Andrew Hargadon

Racing down the hydrogen highway...

Today's WSJ charts the recent decline of ethanol's prospects and suggests the business press, and mass media, has removed from the bio-fuel its most-favored-panacea status (Ethanol Craze Cools
As Doubts Multiply). 

Gone are the in-depth articles charting the return of the family farm and the fall of the house of Saud.  The nay-sayers (who have been saying nay all along) now get the attention:

A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded that biofuels "offer a cure [for oil dependence] that is worse than the disease." A National Academy of Sciences study said corn-based ethanol could strain water supplies. The American Lung Association expressed concern about a form of air pollution from burning ethanol in gasoline. Political cartoonists have taken to skewering the fuel for raising the price of food to the world's poor.

From over here on the science side of the debate, there has been little doubt that corn-based ethanol was not ready for prime-time: it's energy balance (the energy needed to produce ethanol relative to energy gained from its production) was within debating distance of zero. The only advantages of corn-based ethanol were a $0.51 tax credit for every gallon of used and a $0.54 tariff on every gallon imported.

The hope for scientists, though, was that enough investments in corn-based solutions would spill over and advance the (more promising but still immature) cellulosic ethanol. While this has been true recently, it comes at a potentially serious cost in the long run.

Should corn-based ethanol lose its status as the technological cure for our energy and climate change woes, it could fall pretty hard.  Heard much from hydrogen lately?  In 2003, Bush proposed spending $1.2 billion to fund research in Hydrogen. In 2004, California's Governor Schwarzenegger announced:

I am going to encourage the building of a hydrogen highway to take us to the environmental future... I intend to show the world that economic growth and the environment can coexist. And if you want to see it, then come to California....

And senate bill 1505, signed in early 2007, turned this vision into a statute.  Hydrogen has since lost much of its luster, along with much of its research funding...perhaps when politicians realized that ethanol promised to cure the same woes while also appealing to the Iowa primary voters. But that's another story.

What interests me is the question of what happens when good technologies go bad--when promising technologies are brought to market prematurely, with too many promises made and too few kept. It happens in countless start-ups, when emerging technologies turn out to need twice (or more) the development time than their business plans promised and in large organizations, when the demands of Wall Street made it too tempting to accelerate the next generation technology.

When the inevitable disappointment comes, the technology becomes a  pariah--outcast and shunned. Unfortunately, the scientists and engineers who worked their tails off trying to deliver on the unrealistic promises, usually get hit the hardest: "There goes ol' Burt--he worked on the Newton project. Hasn't been the same since." And another promising technology is set back decades (and the generation who pioneered it is lost) for no other reason that that very promise.

Perhaps the biggest tragedies happen on the national stage--when new technologies move from the spotlight to the scrap heap because they failed to live up to the unrealistic promises of a few scientists, investors, or politicians. Worse when so many others, urging caution, were ignored.   

The energy revolution, in perspective

Few would argue anymore that we need an revolution in the ways we produce and consume energy--both for global security and climate change. And there have been plenty of calls for a Moonshot or Manhattan project that would solve the problem (e.g., the ethanol mousetrap).  But two very critical and very sobering facts of life that must be faced when talking about innovations in energy.

First, that no single solution will save the day. Princeton scientists Pacala and Socolow crystallized this discussion with their framework of "Stabilization Wedges" and their calculations of how much impact could be expected from changes in existing  energy technologies. In short: no one technological innovation will account for the complete solution. Indeed, the authors identify 15 independent technological regimes that could and should be addressed.

Second and more sobering, is that any one solution faces astounding resistance.  Recent news brought another example of just how difficult change can be in established systems.  On Nov. 14th, ConEd cut the last line of Edison's original Pearl Street Station network, opened Sept. 14th, 1882.

The last snip of Con Ed’s direct current system will take place at 10 East 40th Street, near the Mid-Manhattan Library. That building, like the thousands of other direct current users that have been transitioned over the last several years, now has a converter installed on the premises that can take alternating electricity from the Con Ed power grid and adapt it on premises. Until now, Con Edison had been converting alternating to direct current for the customers who needed it — old buildings on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side that used direct current for their elevators for example. The subway, which has its own converters, also provides direct current through its third rail, in large part because direct current electricity was the dominant system in New York City when the subway first developed out of the early trolley cars. 

Edison's Direct Current (DC) system was dethroned within a decade of its introduction by Westinghouse's (and Tesla's) Alternating Current (AC) system and yet, here we are, 125 years later, finally and literally pulling the plug on that original system. Granted, it's for a small area of New York City.  But if it was such a small area--why did it take so long to make the change?

The entrepreneurs and venture capitalists of the Silicon Valley are turning their attention to energy and climate change with the full intent of revolutionizing those sectors with the same modus operandi that enabled them to lead the information revolution.   But the circumstances are quite different.  Energy is a brownfield--the installed systems are as difficult to resect from existing physical infrastructure (buildings, homes, and automobiles) as they are from the political infrastructure (from municipalities, states, and Washington). 

We may need revolutionary new technologies to save us from our old ones, but we also need revolutionary new ways of changing. The revolution, if it comes, will come by changing the way we change.