they offered and the feedback was great. And tip of the hat to Dave McClure to provide levity throughout. The marketing campaign outdid itself — we estimated 80 people would show up, but 160+ people showed up! We had 70 people stand the entire time, and I think there was a good amount of mixing afterward. With the combination of this BASES involvement, and of diving headfirst into greentech and energy, I finally feel like my network is humming.

A few other odds & ends:

• Dad gave a talk to the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program class about e-commerce; he enjoyed it and my spies from within said it was well received.
• I made a dish of roasted vegetables, tofu, and pasta (inspired by Luke) and it set off the smoke detector.
• I also made kirchadi (sp)!
• On Sunday Amit and I made enchiladas, and it was delicious.
• For a class, Charles is participating in a mock UN conference to discuss nuclear proliferation. He is part of the North Korea delegation and has to give a fiery speech. Professors play the heads of state and engage in subterfuge as par for the course.
• My phone was constantly rebooting this week but I spent many hours trying to fix it (mostly banging my head against the astonishingly dumb Palm HotSync software). but it’s fine now…I think the local email dB was corrupted.

This weekend should be good. Looks like some friends and I are building a Rubens tube for  a party on Saturday, also a NC State / UNC game and then the superbowl, for which I have no plans for yet.

Also, can’t forget a shout-out to Donny for scoring a visit to Georgia Tech for grad school!

The following report was written by me for an assignment in the CEE 272 – Grid Integration of Renewables class at Stanford University. The prompt called for us to consider how renewable energy sources can contribute to a de-carbonized electricity sector. I chose the concentrated solar power technology to study.

Introduction

A significant driver of global climate change is the high atmospheric presence of greenhouse gases, named for their ability to allow solar radiation to the Earth’s surface but trapping it inside the troposphere. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and one whose atmospheric concentration has grown rapidly over the past two hundred years. Recent years have seen an increased push towards reducing mankind’s contribution of carbon dioxide emissions, and the electricity sector is a significant portion of this – at 2,400 million metric tons per year (MMtCO₂e/year), comprises 40% of the United States total CO₂ emissions (1). De-carbonizing the electricity sector will require greater number of renewable sources to come online, and the challenges of integrating these intermittent and distributed sources will have to be tackled. This report examines one renewable energy source, concentrating solar power (CSP), and will discuss its use, utilization, costs of implementation, and challenges to overcome.

Background

Concentrating solar power generation utilizes a simple method for the generation of steam. Several arrays of mirrors reflect sunlight, concentrating it on an absorber containing a fluid or thermal mass. The heated fluid or mass is then used to boil water into steam, which drives a turbine and then a generator. There are three leading forms of CSP. The first places parabolic trough shaped mirrors (a U-shaped arrangement) with a tube containing synthetic oil running along its focal point, and the oil can be heated up to 400 ^oC (2). The second is parabolic dish mirror on which a collector is placed at its focal point. In this configuration, a Stirling engine is the collector, and the heat is converted into electricity at each dish. The third approach utilizes a central tower with mirrors arranged radially around it. The mirrors direct sunlight to a thermal mass (molten nitrate salts, for example) and heat it to temperatures 600^oC.

The central tower approach. Photo linked from sustainabledesignupdate.com.

Parabolic Dish with Stirling engine. Photo linked from altenergystocks.com

Parabolic trough-shaped approach. Photo linked from CNET's Green Tech site.

Of the three, parabolic trough-style CSP plants are the most popular. The parabolic dish approach requires 2-axis tracking and requires expensive mirror designs, but the central tower scheme is being re-examined due to greater ease at maintaining the heated fluid loop and higher temperatures possible for the thermal mass. When a thermal mass such molten salts are used, CSP plants gain the ability to continue producing electricity at night or when lower levels of sunlight are available. When generation exceeds demand, the extra heat is stored in the thermal mass for later use. This approach works only for a limited time, on the order of a few days.

Performance and Costs

The median capacity size for existing CSP plants appears to be between 10MW and 20MW, with the average skewed higher due to a small number of large facilities sized at 80MW+. The worldwide average of capacity factors for CSP plants is 19%, without using thermal storage (3). With thermal storage technologies that allow electricity generation without light present, capacity factors are estimated to increase to between 33% and 48%, depending on the type of CSP scheme and storage. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates capital costs of $2M to $5M per MW to construct a plant (2), and CSPs enjoy small operating and maintenance costs compared to fossil fuel plants. Currently, the price per kilowatt-hour for CSP varies between 13 and 18 cents, but some newer plants intend to use compact linear Fresnel reflectors (CLFRs) and hope to reduce capital costs by 20% (4). In optimum situations, CSP is targeted to drop to 9 cents per kWh (5).

Concentrated solar power electricity output can match a standard power curve more closely than wind power. This is especially true if solar thermal masses can be used effectively, so that CSP plants can continue to provide steady electricity for the few extra evening hours as the sun sets. As it can be inferred in the above description of CSP, this scheme is a very low CO₂ way of producing electricity. Routine maintenance of the mirrors includes cleaning with water and fixing breakages. The molten salts used as thermal masses are not sources of carbon emissions. Carbon emissions are incurred during the construction of a CSP plant, but a short build time of 12 to 24 months allows for an energy payback time of around 7 months (3). As far as overall grams of CO₂e/kWh across a plant’s lifetime, CSP ranks 2^nd, just below wind but ahead of every other renewable energy source. Thus, the deployment of concentrated solar power plants contribute to de-carbonizing the electricity sector.

Growth and Utilization

Estimates for the total worldwide technical potential for concentrated solar power varies widely between 630GW and 4700GW (4), which is converted to 1.05 to 7.8 PWh/year using a capacity factor of 19% (3). However, the current installed capacity for CSP as of 2008 is approximately 400MW, mostly in California, USA. Australia, Spain, and Israel are also now fielding CSP plants. If we focus on the state of California, a study by Simon & McCabe showed a technical potential of 1 million MW across 16 counties.[1] ⁽⁶⁾ Indeed, California is home to the most number of concentrated solar power plants in the world, one of them being the Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) which is the largest solar generating facility in the world for a combined 354MW of generation spread across nine plants.

There is tremendous potential for the CSP sector to grow. First, there is no shortage of suitable untapped land areas[2], and its suitability to the Southwest and Midwest regions of United States lends itself to easier land use permitting. A number of new plants, by companies such as Ausra, BrightSource, Stirling Energy Systems, are slated to be online after 2010. More states are following California’s lead and signing renewable energy requirements for electric power providers

One critical aspect that must be addressed is the additional high-voltage transmission lines to effectively deliver the electricity from these CSP plants to the main grid. CSP does not have the high degree of spatially distributed generation points that commercial or residential photovoltaics have, and by utilizing a traditional steam engine (for parabolic-trough and central tower CSP schemes) the problem of frequency-matching to the grid is avoided (photovoltaics require an inverter to convert its DC output to AC).

Navigant Consulting published a report in 2008 regarding the federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC) as an incentive to encourage construction of new solar thermal plants. It found 75% to 85% losses in market size for the US CSP market if the current ITC was significantly reduced. (7) Since up to 60% of a CSP plant’s capital cost is from equipment, the CSP sector relies heavily on manufacturing. Furthermore, if the current ITC incentive is renewed, it could “spur an additional 34,000 jobs and 287,000 job-years of employment between 2009 and 2016.” (7) Until there is a proper price on carbon that factors in the externalities of fossil fuels into coal and petroleum electricity production, incentives like the ITC will be critical to ensure short-term continuation and growth of CSP plants.

Challenges to Overcome & Conclusion

The issue of energy storage is still one that needs a solution vetted for long-periods of time. Improving thermal masses so that they can be used longer during diminished lighting conditions will be critical to helping CSP plants more smoothly integrate with the grid and to be seen as not just a very low carbon approach to electricity generation, but a desirable one at well. As further experience is gained with more CSP plants in a variety of locations, costs should decrease and become a viable alternative to current fossil fuels prices.

References

1. Greenblatt, Jeffery, et al. Clean Energy 2030. www.google.com. [Online] Google, November 20, 2008. [Cited: 1 16, 2009.] http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/15×31uzlqeo5n/1#references.

2. Leitner, Arnold. Fuel from the Sky: Solar’s Power’s Potential for Western Energy Supply. RDI Consulting, National Renewable Energy Laboratory. 2002. NREL/SR-550-32160.

3. Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Jacobson, Mark Z. Stanford : RSC Publishing, December 1, 2008, Energy & Environmental Science. DOI: 10.1039/b809990c.

4. Sims, Ralph E.H. and Schock, Robert N. IPCC 4th Assessment Report – Energy Supply. s.l. : IPCC, 2007.

5. Mills, David and Morgan, Robert. Solar thermal power as the plausible basis of grid supply. Ausra, Inc.

6. Simons, George and McCabe, Joe. California Solar Resources. Energy Research & Development Division, California Energy Commission. 2005. CEC-500-2005-072-D.

7. Frantzis, Lisa, et al. Economic Impact of Extending Federal Solar Tax Credits. Solar Energy Research and Education Foundation. s.l. : Navigant Consulting, 2008.

Fair warning: the author is currently in Obama cult mode

I can’t believe I missed this, but right after the election there was some silly softball 60 Minutes segment with the Obamas’ cooking.

Here’s the critical passage:

“The truth is, before I met Michelle I did quite a bit of cooking. I had an Indian roommate for a while, so I learned how to make Indian food.

Our President can cook Indian food!!!

President Obama.

Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Amit came over yesterday morning and we eagerly watched the inauguration, warm coffee in our hands. I knew Charles, my roommate, was out there on the National Mall, and from the TV it looked like a nice day.

Apart from the amusingly flubbed oath, I liked Obama’s speech. While I could quote many parts from it, here are some that I particularly liked:

…it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

A little nugget of entrepreneurial and take-action spirit there.

We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Emphasis mine, and one that made me pump my first while watching. After 8 long miserable years under the Bush administration, as a (wannabe) scientist, I’m glad to see this directly mentioned.

We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers.

Obama is the first politician of national prominence that I’ve seen who will actually mention Hindus when accounting for the faiths of America – unlike most politicians who only state the Abrahamic religions. Oh, and non-believers too. After all, behind the Christian majority, the second largest subset of people with regard to faith is “nonreligious/secular”.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends – hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

Emphasis mine. I often wonder how improved our country and world might be if more people took these words to heart. “The price and the promise of citizenship”, indeed.

Good luck, President Obama.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been checking out an NPR program that I hadn’t heard before – Radiolab out of WNYC. It’s a superb show, with production values rivaling that of This American Life. While not tackling the breadth of topics that TAL does, Radiolab has a more sciency  and philosophic bent, and it’s quirky sense of humor bubbles through more clearly.

The most recent show, Yellow Fluff and Other Curious Encounters, tells the stories of scientists and the process of discovery. It has a great section on the periodic table that any chemistry fan should enjoy, as well as an underwater marine biologist who struggles to make his mark, and a stomach-unsettling story of a chemist who allowed a botfly to gestate inside his head and emerge from a growth the size of a golf ball. Yuck!

Race explores genetic bases and implications of race, of racialized medicines, and a tension-filled story of a Shia Muslim who helped his Sunni friend enter a Shiite controlled morgue so his friend could look for his dead father. The only thing protecting him was a slightly different pronunciation of his name, or else his Sunni identity would be revealed.

War of the Worlds is an exciting look at the original 1938 Orson Welles’ radio play and how it could have had the effect that it did. The story goes on to describe other retellings in Quito, Ecuador in 1949 and in Buffalo, NY in the 1960s and the consequences it has.

Finally, in the iTunes podcast directory for Radiolab you’ll find a podcast titled “Making the Hippo Dance”, which I would sincerely ask that my readers listen to. I know many of you are comfortable with the great enterprise we call science, and that you often concerned with how the scientific community interacts with the society at large. Maybe I’m hyping it up too much, but in this segment the Radiolab hosts describe and demonstrate how they try to make science accessible and reawaken the 3rd grader in everyone who once actually enjoyed science class.

I’d also encourage you to check out Placebo (for the health and medicine inclined), Emergence (about how order rises from apparent disorder), and of course – Space.

While the media obsesses over the status of President-Elect Obama’s Blackberry, we aren’t seeing a more detailed examination of the full implications and consequences of the situation of which the Blackberry represents the mere tip of the iceberg.

This article at Politico begins to try, but leaves me unsatisfied and actually angry about what I’m understanding here. The Presidential Records Act of 1978 specified rules for the preservation of all presidential records, stemming from Nixon’s illustrious dealings. What I cannot find, however, are details regarding how the PRA has been updated to account for new communication methods.

What makes me angry is that the United States was the country that did a tremendous amount to create the technologies that enable the way modern teams and groups communicate. Mobile smartphones, instant-messaging, online collaboration tools, etc. I’ve witnessed myself the way these tools have the ability to transformed businesses – my friends and I were avid users of instant messaging a decade ago, but my father at IBM had never used it. Then IBM started deploying Sametime, an enterprise level IM chat client, and it started to spread. Within just a few years, instant messenging became a vital part of his work environment. Today, he and his colleagues at Lenovo use the freeware IM/voice client Skype everyday – combining cell phones, Skype voice chat, Skype IM, e-mails, and even text messaging to aid them in their work.

Businesses are leveraging these new communication tools so that their people can communicate faster, in richer ways, and in a greater variety of channels. And its benefits aren’t lost on politicians either – everyone knows about how the Obama campaign utilized superior communication methods in their history making campaign. Another facet of this is the way the Obama team operated – it feels more like a generational shift. The channels they used – extensive Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, frequent blog postings, the most casual Facebook profile, etc. The tone used in emails, the casual nature that the candidate himself could exhibit.

With this context in mind, we are now asking one of this country’s most important and influential leadership teams to take on the seemingly insurmountable task of rescuing America from extraordinary domestic and international situations – all while crippling them by removing the tools that they have relied upon to work effectively. Madness! 

The archivists, charged with preserving all documents, raise issues of security and of difficulties of preserving IMs and such. Really? I’ll admit I dislike it when people use the kind of reasoning I’ll use next, but I’ll do it anyway: we can spend $65+ billion in developing the state-of-the-art F-22 fighter jet, but we can’t seem to create a secure, in-house communication tool with the authentication/logging capabilities to satisfy the archivists? We cannot create a satisfactory way for our nation’s CEO to use a mobile smartphone?

It’s exasperating. What if this communication system could be a strictly closed system, only accessible from within the West Wing? I’m hoping my more computer/software/networking literate friends can give me an appreciation of the difficulty of this.

How can we as a nation be ok with asking our leaders to tackle modern day problems with decades old communication practices? This is like a National Guardsman training for years with a M16 standard issue automatic rifle and moving up into more prestigious units. Then he finds himself joining an elite SEAL team, only to be forced to turn in his M16 and pick up a WWII-era semi-automatic rifle and told to take on the hardest missions in the military. Madness!

The ASSU Speaker’s Bureau outdid themselves and scored Pakistan’s former president, Pervez Musharraf, to give the Big Talk at Stanford for this academic year. It’s especially notable for how recent Musharraf stepped down, and of course because of increased tensions between India and Pakistan due to the Mumbai terror attacks. This was going to be an event that got people intrigued, excited, angry, and probably a bit of all three. I should also note that Musharraf’s son graduated from Stanford University with a MBA and a MA (in educator) in 2007.

State troopers and State Department officials setup early outside Memorial Auditorium. I spotted several friends in the audience and the auditorium was filled to capacity. Musharraf appeared wearing a casual tan/brown suit and began his remarks, which was a frankly surface-level look at terrorism – the root causes of it, how to address it at an int’l, regional, and domestic level, etc. Nothing too probing here, and the speech went for nearly over an hour. He used the analogy of a tree, where leaves and branches are the terrorists and the organizations, where as the root of the tree is a combination of extremism, illiteracy, poverty, and hopelessness that feed and allow terrorism to thrive. Surprisingly to me (and there is clearly a bias here) the word India was said only once, with no mention or reference to the Mumbai terror attacks. Musharraf also repeatedly defended the Pakistani army and ISI (the internal intelligence service).

After the remarks, Professor Scott Sagan did a Q&A with Musharraf for a while then the floor was opened to questions from the audience. Sagan said that Musharraf was known for allowing frank dialogue, and none of Sagan’s questions were softballs. He used a Meet-the-Press tactic of quoting Musharraf in a previous interview. The real wildcard of course, was going to be the open Q&A.

I don’t know if its the organizers, or whether it’s how they do things at Stanford, but I approvingly observed that questions weren’t screened or moderated. I remember at many NC State events, often audience members had to write down their questions and then a moderator flipped through them to ask questions. I felt irritated during the Sen. Lindsay Graham one that nearly all the questions were total softballs.

The first question to Musharraf was asked by an Indian Kiwi i know, and began with a series of damning allegations, in the vein of “Given that you illegal seized power, given that you suspended the Constitution twice, given that you banned free expression, given that…….how do you expect us to believe anything you’ve said?”. An applause was started (as were a few boos), but it went on a bit too long because the moderator asked if there was a question. Musharraf calmly listened and replied that he could give another hour talk on all these points. He scored points there, to a 3rd party observer anyway, of appearing the calm one. Other questioners did a better job at delivering curt yet respectful sounding yet intensely critical remarks & questions, such as the sacking of the Chief Justice, of inaction at stopping the proxy war with India, and of supporting extraordinary rendition. Most of the questions were dodged, and Musharraf utilized the tactic of bringing up examples of other countries ill action, as if that seemingly absolves the issue from criticism.

The one point he stressed in these Q&As, which I can understand, is that there are certain ‘domestic sensitivities one has to balance as President. It might be convenient to execute a nuclear scientist who sold atomic secrets and plans to Iran, Libya, and North Korea, but if that same person is revered as the father of nuclear energy by the common masses, that kind of action might start to inflame them. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s a point he brought up a lot.

All in all, I’m still glad Musharraf came to campus and that I attended. I don’t particularly like the guy or think he’s done a stellar job, but I appreciate the chance to see and hear him. Nothing new was said or new insights gained, but I had expected that much. Still, it got people talking about Pakistan, about India, and of terrorism.

Procrastinated heavily on first week of homework…not a good omen for rest of the quarter. Don’t want to pull more Thursday late night sessions. All homework for classes are due on Friday.

2nd intern started at Apple, from Carnegie Mellon. We trash-talked our respective robot car teams. Good guy though.

Was asked to give a five minute pitch about the Social E-Challenge to a panel discussion featuring some angel investors. This turned into a 3 hour diversion, but one in which I rescued enough free food to feed six fellow grad students for up to 15 meals.

Data visualization class with Dr. Heer is the class I have the most fun in, yet I’m not officially taking it.

Getting the hang of Twitter updates (i think), enjoying the updates i’ve been getting from Mike and Win. My problem is that some of the more ‘well-known’ people tweet at much higher frequencies and tend to drown out my friends.

Learned that my fuel cell professor is a real deal baller. Aldo V. da Rosa, is 92 years old and professor emeritus. Born in Brazil, he went to the military academy and aeronautical school, then went to Harvard and Stanford, picking up a PhD in EE. He also rose to brigadier general of the Brazilian Air Force and founded the Brazil’s version of NASA. If that wasn’t enough, he has also broken 37 world records in Masters swimming, and currently holds the world records for the 200m IM and 200m breast stroke for the 85-89 age group. Like whoa.

Been making decent progress on contacting judges for social e-challenge. Around 33 confirmed so far.

Friends know my  old fashioned skepticism of e-mail applications that sit solely online – despite being in Silicon Valley and carrying a smartphone I just feel better knowing I can access email without an internet connection. I’ve been a Thunderbird fan for almost 5 years now because it’s lightweight and zippy nature. My address book resides here (not in Gmail, which is a pain) but I rely on Google for my calendaring – Thunderbird does not integrate calendaring like Outlook does. For BASES I was starting a contact heavy endeavor, and wanted a better way of organizing my contact list. I had heard from a friend that Outlook 2007 was good, so I tried it out.

God, what an awful experience. Outlook is a feature-rich application, but frankly I was often puzzled trying to get things done in it. There has to be 1587 some odd dialog boxes of options, but even the most straightforward, obvious things were overlooked. I found that I could change precisely how new mail subject line in my reading list was to be formatted, yet almost no options for choosing how I’d want mail to look while reading them. Contacts cannot be easily placed in multiple groups because of a folder-approach to organization. One can assign multiple categories to a contact, but when addressing an email you cannot sort or choose categories, making this organizing method useless. Auto-complete of names when writing emails doesn’t kick in until you manually select the person from the address book (thunderbird’s works immediately). Using Google’s calendar sync, I’m only allowed to setup 2-way syncing with my primary Google calendar. So either I enjoy color differentiation of events on Outlook or Google, but not both. Outlook uses the ‘star this email’ feature seen on Gmail as a way of auto-generating a “To Do” list, but this isn’t how I’ve used the ‘star’ feature. When I click on Tasks in Outlook, the program lags for as much as 20 seconds as it tries to process the 8000 odd messages I’ve got in my folder. I cannot disable this ‘feature’. The new mail notification often refuses to disappear despite there being no new mail.

What a trainwreck. Frustrated, I installed Thunderbird with the Lightning calendaring add-on plus a plug-in that claims to do Google Calendar sync. In about 10 minutes, I had 2-way sync working with all my calendars. Even with five IMAP e-mail accounts set-up, Thunderbird remains zippy, where as M$ says that mailboxes greater than 500MB will experience problems. I’m approaching 3.5GB of mail….

So a word of caution to those who haven’t migrated to Gmail’s web interface: hold off on Outlook unless you’ve got many hours to burn.

I don’t have an iPhone. I think the iPhone is a great product and a more impressive platform. But because I’m on Sprint and cheap, I use a Palm Centro. It’s a terrible platform and my 3 year old Samsung flip phone has more useful features for alarms and timer than it, but whatever. I get Google Maps and email on it.

But last week, Palm finally unveiled their new device: the Palm Pre.

The Palm Pre

Last winter, I worked on a strategic analysis of Palm Inc. for my high-tech strategy class with a group. We picked Palm because it was a high flying company back in 1999 but had since plummeted into literally ridicule. It’s smartphones were more than 2 years behind the times (eons in the tech world), both in features and in design. The Palm OS looked like a flint arrowhead compared to the sleep B2 bomber of the iPhone. No one is buying Palm Pilot handhelds anymore. The company went through a dizzying array of mergers and re-structurings.

But in doing that strategy paper, I came away more optimistic. Palm got some vital new blood (Apple blood) and really clammed up. We didn’t get a whole lot of info, but a Stanford alum was really great and invited us to Palm and spoke about its challenges. My team talked about what we thought Palm should do as it prepares to launch its new product and platform. After extensive research, here are two specific things we suggested:

“Contacts-centric Approach to Communication – Communication is fundamentally about connecting people. Much of today’s mobile phone software instead partitions by communication channel first. As the number of ways people stay connected grows, we believe this approach obfuscates people’s real needs. Making contacts the centerpiece of communication aids the user experience and leverages one of Palm’s strategic advantages.”

This is very much aligned with Palm’s way of aggregating and synthesizing all the info about your contacts whether its from Outlook, Gmail, Facebook, etc. Palm’s calling it Synergy.

Learning that Palm’s bet was to target the spot between Blackberry (RIM) and iPhone (Apple), we discussed whether Palm should try a touchscreen based keyboard. RIM is famous for its physical keyboards in the same way Apple is rightfully proud of its extraordinary touchscreen keyboard. Ultimately, we did not recommend Palm “to pursue a touch-screen based keyboard for the tactile feedback and reduced power consumption of a physical keyboard are important for Palm’s target markets.”

The Palm Pre features a vertical slide-out keyboard.

Palm Pre's keyboard

We also heavily stressed location based services, seeing this as a new killer app for mobile devices. Few companies have figured out how to effectively do LBS. Palm didn’t mention anything related to this, other than the Palm Pre does have built-in GPS.

Still, I feel pretty good about our analysis, especially with regard to Palm Synergy. I’m really quite excited about the new platform too – Web OS – with applications written in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Another critical feature that Palm seems to have gotten down: multi-tasking. We’ll only know after its out in the market. WinMo claims to handle multitasking, but WinMo becomes sluggish and freezes if you keep things open too long. Apple’s iPhone has an dazzling array of successful applications written for it, so Palm still has a huge hill to climb with its analogous app store. But the smartphone space is certainly heating up! Glad I’m still with Sprint…

Last fall Joseph, my manager from Apple, asked whether I’d be interested in coming back to work part-time during January. Joseph has built up a very strong intern/co-op program over the past few years, and one thing he likes to do is overlap internship periods so that the outgoing veteran intern can help train the newbie interns. With the long winter break, this wasn’t possible for the 3 new co-ops starting in his group. I’m in the area, and my class schedule worked out pretty well.

Mariani is the building where I work down there, and during the fall they put in new carpet and painted the walls. The sad part is that all the artwork and posters that made Mariani such a cool place to work is gone. At least, not put up again.

It was nice seeing everyone though, joking around with Jose and Guillermo, watching Diep do her magic, and Erturk’s sense of humor. The first intern to arrive, Rushi, is a (real!) Ph.D. candidate from Georgia Tech – an easy-going, really sharp guy. He’s doing real research into wireless power at the moment. His family is also from Gujarat, and he showed me an all-you-can-eat Gujarati restaurant just a mile from Mariani! I met the 2nd intern today, Will, who came in from Carnegie Mellon. It’s a firehose for them right now, but in 2 months they will be different people, like Joseph likes to say.

So yeah, just working part-time, helping the new interns and working on some real stuff, and the extra money on the side isn’t bad either. Will have to stop it in a few weeks though, because school takes priority.

Stanford University announced today a major new initiative to tackle the global problem of energy. This new research institute, the Precourt Institute for Energy, is fueled by $100 million in donated funds led by alumni Jay Precourt and the husband-and-wife team of Thomas Steyer and Kat Taylor.

I attended the event held in Memorial Auditorium, where President Hennessy opened with the formal announcement. At the Stanford Roundtable, held in the fall, Hennessy himself said that his dream is that one of the big solutions to the global energy problem will be pioneered at Stanford. Following his remarks, there was a panel discussion with guests John Doerr, a world renown venture capitalist with Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers, and Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. Also on the panel was Jim Sweeney, director of the Precourt Institute on Energy Efficiency and professor in the Management Science & Engineering department, Sally Benson, director of the Global Climate & Energy Project at Stanford, and Jane Woodward, CEO of MAP and consulting professor to Stanford on energy courses. The panel was moderated by Lynn Orr, former GCEP Director and inaugural director of the new Precourt Institute for Energy.

Below are the notes I took during this event:

Hennessy’s remarks

• Three key motivations for addressing the global problem on energy: 1) reducing foreign dependence on energy 2) instability of pricing for current energy sources 3) global climate change being the seemingly insurmountable problem of our time
• Stanford has increased energy funding by 7x over the past few years – and it’s not enough.
• The Precourt Institute for Energy (PIE) will house a various of centers. The Precourt Institute for Energy Efficency will become the Precourt Center for Energy Efficiency. Also housed in the PIE will be the Global Climate & Project Project, and a new TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy, which will focus on renewable sources of energy.
• This problem is multidisciplinary – we need basic science, engineering, policy, and industry working together to solve this problem.

Lynn Orr’s remarks

• The initiative will involve 136 faculty across 21 departments.
• The new TomKat Center will focus on renewable energy – generation, smart electric grid, and energy storage.
• There will also be extensive policy analysis, markets, carbon pricing, etc.
• 6 to 8 new faculty appointments + 22 graduate fellowships for energy research + postdocs. All together some $30M a year in research funding.
• There will be an Energy Research Innovation Fund for $2M in seed funding.
• More energy related courses and degree programs will be introduced.

Panel Discussion

Eric Schmidt: At Google, it started with energy efficiency. I was surprised to hear the payback for a few million dollar in energy efficiency investments was just 18 months. That’s quick! My thought is: why isn’t everyone doing this? it’s like there are $100 bills lying on the floor. Google has a role to play in this discussion, and we created the Google Energy Plan of Clean Energy 2030 to outline our vision. We need to regulation to help keep energy usage constant in the years ahead, just as California has done successfully for a while now. This will reduce the need for the high capital costs that large new generation plants require.

Jim Sweeney: There are so many opportunities for saving energy. Our studies have shown that 30% of personal energy use can be reduced in places where the benefits are greater than the costs. But we need social skills to tackle this. We said 30 years ago that smoking is bad for you, but people still smoke today. It’s going to take a lot of programs working in parallel to effect this change. Management matters for leadership in corporations. We’ve got to get the prices right for carbon. We need to address the agency cost problem, where energy companies make decisions that benefit them at your or the planet’s expense, but say they are doing it for you. Eric has said there are $100 bills lying on the ground – I’d say that many of them are glued down, so we need to figure out the best ways to get them up.

Sally Benson: It’s important to realize that today, there is no shortage of energy resources. 30 years ago we thought that we were running out of everything, but not today, when you look at sunlight, wind, biomass, nuclear, and fossil fuels. The critical question is how do we extract what we need from them in an environmentally sound way. We need to fund research across the entire spectrum. Nano-materials for energy storage, new generation solar panels, smart electric grid, grid integration of renewables, carbon capture and sequestration, and even better ways of using coal. 50% of the electricity in the US currently comes from coal, and we won’t switch all them off immediately.

Jane Woodward: It’s tremendous how far we’ve come. Twenty years ago, there was just a small club of faculty here looking at the energy issue, but now there is over a hundred! I started a course on energy, and I was so worried about people enrolling that I hired a plane to fly around campus with a giant banner advertising the course. 35 of the 40 students on the first day came because they saw the banner. Now, there are hundreds of students showing up for courses. 20 years ago, it was the environmental issues that motivated students, and they came to energy from the backdoor. 10 years ago, it was the awareness of the connectedness of energy systems. Today, we’re finding a lot of it is that students are realizing that what higher calling is there than to tackle the biggest problem facing the planet today?

John Doerr: Look, it’s about economics. The Internet supports a trillion dollar economy with 1.2B users. The economy for energy is six trillion and has 4B users. This has the potential of being one of the greatest opportunities in history. At Kleiner Perkins, we focus on energy systems. And profitability. We see profitability as a sign of what is most probable to make it. What are the big components of the system? 6% of the domestic energy demand is fed by renewable energy sources, while 30% is bought. Al Gore (who joined as a partner at Kleiner Perkins on their green team) has a saying: in 2007, the United States borrowed over a billion dollars a day to buy Middle East oil that we then burn in this country, where we are left with the pollution and harm the planet. America is behind in this race, which is why this new initiative is so important. Kleiner just doesn’t look at American firms. We’ve made five investments in Germany because of the technical centers there. If you look at batteries, the Japanese are way ahead of us, we just import them. If you look at the top 30 firms in the solar/wind/battery technology, only 6 of them are US firms.

General Answers to Questions and My Own Comments

Transportation

A lot of  questions and discussion on transportation. Schmidt says we need to look at the whole picture. Plugin hybrids feature stellar fuel economy, but 50% of the electricity used to power plugin hybrids are coming from coal plants, so overall you’re not making a real impact. Benson says we’ve got to decarbonise the electric grid, which is actually a phrase that my prof for Grid Integration of Renewables uses a lot. Transportation systems are really challenging.

John Doerr says that batteries are the holy grail.

Though I think that Doerr is combing both batteries in the sense of using them for transportation purposes, but also in energy storage for the electricity grid to counter the intermittent nature of renewable sources like solar and wind. If you’ve got a legitimate way of solving this problem, you can write your own term sheet for Series A.

Sweeney said a few words about meeting the AB-32 standards. AB-32 is the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, and there are certainly behavorial choices to be made, such as driving smaller cars with less horsepower. But he’s concerned with utilization, not simply what kind of vehicles are in use. How can we more effectively reduce vehicular miles driven? This leads to looking at restructuring how people live, and we’ve got to bring in the regional planners. We have a tax system with an influence on regional planning that affects where our living, commercial, and industry sectors are that directly affects vehicular miles driven. How do we align these interests?

It’s interesting that Stanford doesn’t have a program in transportation, isn’t it?

Last week, John Doerr spoke to Congress about the green economy and such. Towards the end, Lynn Orr asked John Doerr what he told them. Doerr told them six things:

1) Use economic stimulus package to build the smart grid.
2) Put a price on carbon. Doerr prefers a revenue-neutral carbon tax, but thinks that Congress will go with a cap and trade system.
3) Institute a natural renewable energy portfolio standard, a 20% target.
4) Utility regulation & incentives to get their interests aligned with the big picture.
5) Funding research in energy. Federal funding for energy in 2008 was less than $1B, and most of that went to federal labs.
6) And finally, do not overlook education. We need to support our students to go into science and engineering. We have a great system here in the U.S. – we bring the world’s brightest to our universities, train them, and then kick them out. We need to be stapling a green card to every diploma in science and engineering.

And if any of you think Doerr is approaching this problem from a purely profit making angle, I’d encourage you watch his alarming and restless TED talk about the global energy problem – a talk where he chokes and tears up wondering how he’s going to talk to his daughter in 20 years about what he did to make the world better for her.

I’m obviously excited about this new initiative. It’s a lot to digest at once. I was telling Joey that I’d love to have some of that money come my way and fund a 2nd Master’s degree in the field of energy.

Mozzi showed me the secret to an excellent made-from-scratch hearty red pasta sauce: tomato sauce (in the can) and half a bottle of red wine. Use that with the usual sauteed onions, garlic, mushrooms, and diced tomatoes and you’re in business.

I watched The Dark Knight on Blu-Ray on a friend’s 1080p 28’’ TV. Blu-Ray is for the real folks. They aren’t kidding. Truly spectacular.

Each of my two (large) energy classes in the civil & environmental engineering department is 50% made up of girls. My energy course in the electrical engineering department has 5% girls.

Finally got around to listening to the Fleet Foxes, and they are amazing. Got their album. Blue Ridge Mountains is absolutely worth listening to.

One of my roommate got a mini-fridge for more space. But not for drinks. Though it is convenient for that, no?

On the topic of drinks, Ed from the building across had his beer brewing gear out in the courtyard again. He’s making an oatmeal stout and a pale ale. Gonna call the pale ale “Barack & Tan”. One of his roommates plays the violin in the symphony (I hear the music wafting through the air at night).

Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is speaking Friday on campus.

New favorite snack – chilled can of pineapple. Delicious right out of the can.

Jeffrey Heer, the guy who created the Prefuse and Flare data visualization toolkits, is actually an HCI professor at Stanford. He’s teaching a class in data viz.

Software pet peeve: F5 in PowerPoint. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen people try to hit the 2 pixel square button that is the ‘Start Slideshow’ button in the lower left corner of PowerPoint’s interface. Hit F5! Just hit F5!  Or if you want to be even sexier, use a trick that Nader told me about: when you’re ready to present, rename your file with a .pps extension. When you double-click the file to open it, it’ll go directly into presentation mode!

A massive snowstorm tore through Chicago this past weekend. I made sure to send Sapana the Saturday forecast for Stanford: