Saket Vora

This is awfully scattered, but bear with me. At the ThinkGreen forum last week, the lunch keynote was by Mark Mills, a physicist who has worked in a variety of capacities including engineer, consultant to the White House Science Office under Reagan, Dept of Energy, national labs, policy, and writing. It was a wonderful keynote, engaging and offering a perspective I hadn’t heard (and you go to enough cleantech focused gatherings, you start hearing the same things). I wish I could have gotten a transcript of it, but here are a few takeaways:

• When looking at the energy sector, there is really oil and everything else, particularly when examining the production mix. For electric power, burning oil makes up roughly the same order that electric power is encroaching upon the domains that oil dominates (ie, transportation). I think for electric power production, oil is like 1 o 3% of total.
• The myth of energy efficiency. Mills says it has been the policy of every administration to support energy efficiency measures, but every single year there is a net increase in energy consumption. Energy efficiency isn’t necessarily motivated towards decreasing energy consumption. The fact is, as energy efficiency improves, consumption increases.
• For example, if a Google data center used ENIACs, it would consume the amount of power that Manhattan  does. Because computers became more energy efficient, they were made affordable and practical to more people, so more were bought and brought online. The net effect? The energy consumed by the information technology sector is on par with that of the entire aviation industry.
• Don’t forget about energy density. Mills used the drive range of an automobile to compare sources. If you made a normal car run on lead acid batteries, it’d go roughly 20 miles. With lithium-ion batteries in the same amount of space, 100 miles. Ethanol gets you 400 miles, while oil (gas) achieves 700 miles. This is why airplanes will always run on oil.
• The last point was that while people like to use BTUs as a standard form of energy accounting, not all BTUs are comparable like apples to apples. To get the energy (BTUs) contained in a barrel of oil, it would cost you $20 if you burned wood. Barrel of oil right now is ~$50. It would cost you $70 if you used ethanol to get the same amount of BTUs. If you took a generic kWh of electricity and expressed that in a barrel, it would cost $200. That’s just generic electricity; if you wanted regulated and filtered electricity like the kind needed to run a data center, it would cost you $10,000. And finally, if you took the kind of energy in a laser beam and priced it in terms of energy in barrels of oil equivalent, it would cost $200,000 per barrel.
• Mills told us to note the entropy. It takes effort to lower teh entropy of a system. Burning wood is high entropy.  A laser is highly ordered, coherent energy -  one that has very low entropy.

Here’s one that I heard Saul Griffith, a noted inventor, say in his TED talk. He recounted how he was at a Silicon Valley event where a VC asked him what he worked on. Griffith, who did his PhD thesis on self-replicated machines,  has worked on a novel way of creating cheap eyeglasses for the developing world, smart electronic rope, and most recently the idea of using kites as a platform for solar PV. Griffith said “hardware” and the VC responded with “how quaint.” Griffith wondered about this, and thought to himself that the really big problems facing the world right now actually need hardware to solve: clean energy. clean water. cleaner, more functional materials. I would add public health to that list.

IT can play a big role in helping us tackle those problems, but eventually you will need to move beyond just bits and bytes. Not being a software engineer or an agile ‘hacker’, I sometimes feel like a fish out of water here; particularly a year ago when I first arrived. Web 2.0 this and Web 2.0 that. I actually had a recruiter at a job fair — he initiated the conversation, not me — ask me what the heck I was doing there without a software background or interest.

So Griffith’s comments resonated with me. The big problems in the world still have much to benefit from software and IT, but those aren’t the end all and be all of the solution.