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?

Comments

Bad sign.

[jythie]

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 ^_^

This is a good reminder for all technocrats

[dunkelfalke]

I have seen - predominantly on Slashdot, obviously, but also elsewhere, a sort of naive technocrats (who are often also libertarians) believing that as soon as some technology is needed, the invisible hand of the market magically creates this technology so one only has to sit and wait for this magic solution to appear out of thin air. The more down-to-earth kind of these people even tried to explain this magic by telling that this process happens by throwing enough money at a problem.

Unfortunately - and TFA is a picture book example of this - reality doesn't work that way. Breakthroughs don't happen by magic, they happen by meticulous research and a shitload of small steps. Solutions don't suddenly appear just when they are needed, a long lead time of research is required. And sometimes this new technology never comes up at all.

Re:What does it mean?

[GameboyRMH]

If you don't like the choices previous generations made, you first should figure out WHY they made those choices before deciding they were wrong.

And you can learn a lot in the process of finding this out. Sometimes I wonder why nobody has tried X, I look it up and 9 times out of 10 there are good reasons, and I learn what they are instead of wasting time. Then there's the 1 time out of 10, like when I asked why nobody invented a hydraulic anti-roll system for cars that can also control squat and dive, years before FRICS was used in F1 (originally I was thinking it could get around the problem of sway bars getting bent in offroad racing).