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Lessons Learned From Google's Green Energy Bust
the_newsbeagle writes In 2007, Google boldly declared a new initiative to invent a green energy technology that produced cheaper electricity than coal-fired power plants. Sure, energy researchers had been hammering at this task for decades, but Google hoped to figure it out in a few years. They didn't. Instead, Google admitted defeat and shut down the project in 2011. In a admirable twist, however, two of the project's engineers then dedicated themselves to learning from the project's failure. What did it mean that one of the world's most ambitious and capable innovation companies couldn't invent a cheap renewable energy tech?
I think this speaks a lot about how companies and the population are increasingly thinking in rather short terms and how little respect the modern tech elite have for those who came before them. There seems to be this attitude that difficult problems are only unsolved because the 'wrong' people have looked at it and flush with arrogance for solving comparatively simple internet related ones they believe that they are smarter and thus will quickly tackle what those 'researchers' and 'old fogies' could not.
And when gratification is not instant, they move on.
I also see this, on a smaller but more insidious scale, in the almost pathological desire to not learn from the past developers have been fetishizing. Too often learning roots or old technologies 'taints' a person with 'old' ideas rather than teaching them lessons others have already learned so that they can move on from there. So many 'new' technologies that when the developers are asked 'ok, this is great, but how do you plan to address the issues that were encountered last time?' they just look at you blankly and claim this is new and innovative, or that you just don't understand.
Ok, got a bit off topic there ^_^
The big news to me isn't that they weren't able to invent the tech, but their estimate that even if their most optimistic scenario had come true w.r.t. clean energy tech that it still wouldn't be enough to avoid the "really bad" scenario w.r.t. climate change (if you trust Hansen's models).
I think people would settle for fusion. It seems that fusion is also a difficult problem to crack.
It is, and will continue to be, so long as governemnts keep paying people to not build fusion reactors. My guess is that, when we finally get a working fusion reactor, it will be developed in a few years by a company that completely ignores all the 'basic research' governments have funded over the last fifty years.
Solar cell costs are plunging, while their efficiencies rise. I predict a collision, a market and a profit.
You might see one, if you could just plug solar cells into your house and magically get power all day. Most of our power usage in our house is at night, when... oops... there's no solar power.
No, actually, in America the highest electrical usage is in the afternoon. It's driven by air conditioning loads in summer, along with the fact that business and industry tends to use the most power only during working hours. There's a slight bump at about 7, but it's not as big as the afternoon peak.
Quick calculations suggest that you can replace about 10% of US electrical usage with solar with no disruption at all, and something like 20 to 30 percent with only minimal disruption.
That's not enough to solve the energy problem. But, with the electricity market in the US at something like half a trillion dollars a year, that's a substantial market (and substantial profit)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com