Graphene Supercapacitors: The End Of Batteries?

V3Solar Spin Cell = 8 Cents/kWh?

January 24, 2013 Zachary Shahan

Quite frankly, if the company’s numbers are correct, this could be the biggest solar news of the decade, or even a greater timespan. (And CleanTechnica got the inside scoop — due to our sincere passion for helping the world, and probably also our status as the top cleantech or clean energy site in the world.)

As a quick refresher, we’ve covered V3Solar before, back when the name was Solarphasec. See: Solarphasec — Solar Power Meets Art (I think that includes a good intro of the tech, as well as an exclusive, real-world photo of an early version of a V3Solar cone or “Spin Cell.”)

But a simple intro of the tech isn’t the groundbreaking story of the day (that’s old news) — the story of the day is the tremendously low cost of the tech, and that’s what could change the world; that’s what could stimulate a more transformative distributed energy revolution than anything we’ve seen to date.

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Am I hopeful? Yes. In case you aren’t aware, the average cost of electricity in the US is about 12 cents per kWh. The average cost of electricity from solar PV in the US is now about 10-15 cents per kWh. The cost of V3Solar’s Spin Cell, as noted in the title (and based on tests that the company considers to actually be conservative — meaning the cost could actually be lower), was quoted to me as being 8 cents per kWh! Bill Rever, a very well qualified 3rd party solar specialist has apparently verified the cost projection. You can see his full technical review here.

When I received this information and was astounded at the low price, my source wrote: “Yes. We are excited. We think we can go below that, but we want to stay conservative.”

So, 8¢/kWh is two-thirds the price of retail electricity, and nearly half the price of current solar technology. If the cost projection is true, that’s astounding, and revolutionary. (Notes: the 8¢/kWh figure is LCOE; and the BOM cost is 59 cents/Wp, including racking, tracking, and the inverter.)

Here’s a chart showing how the Spin Cell would compete with other energy technologies:

Larger image via this link.

Am I cautious? Yes. Until a new technology is on the market, I’m always cautious. And I’m no solar scientist or engineer. A production prototype is still in development, and a low-volume production phase would follow that before advancing on to the mass-market production phase. A lot can change between the lab, the manufacturing floor, and the Home Depot shelf. I have no capability of saying if it will or not. But let’s not forget that we’ve put a man on the moon, we’ve now got a world of information in our computers and even on our phones, we can talk to people across the world via tiny microphones and can receives tweets from astronauts out in space, we can play video games with almost real-life visuals, and more. Changes happen. Technology advances. Every “breakthrough” doesn’t translate into a commercial product, but some do. We’ll simply have to wait to see if this is one of those technologies.

 

V3Solar’s Spin Cell

I shared a link above to a good overview of the technology, but if you’re not the type to click through on links, or simply want a bit more info, here’s another summary based on info from a “corporate overview” that was passed on to me:

Revolutionizing Solar

I think everyone can now picture a conventional solar panel. But a phone 20 years ago certainly didn’t look like a phone today. And solar technology today may look nothing like solar technology in 20 years. And if V3Solar’s technology is anything close to as cheap as presented above, there’s a good chance solar installations will soon look much different.

“V3Solar has invented, and is now in the process of commercializing, the first major change to flat panel PV technology in over 50 years – the V3 Spin Cell. For too long, the world believed solar was flat,” V3Solar writes.

“Using specialized lensing and a rotating, conical shape, the Spin Cell can concentrate the sunlight 30X onto one sun mono PV with no heat degradation. This increases the Power Density while lowering the Total Cost of Ownership and Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE), which is estimated to be $.08/kWh for the Spin Cell (see spreadsheet).”

Here’s more on this in a bit simpler language and more detail:

1. Concentrated light reduces the amount of PV by a factor of the amount of concentration – 30X sun concentration requires 1/30th of the PV for the same power output.
2. Dynamic Spin cools the PV so that one sun mono PV can handle a concentration of more than 30X suns.
3. The dynamic spin increases the efficiency of the PV by 20%, effectively increasing 20% efficient PV to 24% efficiency.
4. Spinning the PV under multiple lenses creates “an additive” effect of sunlight.

“The Spin Cell does have additional BOM costs for the magnets, the power electronics and the form factor, but these costs are mitigated by the increased production through integrated tracking, inverter, and racking.
 Bottom line is the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE). The company contracted with Bill Rever to complete a 3rd party technical analysis on the V3Solar technology and to verify all of the numbers for the LCOE.”

A second product based on the same technology, called CoolSpin, integrates with existing concentrated photovoltaics (CPV), but it lowers their material costs by 34%, because it addresses CPV’s key shortcoming.

“Being able to use the abundant and cheap one sun mono PV is a significant market advantage. Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) has been forced to rely on expensive, exotic, and scarce materials to handle the increased heat, costing up to 400X more.

Using less PV for the same power output is significant because the cost of the lensing material is 1/10th the cost of one sun mono PV.”

CoolSpin is a simpler product to design and manufacture and the company expects it will be in full production by the middle of 2013. You can read about Cool Spin on the V3Solar website.

Here are some more charts and tables on the above information:

Here is a slide from the company’s investment deck that explains how the automated manufacturing will work:

Preparing For Manufacturing & Mass Market

“The Spin Cell is currently undergoing refinement and cost analysis at NectarDesign.com, a Californian based industrial design house, as a precursor to commercial production. The Company is also engaged in negotiations with potential licensees in both the United States and abroad for high volume manufacturing of the Spin Cell.”


Through partnerships with manufacturers and major solar companies, and their specific licensing model, V3Solar is looking to get its Spin Cell to mass market quickly.

Notably, I also learned from my contact that V3Solar already has over 4 GW of requests for orders. To put that into perspective, the US currently has about 7 GW of installed solar power capacity. 4 GW is impressive! Again, we’ll see what happens after the prototype test, but it’s clear that a handful of big players are interested in this.

As one example of a potential order, a group specializing in military projects has signed a deal with V3Solar to develop 1000 Mobile Energy Production systems for the US Army, at $500K each. For this project, the Spin Cell would be integrated with the batteries of a major multi-national corporation (I can’t share the name, but they are huge). The batteries and Spin Cells will be held in shipping containers for transport, which will then open up like a flower upon arrival to cheaply produce clean energy. This will not only save money, but will also reduce supply-line casualties. A similar system is being developed for disaster relief.

The Mission

In a nutshell, here’s the company mission: “A new spin on solar to capture 3% of the energy market with a licensing model that eliminates CAPEX costs, mitigates risk, and diversifies production.”

Again, to put “3% of the energy market” into perspective, all solar power installed in the US to date currently accounts for about 0.5-1% of the energy market — V3Solar has some ambitious targets, and it plans to hit those through cooperation and partnerships that are good for the average citizen.

Spin Cell Benefits

In summary, here’s a list of the technology’s key benefits, according to the company:

• Dual axis tracking from conical design
• Increased Power Density
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership
• “Power Stair casing” — as the PV spins past multiple lenses, an additive effect of sunlight is created – a first for any solar device.
• Integrated racking and ease of installation

Through the concentration of sunlight, the Spin Cell uses only 5% of the amount of PV as flat panels to produce the same power, thus reducing the cost/watt.

“The Spin Cell does have additional BOM costs for the magnets, the power electronics and the form factor, but these costs are mitigated by the increased production through integrated tracking, inverter, and racking. Bottom line is the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE).”

There’s a lot more to write about the company and the technology, but I think I’ll leave it at that for now. 8¢ per kWh would be astounding, and combined with some progressive goals the company has, we may genuinely see it transform the energy industry.

All images via V3Solar

Clean Technica (http://s.tt/1yUBC)

Denmark's 50 percent wind commitment and a path to fully renewable power

By James Holloway | Ars Technica

Denmark's Horns Rev offshore wind farm as it stands today

Denmark has committed to generating 50 percent of its electricity from wind sources by the year 2020, by which time the country hopes to have reduced CO2 emissions by 34 percent compared to 1990 levels. This renewed commitment to wind forms the central pillar in an energy bill that commits to obtaining 35 percent of the country's energy from renewable sources by that time. And Denmark actively aims to lower energy consumption, with 2020 usage 12 percent lower than that of 2006.

"Denmark will once again be the global leader in the transition to green energy," said Martin Lidegaard, Denmark's Minister for Climate, Energy and Building. "This will prepare us for a future with increasing prices for oil and coal. Moreover, it will create some of the jobs that we need so desperately, now and in the coming years."

The bill passed with a near-unanimous 171 votes out of the parliament's 179 seats.

"Once again" is a telling choice of words from Lidegaard, but it raises a question: if not Denmark, what country was leading the pack with renewable energy prior to the bill's passing? Certainly, wind already makes up a higher proportionate of Denmark's energy mix than it does any other country's—21 percent as of 2010, with Portugal (18 percent) and Spain (16 percent) not far behind.

Indeed, Denmark tops the wind charts whichever metric you care to throw at it: installed capacity per person, per square kilometer, per unit of GDP—as of 2010 (PDF) at any rate.

But when it comes to the contribution made by all renewable sources of energy, Denmark fell into eighth place based on installed power in 2009, behind Sweden, Latvia, Finland, Austria, Portugal, Estonia, and Romania. Even factoring in Denmark's aspirations for 2020 (according to the Renewables Global Status Report 2011(PDF), published prior to this bill), the country would only be elevated to sixth place, assuming it meets its target of a 30 percent renewable energy share. (These figures are for the EU alone.)

EU renewables shares of final energy, 2005 and 2009, with targets for 2020

Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century

But Denmark has only raised the bar by 5 percent of its total energy use, to 35 percent. Sweden met its target for a 50-percent renewable share in 2009, thanks to the gargantuan contribution made by the country's hydroelectric infrastructure. By what measure, then, does the new announcement return Denmark to the top of the league?

The short answer is, it doesn't. The government sees the 2020 targets as stepping stones to the end goal—100 percent of the country's energy to be supplied from renewable sources by 2050. But even that wouldn't leave it on top; Scotland is aiming for a 100-percent renewable energy contribution by 2020.

Wind has a tremendous role to play in Denmark's renewable grand expansion, with 1500MW of new offshore wind capacity due for completion by the 2020 deadline. A third installation, with 400MW of capacity, will be built at Horns Rev; while a 600MW farm will be built in the Baltic at Kriegers Flak (where hurricanes aremercifully absent). The latter has been described as the world's first offshore "supergrid," and will additionally provide electricity to Germany.

But it would be misleading to portray Denmark as a country putting all of its eggs into a windy basket. It isn't so much as placing a "price on carbon" as the OECD has recommended. Denmark seems to be making efforts(PDF) to ban it outright, phasing out coal power generation in favor of biomass energy and investing in geothermal energy.

At the smaller scale, Denmark is banning the installation of oil-fired and natural gas boilers in new buildings from 2013, and providing over $7.5 million to fund the conversion of domestic boilers to renewable equivalents. Further investment is being made available to industries that use renewable energy to fuel manufacture and the like, as well as for the promotion of CHP (combined heat and power) schemes.

The government also recognizes the need to modernize the grid to accommodate intermittent renewable sources (an oft-cited stumbling block for the rollout of renewable energy in the US), with an agreement being put in place with electricity distributors for remotely-readable "smart" electricity metering.

In the arena of transport, the government is making $12.5 million of subsidies available for electric vehicle recharging stations, and mandating that all fuel must be at least 10-percent biofuel by 2020. It has also committed to eliminating fossil fuels entirely from the island of Samsø, a proto-renewable energy community where 100 percent of electricity is already provided by wind power.

If you'll permit a West Wing reference, Denmark might be thought of as adopting one of President Bartlet's theories of economics and applying it to energy policy—at least partially. "Everybody's got a magic lever they want you to push. I studied economics all my life but in this job only a fool is ever certain. You don't push any one lever; you wanna push a little on them all." Denmark's certainly pulling all the levers—not a little, though. A lot.

Notre Dame researchers develop paint-on solar cells

by Prashant Kamat
21-Dec-2011
University of Notre Dame 

Imagine if the next coat of paint you put on the outside of your home generates electricity from light—electricity that can be used to power the appliances and equipment on the inside.

A team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame have made a major advance toward this vision by creating an inexpensive "solar paint" that uses semiconducting nanoparticles to produce energy.

"We want to do something transformative, to move beyond current silicon-based solar technology," says Prashant Kamat, John A. Zahm Professor of Science in Chemistry and Biochemistry and an investigator in Notre Dame's Center for Nano Science and Technology (NDnano), who leads the research.

"By incorporating power-producing nanoparticles, called quantum dots, into a spreadable compound, we've made a one-coat solar paint that can be applied to any conductive surface without special equipment."

The team's search for the new material, described in the journal ACS Nano, centered on nano-sized particles of titanium dioxide, which were coated with either cadmium sulfide or cadmium selenide. The particles were then suspended in a water-alcohol mixture to create a paste.

When the paste was brushed onto a transparent conducting material and exposed to light, it created electricity.

"The best light-to-energy conversion efficiency we've reached so far is 1 percent, which is well behind the usual 10 to 15 percent efficiency of commercial silicon solar cells," explains Kamat.

"But this paint can be made cheaply and in large quantities. If we can improve the efficiency somewhat, we may be able to make a real difference in meeting energy needs in the future."

"That's why we've christened the new paint, Sun-Believable," he adds.

Kamat and his team also plan to study ways to improve the stability of the new material.

NDnano is one of the leading nanotechnology centers in the world. Its mission is to study and manipulate the properties of materials and devices, as well as their interfaces with living systems, at the nano-scale.

Is Cancer Epidemic in America?

The Disease of the Nuclear Age

by RUSSELL D. HOFFMAN

 

A friend and I were looking back at 2011.

She remarked about all the cancer she’s seen this year.  Last month she lost a close friend — a woman in her 30s.  Another friend, 40, has bladder cancer for the second time.

My step-mother recently made a similar remark about cancer in my own family.  She lives on the other side of the country and the family is scattered all over the globe.  One brother-in-law has stomach cancer which has metastasized, and many of us are cancer survivors (including me (bladder, 2007)).  And on my own newsletter list I know of a number of ongoing cancer cases as well.

It feels like an epidemic, but of course, the epidemiologists who work for the state or the federal government would undoubtedly tell us they can’t discern anything “statistically significant” (they love that phrase!) from our “data” — it’s just a few random points, it doesn’t show a trend.  That’s true of course — but we’re talking about real lives of our friends and families, not raw, impersonal numbers.  We’re looking for answers.

The epidemiologist will also point out that cancer will strike about one in two Americans at some point in their lives, and will be the underlying cause of death for somewhere between one in four, and one in three of us.  So they’re not really looking for an epidemic.  They’re looking for a worsening trend within an ONGOING epidemic.

Baseline radiation values vary enormously from one location to another.  Accurate data isn’t available.  By the time something is occurring so frequently that researchers find it to be “statistically significant,” it might already be killing tens of thousands of people annually, or even more.

As an example, it took thousands of carefully-done studies to show there was a legally-defensible, statistically-significant connection between cigarettes and lung cancer, heart disease,throat, lip, esophageal, stomach, colon, and rectal cancer, and low birth weight among the babies of smokers.  All these and many additional health effects are now well-established, yet each connection was hard to prove.

But even today about a billion people think the statistics are wrong, or that they don’t apply to them for any of about a billion reasons.  They smoke anyway (including my friend, who’s excuse is that she only smokes one or two cigarettes a day).

Radiation deaths are far more difficult to prove than smoking deaths, because the source is almost always unknown in its quantity, who it was delivered to, and when.  A two-pack-a-day smoker knows he or she is a two-pack a day-smoker.

Who got what dose from Fukushima?  Nobody knows, not even in Japan.  So proper epidemiological studies will be nearly impossible to accomplish.  Three radiation experts — Robert Alvarez, Joseph Mangano, and Janette Sherman — have made an attempt to calculate Fukushima’s impact.  They estimate that nearly 14,000 excess deaths may have occurred (including over 800 infants) in America in the first few months after Fukushima (see below).

The nuclear industry will tell you they don’t see anything unusual going on.  They’ll remind you that: “No one was harmed by Three Mile Island.”  Independent studies indicate otherwise.  They’ll remind you that: “No one has ever been harmed by living downwind of a properly operating nuclear reactor”.  Again, independent studies indicate otherwise.  And they’ll tell you that: “Hardly anyone was harmed by Chernobyl” but again, independent analysis indicates as many as a MILLION people have already died because of Chernobyl.

And of course, they’ll say that: “No member of the public was harmed by Fukushima” but they’ll be wrong about that, too.

People don’t like to talk about cancer.  But ever since cancer “came out of the closet” about forty years ago, it’s felt like an epidemic even though the obituaries stopped routinely listing the CAUSE of death — about thirty years ago.  Independent studies of cancer clusters have become much more difficult since we all started clamming up about who we are, where we live, where we work, and so on.  Studies are even more difficult because we move so often, change jobs and companies, partners and eating habits.

And when a victim does manage to reach a settlement with a polluter, the terms and conditions are invariably kept secret, making the clusters that much harder to find for everyone else.

My friend is not a nuclear activist and wasn’t talking about Fukushima and its aftermath.

She just was wondering why so many people seem to have cancer these days.

“Could be Fukushima” I said.

“What’s that?” she responded.

“Remember that nuclear accident in Japan last spring?  It’s still spewing radioactive poisons into the environment, and is still out of control.  We need to shut them all down, including San Onofre.”   (SanO is our local pair of poorly-run nuclear reactors, about 15 miles away.)

“Where will we get our energy?” she asked.

I answered that San Onofre only supplies about 7% of California’s power, which could easily be replaced by solar, wind, etc..  If I had more time, I would have made her aware of some other considerations besides just where our electricity will come from.

Here are some other reasons she might be thinking we can’t shut San Onofre:

“Wind turbines kill birds!” 

They do.  So do plate glass windows in high-rise buildings, and so do cars, trucks, busses, trains and airplanes, deforestation and climate change — but no one seems to care about those!  Only wind turbines.  And there are a variety of ways to increase wind turbine blade visibility to birds, ways to site them and so on, that can greatly reduce the incidence of bird strikes.

“You’d have to cover the whole country with solar panels!” 

Not true.  Actually an area in the southwest approximately 100 miles on each side would be enough — and much of that can be found on existing rooftops, which are mostly just tar-covered, wasted space anyway!

“Hydroelectric power damages the river life.”

You can install anything improperly if you like.  Or you can build fish ladders, you can control the water levels in the rivers appropriately, you can locate the dams properly and make existing dams more efficient and so on.

“Mining for Rare Earth Elements (REEs) is extremely polluting — but all the renewable energy sources needs REEs!” 

That’s right:  For example, they need “permanent” magnets made of REEs.  However, these are 100% recyclable!  And don’t forget that “rare” is just a name:  These elements are fairly abundant, actually.

“Nuclear power has worked for 50 years.”

No it hasn’t!  Accidents have been covered up, and when that isn’t possible, they’ve been swept from the front pages of the news even as they’re still happening!  Fukushima is no longer the top item in the news each day, and yet it’s an ongoing tragedy — the most massive single environmental catastrophe the world has ever seen — and capable of an even-more catastrophic “hydrovolcanic explosion” if any of the molten cores hit the water table underneath.

Lastly but most importantly, she might think:

“They’ve solved the nuclear waste problem, it’s just a political issue now.”

Completely false!  In fact, the Yucca Mountain scientific team was allowed to come up with ANY scientifically-viable alternative to Yucca Mountain if they could.  They only thing they couldn’t consider was the same thing in a different location.  They couldn’t come up with anything else that would work, and neither will Obama’s “Blue Ribbon Committee.”

Nothing else works any better than Yucca Mountain would, but Yucca Mountain  wouldn’t work, either:  It’s geography is unstable, it suffers from water seepage, the population centers nearby are too close, transporting the waste there would be a nightmare.

Unfortunately, any OTHER location will have the same problems, or worse!  Therefore, the  only solution to the nuclear dilemma — and it’s a partial one — is to stop making more waste.

But unfortunately, the average adult in America has no idea what “radiation” is.  They don’t know an element from an isotope from a molecule from a sub-atomic particle, and couldn’t care less.  The word “epidemiology” causes their eyes to glaze over.  And cancer scares them.

How will it be possible for a “democratic” society (let alone any other) to fulfill its promise to protect its citizens, when those same citizens are ignorant of the dangers they face?  When the problems are too complex to grasp in a sound bite?  When there is always an opposing view, who usually sounds just as passionate or more so (after all, their livelihoods are usually at stake)?

My hope for 2012 is that the world will educate itself more about the problems it faces.
It is our duty to our children to learn how to protect them.

My friend has a wonderful child.  But she is probably unaware that radiation harms young children at roughly 10 times the rate it harms adults.  Infants are a hundred times more vulnerable, and fetuses a thousand — or thousands of times — more so, because their cells are differentiating.

The Nuclear Age has been an epic failure so far, and is destined only to be more so in the future.  A third of a trillion dollars are projected to be put into a dozen (or more) genocidal, environmentally-devastating nuclear-armed and nuclear powered submarines for the next generation to play war games with.  Then those sailors will need jobs in the industry.  Same as now.  But nuclear weapons have not prevented war, as was promised, and nuclear power plants have only made us vulnerable.  Electricity has not been “too cheap to meter,” as was also promised. Nothing’s worked out for the nuclear industry — except their ability to fool the public.

After 2011, the world is three meltdowns more polluted than it was in 2010.  It also has about 20,000 tons of NEW “High Level Radioactive Waste” from ~500 commercial reactors still operating around the world.  This new “HLRW” waste (mostly used nuclear reactor cores) is about ten million times more hazardous than before it was put in the reactor (and it was no picnic then, either).

TEPCO, the owners of the stricken reactors, lie constantly.  The reactors spew radioactive waste constantly.

The Japanese government lies constantly.  No one knows what’s really going on anyway.  Everyone is now admitting that it will take “40 years” to put Fukushima into “Safe Store”, a fictitious state of temporary nuclear bliss.
 
2012, here we come.

The Great San Diego Blackout of 2011

A Preview of Things to Come?

by RUSSELL D. HOFFMAN

 

It looks like everyone survived the Great San Diego Black-Out of 2011.

I didn’t even notice there was a black-out at first, other than the printer going off while I was trying to print protest books against San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.   A group of us formed up post-Fukushima, and we’re going places and raising awareness.  And we need books — lots of books!  People are pretty ignorant about the dangers, even post-Fukushima. There’s a lot of information being kept from the public and misinformation being presented to them.

San Onofre didn’t help at all to keep the power on when the grid went down.

Instead, they had to shut down themselves!  Supposedly this was because “they had no place to send the power.”  That’s how the spokesperson for the plant describes it.

But I would say it was because they had no offsite power coming INTO the plant!  That’s what probably really shut the plant down.

But one way or the other, here’s the obvious thing:  San Onofre is not helping.

San Onofre is presumably currently operating on Emergency Diesel Generators as I write this — and generating ZERO power to help alleviate the situation.

Thanks for your help, SONGS — NOT!

About one and a half million homes — five million people — were without power for at least six to eight hours yesterday and today, and many of them are still without power.

There WAS a seven-car pile-up on I-5 (the main freeway that runs near San Onofre), which shut it down in both directions, and I-5 was shut down heading out of San Diego elsewhere at the same time — it was a mess!

But I was prepared — or so I thought.  When the printer went out, my UPS beeped and the front panel lit up.

Those were my clues that five million of us were in the dark.  I paid little attention, being in the middle of writing a newsletter about what an atom is, an alpha particle, a beta particle, a gamma ray, a half-life, and so on.

But then the UPS beeped again, and the print job was clearly not running (the printer pauses now and then anyway, for some reason), so I went upstairs and checked the printer, and it was completely off and the on/off switch wouldn’t do anything.

So then I started to grasp that there was a blackout, and shut down the computer so that I wouldn’t drain the UPS battery just in case I needed it.

I tried to count up all the ways I wasn’t prepared for real trouble — like, a meltdown at San Onofre because of the “Station Black-Out” conditions (the same as occurred at Fukushima after the earthquake and tsunami, but minus the earthquake (which actually started the inexorable sequence that led to meltdown of the three reactors in Japan) and minus the tsunami (which is blamed for the meltdowns, but apparently was NOT responsible — it was the earthquake).

We have earthquakes here, too.  Bad ones.  Right near San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

Small-scale distributed renewable energy is a much safer way to power the grid.  In an emergency, nuclear power is unlikely to be there to help at all!  We’ve seen this now, time and again.

And the traffic!  Oh, the traffic!  Because the traffic lights were out everywhere, it took my wife more than an hour to get home, normally a 12 minute drive in clear traffic and a 20 minute drive at rush hour.  The 60 or so trollies in the city of San Diego all stopped at the same time, and only a couple of trains ran, so if you missed them, you missed them.

Could we evacuate five million people if San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station melted down?  No!  Can San Onofre melt down?

In a heartbeat.  It’s useless, wrong, and crazy to continue risking the enormous death and destruction that would accompany an serious accident at San Onofre.  Trapped as we are with only a few roads out of the area, San Onofre actually cuts in half the main evacuation route needed in case of an accident at the plant!  That is, the plant itself is located so close to the freeway that ANY accident at the plant will close I-5 immediately, and probably I-15 as well.

Meanwhile, the plant itself has been on restrictions and tightened inspections for years now because of worker apathy, anxiety, and audacious arrogance:  They faked safety inspections, fire inspections, security inspections, and medical claims, work records, time sheets, and, of course, worker’s own complaints were filed in the “circular” file or actually given to the supervisor about whom the complaint was filed — the LAST person who should be seeing the complaint!

Now, these guys are all scared the power plant WILL actually be shut down!  They put on a brave face, but scratch the surface, and you find out they are being told not to talk to the public, not to talk to reporters, not to talk to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission unless they absolutely have too — and WHY are they so scared?

They’re afraid they’ll lose their jobs.  Get thrown out in the bad economy just like so many of the rest of us.

 Never mind that they could be building solar and wind turbine power supplies instead.  Never mind that they are generating 500 pounds of high-level nuclear waste every day that they don’t know how to store or how to get rid of. (The most toxic stuff on earth, and, thanks to Fukushima, the most toxic stuff in your lungs and the rest of your body right now.)

Never mind that there is no way to evacuate San Diego, Orange County, Los Angeles ….

Never mind the lives that would be lost if there was a meltdown, or a spent fuel pool fire, or a dry cask fire, or all three, due to an earthquake, or a tsunami, or a power black-out, or all three.

Never mind all that — they are afraid they’ll lose their jobs.

Senator Bernie Sanders Introduces Bill to Lower Cost of Solar Power

(Go, Bernie!--jef)

Fri, 06/10/2011 - 12:18pm.
A press release from the office of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont):

Washington - Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.) introduced a bill that would lower the cost of solar power and put the United States on track to install 10 million solar systems on homes and businesses by 2020.

Sanders and Boozman are the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Green Jobs and New Economy Subcommittee. They were joined in introducing the solar legislation by Sen. Jeff Bingaman, the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

"This legislation will make it more affordable for families and businesses to install solar, by helping communities reduce the costs associated with solar energy permitting," Sanderssaid. "As we lower the cost of solar energy and increase our use of solar, we can create hundreds of thousands of good-paying manufacturing and installation jobs in this country. This bill also sets strong targets for American solar energy production, to ensure we compete vigorously with China and Europe for solar energy jobs."

Boozman said the goal is to reduce unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles to American-made solar energy. "Our country benefits by using our domestic energy resources, including the expanded use of renewables, such as solar and wind energy.  A simplified permitting process will make solar energy more affordable.  I am especially pleased that our bill is fully offset and uses existing authorized spending to spur improvements in solar permitting and encourage the deployment of solar energy systems."

The 10 Million Solar Roofs Act of 2011 would establish a goal of powering 10 million homes and businesses with solar energy by 2020. The measure also would incorporate a Department of Energy initiative called SunShot to make solar more competitive with conventional energy technologies. The bill would provide grants to communities to help them make their solar energy permitting process less costly and more efficient, and would recognize and reward communities that have adopted common policies on solar permits.

A solar industry report said obstacles to acquiring local permits add up to $2,500 to the cost of a typical residential solar installation. The Department of Energy also identified local permitting costs as an obstacle to further lowering solar energy costs that declined by 60 percent since 1995.

Supporters of The Ten Million Solar Roofs bill include the Solar Energy Industries Association, the National League of Cities, and the League of Conservation Voters.

To read the bill, click here.

Why Our 21st Century Slave Society Can't Last

We're the slave masters of energy-driven gadgets that replace human labor. But don't count on it sticking around.
By Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee
Posted on May 30, 2011

"A low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of lifestyles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist." -- Radical Catholic Theologian Ivan Illich

In 2009 a British family living in a four-bedroom house became the subject of a subversive energy experiment about modern slavery.

While the foursome flicked on gadgets one Sunday with the abandon of Roman patricians, an army of volunteers (The Human Power Station) furiously pedalled 100 bicycles next door to generate the needed energy.

The unsuspecting family, of course, had no idea they had been unplugged from a power grid fueled largely by fossil fuels.

At the end of the day the slave masters literally dropped their jaws when a BBC television crew introduced them to the exhausted slaves that boiled their tea. (Get this: it took 24 peddlers to heat the oven and 11 cyclists to make two slices of toast.)

At the end of the experiment many of the cyclists collapsed. Several couldn't walk for days. The peddlers actually consumed more energy in food than they generated by peddling.

The experiment crudely illustrated the global state of North American energy consumption (just imagine an empty yet well-lit house powered by 100 hungry cyclists). It also convinced one of the experiment's designers, Tom Siddall of Electric Pedals, that "volunteer slavery" (hordes of sweating cyclists) or old fashioned shackled labour will power the future. "I have no doubt that slavery will return as the world's energy resources get increasingly scarce."

Oil removes the toil

Now most people don't regard oil, say, as an energy slave or a liquid replacement for human muscle, but they probably should. Thanks to petroleum, every North American now behaves, thinks and often looks like an obese and overbearing 19th century slave owner.

Oil slaves, of course, are more portable and versatile than human muscle and now order our world. They grow and deliver food; transport friends and goods; and energize fields and cities. Every laptop computer arrives impregnated with 240 kilograms of oil. Like any good slave, oil removes the toil.

How many slaves for you?

How many energy slaves does a typical Canadian have at his or her disposal? Dave Hughes, perhaps Canada's premier energy analyst and the nation's former coal specialist at Natural Resources Canada, has done the math and we are not an emancipated people.

Hughes calculates that one barrel of crude (non-renewable sunshine captured in plants over the past 500 million years or so) contains approximately six gigajoules (six billion joules) or about 1,700 kilowatts of energy.

Now a healthy individual can pump out enough juice to light a 100-watt bulb or (360,000 joules) an hour. With weekends and holidays off and a sensible eight-hour day, Hughes figures that it might takes one person 8.6 years on a bicycle (or treadmill) to produce the energy now stored in one barrel of oil.

(Of course we could work those slaves 12 hours a day, seven days a week with no holidays, argues Hughes. In that case a barrel is equivalent to 3.8 years of human labor. But this columnist favours a more humane treatment.)

Given that the average Canadian now consumes 24.7 barrels of oil a year with scarcely a blink of the eye, every citizen employs about 204 virtual slaves. That's a spectacular amount of power for any mortal to wield and much more than any Roman or Egyptian household ever commanded. Or five times more than average 19th century U.S. plantation owners.

Oil slaves fueled human population

What worries Hughes and many other energy analysts is that cheap energy slaves have created a formidable global dilemma. Before the Fossil Fuel Age (it started with coal burning around 1700), humans numbered less than one billion for their entire evolutionary existence on this planet.

After coal and then the discovery of oil in the 1850s, Homo sapiens exploded to an astounding population of 7 billion in just 170 years. And non-renewable energy slaves paved the way. Oil, in other words, was a powerful Viagra for the species (with unwieldy erections and other side-effects).

Oil also broke all previous energy thresholds. While human population grew 5.4 times since 1850, per capita energy consumption exploded at a rate of 8.5 times. In fact total energy consumption jumped 45 times.

These extraordinary changes gave peasants vicarious lifestyles once only enjoyed by minor kings and queens. In 1850, the average Tom, Dick or Harry claimed but 2.2 fossil fuels slaves thanks primarily to machines powered by coal, says Hughes. But by 2009, each member of the average human family crowded their household with 93.8 slaves thanks to the combined work of oil, gas and coal. (Add wood, hydro and nuclear energy and another 17.6 diligent slaves must fit in the door.)

Unsustainable

Given the realities of peak oil (the end of cheap slaves and the advent of extremely brutal substitutes) and the fact that China and India now want more petroleum slaves too, that level of consumption or slavery can't be sustained. In fact Hughes warns that the world of the petroleum slave owner can only get smaller. He calls it "the Energy Sustainability Dilemma."

This indelicate dilemma will be ugliest for those who employ the most slaves. Right now the average Canadian lives as extravagantly as the feverish English master of a large Caribbean sugar plantation. In fact Canadians typically boss around five times more slaves than the global average.

"Your average Canadian consumes five times the world average per capital consumption, seven times the per capita consumption in China and 29 times the per capita consumption in India," calculates Hughes.

(For the record the new and leaner slave masters of Shanghai or Tianjin burn but 2.4 barrels of oil a year which puts 20 coolies at their beck and call.)

"Maybe we have been even less cognizant of the services provided by fossil fuels than people did from their slaves," reflects Hughes. "Slavery, after all was in your face. Now it's all about filling up the tank."

In his thoughtful 1973 essay, "Energy and Equity," the radical Catholic theologian Ivan Illich questioned whether "the well-being of a society can be measured by the number of years its members have gone to school and by the number of energy slaves they have thereby learned to command."

While most people worried about the scarcity of fodder for these slaves, Illich asked whether free men really needed so many slaves in the first place.

The iconoclast concluded that each and every human being was entitled to a certain amount of energy, but beyond a certain threshold, people lost both their freedom and humanity as slave owners typically do.

Even if nonpolluting slaves were feasible and abundant, Illich reckoned "that the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving."

He then dropped a Promethean question that most economists, philosophers, environmentalists and energy analysts avoid: can a society be progressively hooked on a larger numbers of energy slaves and remain autonomous?

It remains civilization's central question.

America Becoming an Idiocracy

Sunday, May 22, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
by Brian Moench

In the 2006 satirical science fiction comedy, Idiocracy, the protagonist Joe Bauers, “Mr. Average American", is selected by the Pentagon for a top-secret hibernation program. Forgotten, he awakens 500 years in the future, to discover a society so incredibly dumbed-down that he's easily the most intelligent person alive and their only hope for survival.

With the Republicans bullying their way through state and federal legislation, the movie has become prophetic to the point where the only thing that isn't believable is that this devolution will take another 500 years. Idiocracy already has its living, fire-breathing poster child, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), the ranking Republican and former chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

You may remember Rep. Barton as the Congressman who on behalf of the American people apologized to the CEO of British Petroleum, Tony Hayward, for having our Gulf of Mexico get in the way of Hayward's oil spill:

"I apologize. I do not want to live in a country where any time a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, is subject to some sort of political pressure. [It] amounts to a shakedown, so I apologize."

How about Barton’s grasp of CO2 as a greenhouse gas?

“It’s odorless, colorless, tasteless, doesn’t cause cancer... there’s nobody that’s ever been admitted to a hospital because of CO2 poisoning. Hell, “CO2 is in our Coca-Cola!"

Even better is Barton's explanation of how wind power could speed up climate change:

"Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about.” 

Yes, Joe, that sure is something to think about!

If Barton's awareness of why we must stop building wind turbines isn't enough to blow you over, how about his penetrating insight into just how innocuous air pollution is. At a Congressional hearing in April, Barton insisted that an EPA estimate that pollution controls on coal power plants would prevent 17,000 premature deaths a year had been “pulled out of thin air.”

Unfortunately, the air coming out of coal smoke stacks is hardly thin, but Barton's understanding of medicine certainly is:

“To cause poisoning or a premature death, you have to get a large concentration of mercury into the body. I am not a medical doctor, but my hypothesis is that is not going to happen. You are not going to get enough mercury exposure or SO2 exposure or even particulate matter exposure.”

The only remotely true part of Barton's statement is that he is indeed not a medical doctor. Real medical doctors from the American Lung Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association and other health groups were so outraged and stunned at Barton's statement they sent him a letter pointing out decades of medical research contradicting everything he said.

Mercury is the second most toxic substance on earth, after only plutonium, and is capable of causing brain damage in fetuses and children at unimaginably small concentrations. One out of every six women of child-bearing age has enough mercury in her blood to cause measurable brain damage in any child she might conceive.

The largest source of this mercury contamination is the emissions of coal fired power plants. Nonetheless, industry lobbyists and their allies in Congress, like Barton, have vowed to fight any attempt by the EPA to correct this deplorable public health disaster. Without a shred of supportive evidence, pollution control and environmental protection of any kind is suddenly being smeared as "job-killing", ignoring all the while that science clearly proves that pollution itself is “heart-killing, lung-killing, brain-killing and people-killing". Which Joe could argue does create job openings.

If Rep. Barton was just your crazy uncle who everyone avoids at family reunions, this would just be entertainment. But he is only the most outspoken of an entire legion of Republican politicians from their Presidential contenders on down who are strutting their disdain for science and the environment like a fully spread peacock’s tail. Even many Democrats are tagging along with this menacing flock.

In a normal world people who repeatedly lose their arm wrestles with reality would also lose the next election, their careers, and the right to leave the house without their medication and a chaperone. But in an idiocracy, they rise to power, ignore the facts, re-write the laws, cash the lobbyists’ checks, and force us all into their asylum. Idiocracy has indeed come to America, 500 years ahead of schedule.

Police Dept. Uses Water Instead of Gas for their Vehicles

(The person who posted this video titled it incorrectly. It doesn't use water instead of gasoline, but water in conjunction with gasoline. It's a start to looking elsewhere for energy resources that aren't based on foreign oil.--jef)

High Oil Price = Faster Economic Decline

By The American Dream on 01-18-2011

Most Americans have no idea how important oil prices are to the overall health of the U.S. economy.  Whenever oil prices have pressed toward record levels in recent decades, it has always resulted in an economic downturn.  A high oil price does not just mean that consumers will have to pay a little more at the pump.  The truth is that oil is the very lifeblood of our economic system.  We have built our entire country around the concept that we can transport lots of stuff very long distances for a very, very cheap price.  When that paradigm beings to change, it fundamentally alters the dynamics of the U.S. economy.  A high oil price will mean an even faster economic decline for America.

The cost of oil factors into everything.  A high oil price means that transportation of products and services costs more, travel costs more and energy costs more.  It means that consumers will have less disposable income.  When the price of oil goes up it benefits the big oil producers and few others, but for everyone else it is very painful.  But perhaps even more importantly, because the U.S. has to import such massive quantities of oil, whenever the price of oil goes up it means that we are becoming poorer as a nation because even more of our money flows out of the country and into the hands of the oil barons.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the United States consumed a grand total of 6.9 billion barrels of oil during 2009.  That represented approximately 27 percent of the total oil consumption of the entire globe.

Unfortunately, the U.S. imports over half of the oil it consumes, and this represents a massive transfer of wealth out of the United States.

Every single month we send the giant oil producers of the world billions of our dollars in exchange for the oil that we are deeply addicted to.

Meanwhile, many formerly great American cities are being transformed into rotting hellholes.

It is kind of like a rich young man that is rapidly going broke by blowing all of his money on a drug habit.

We’ve just always got to have more, more, more and it is draining more of our national wealth out of us every single month.

Sadly, the truth is that the United States has absolutely huge untapped reserves of oil that the “powers that be” will not let us touch.  It turns out that certain interests are making insanely huge profits by keeping America addicted to foreign oil.  The ultra-wealthy and ultra-powerful people that are involved in doing this to us are destroying our nation economically just so that they can profit.

It is absolutely sickening.

So does any of this money that we ship off to foreign oil producers ever come back to the United States?

Well, yes, there are a couple main ways that it comes back to us.

One way that it comes back is that it gets loaned back to our government.  The U.S. government has now borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars from the top oil producing nations around the globe.

Remember, the borrower is always the servant of the lender, and we are rapidly becoming servants of the big oil producing nations.

Another way it comes back to us is when sovereign wealth funds from nations such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and other major oil producing nations buy up huge chunks of our infrastructure.  These giant sovereign wealth funds are buying up highways, ports, toll roads and even parking meters from coast to coast.

In a recent piece for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi described some of the U.S. infrastructure assets that these sovereign wealth funds are buying up….

A toll highway in Indiana. The Chicago Skyway. A stretch of highway in Florida. Parking meters in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities. A port in Virginia. And a whole bevy of Californian public infrastructure projects, all either already leased or set to be leased for fifty or seventy-five years or more in exchange for one-off lump sum payments of a few billion bucks at best, usually just to help patch a hole or two in a single budget year.

America is literally being sold off piece by piece.

We are slowly becoming owned by foreign entities.  We are slowly being transformed into paupers in the land of our forefathers.

Not only that, but a high price for oil will only cause this incredible transfer of wealth to accelerate and it will likely crash the entire global economy once again.

Already the U.S. economy is teetering on the brink of disaster.  If the price of oi lhits $100 or $120 a barrel, it could be enough to set off another huge economic slide.

According to Sabine Schels, a commodity analyst at Merrill Lynch, whenever the size of the energy sector reaches 9 percent of the global economy it spells big trouble….

“It was in the 1980s and it was the same in 2008. Right now we are at about 7.8 percent and if you go above $100 per barrel to $120 per barrel, you get to that 9 percent level.”

But it isn’t just the rising price of oil that is causing the cost of gasoline to go up.  All over the country, states that are facing massive budget shortfalls are raising gas taxes.  Many state officials believe that since consumers don’t actually “see” the higher gas tax on their receipts that they won’t be as angry as if state income taxes were raised.

Another consequence of a high oil price is that it means that the price of food all over the world will be very high.  In some areas of the globe, even a minor increase in the price of food is enough to threaten the survival of millions.  If the price of oil gets up around $140 or $150 a barrel, it is likely to set off food riots that will make what is currently going on in Tunisia and Algeria look like a Sunday picnic.

But right now, many of the big oil producing nations of the world are openly welcoming the arrival of $100 oil.  Iran, Venezuela and Libya all say that there is no reason for OPEC to act even if oil hits $120 a barrel.

Venezuela says that they now have the biggest crude oil reserves in the entire world. Venezuela says that they had certified deposits of 297 billion barrels of oil at the end of 2010.

That certainly puts a larger target on their back, doesn’t it?

In the years ahead, the demand for natural resources is going to continue to intensify.  It is going to be one of the dominant economic trends during the coming decade and beyond.

The United States should be much further along in developing alternative energy sources, but up to this point big business and the U.S. government have been openly repressing many promising technologies.  Whenever anyone comes along that could seriously upset the status quo they are bought out or squelched.

Because of all of this corruption we are all going to pay the price.  There are plenty of untapped oil reserves inside the United States.  There are plenty of alternative energy sources that we could be developing.  But we have been kept completely and totally dependent on foreign oil and now rising oil prices are absolutely going to devastate our dying economy.

***

(What this also says to me is we need to ease up on our boycott of Venezuelan oil. Citgo used to import all of its oil from Venezuela before the US got all rankled by Hugo Chavez, and we were paying about $1.75 a gallon. I'm just saying. As far as dictators go, he is by far the most harmless and his people love him. I'm not saying he's all that, but we need cheaper oil, and he happens to have a whole bunch of it. He even donates heating oil to poor American families during the winter. I mean, come on!--jef)

Oil to run out 100 years before replacements become viable, study claims

By Agence France-Presse - Monday, November 15th, 2010

The world will run out of oil around 100 years before replacement energy sources are available if oil use and development of new fuels continue at the current pace, a US study warns.

In the study, researchers at the University of California, Davis (UC-Davis) used the current share prices of oil companies and alternative energy companies to predict when replacement fuels will be ready to fill the gap left when oil runs dry.

And the findings weren't very good for the oil-hungry world.

If the world's oil reserves were the 1.332 trillion barrels they were estimated to be in 2008 and oil consumption was some 85.22 million barrels a day and growing at 1.3 percent a year, oil would be depleted by 2041, says the study published online last week in Environmental Science and Technology.

But by plugging current stock market prices into a complex equation, UC-Davis engineering professor Debbie Niemeier and postdoctoral researcher Nataliya Malyshkina calculated that a viable alternative fuel to oil won't be available before the middle of next century.

The researchers analyzed the share prices of 25 oil companies quoted on US, European and Australian stock exchanges, and of 44 alternative energy companies.

They found that the market capitalization, or total value of all stock shares, of traditional oil companies far outstripped that of the alternative energy companies.

That indicated that investors believe oil is going to do well in the near future and occupy a larger share of the energy market than alternative energy, said Malyshkina.

"To assess the time until a considerable fraction of oil is likely to be replaced by alternatives, we used advanced pricing equations to make sense of the large discrepancy between the market capitalization of traditional oil companies and the market capitalization of alternative-energy companies," Malyshkina told AFP.

The answer they came up with was that there would not be a widely available replacement for oil-based fuels before 2140, which, even if the more optimistic date of 2054 for oil depletion is retained, would mean there could be a nearly 90-year gap when it might be difficult to run a motor vehicle.

Nearly two-thirds of crude oil is used to produce gasoline and diesel to run vehicles, says Malyshkina.

The calculations used by the researchers are based on the theory that long-term investors are good predictors of when new technologies will become commonplace.

Similar calculations have been used to accurately predict the outcome of elections and the results of sports events, Malyshkina said.

Wind Power Can Change the World -- Why Aren't We Investing In It?

A lack of continuous federal support cripples emerging clean energy industries in the United States.
By Melinda Burns, Miller-McCune.com
July 26, 2010

Jim Dehlsen, America’s most successful wind power innovator and entrepreneur, has been tilting at windmills since the early 1980s.

Back then, he installed one of the largest wind farms in the world in the mountains near Mojave, Calif., where a strong gust could snap a windmill blade in two. He called it his “Victory Garden.”

Today, at 73, Dehlsen is producing one of the most advanced and efficient windmills in the world, employing 300 people at a plant in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And he is building a plant in England to manufacture the largest offshore windmill in the world, creating 500 green jobs.

Like Don Quixote of La Mancha, the errant knight of windmill fame, Dehlsen is on a life’s quest, propelled by the vision of a moral world — by his definition, a planet that is much less dependent on coal and oil.

Now, he is drawing on his expertise in wind to explore the untapped energy of the sea. With his son Brent, Dehlsen has designed an underwater “windmill” to harvest the unstoppable flow of the Gulf Stream off Florida. For the wind-whipped waters off the U.S. West Coast, the Dehlsens have designed a grid of floating pods equipped with pistons to capture the energy in the rise and fall of the waves.

In his lifetime, Jim Dehlsen hopes to see the ocean powering American homes and providing American jobs.

“We’re determined to make it happen,” he said. “I really want to see this in deployment. The continental shelf off the coast of Florida extends out 20 miles, and flowing over it is a river that has a constant flow equal to 50 times all the rivers of the planet. It’s just tremendous. It’s always there.”

What’s not always there, Dehlsen said, is government support in grants and subsidies for pioneers who, like him, struggle to come up with the millions needed to invest in new technologies in renewable energy. Federal support for wind blows hot and cold: During the past decade, tax credits for wind power have expired and been extended -- usually for one or two years at most -- on seven different occasions, creating uncertainty in the market and scaring investors away. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, or stimulus fund, gave wind power big boost with cash grants covering 30 percent of construction costs, but the time frame, as usual, was short: To qualify, projects have to begin construction by the end of this year.

By contrast, the U.S. government showers support on fossil fuels for electricity.

Most of Dehlsen’s early competitors went bankrupt in 1985, when the first round of subsidies dried up. After giving birth to the wind-power industry, the U.S. lost its position as the top producer of wind power in the world for more than two decades. It holds the No. 1 spot for now, but China is the world’s leading manufacturer of wind turbines.

The U.S. also has ceded a global market in offshore wind to Europe, where generous government subsidies, higher energy prices and $7-per-gallon gasoline provide a more favorable climate for renewables. Denmark built the first offshore “wind park” in 1991, and as of last year, according to one report, there were 67 in operation or pending in Northern Europe.

The first offshore wind farm in the U.S., a 131-turbine project off Cape Cod, was approved by the U.S. interior secretary in April. The turbines themselves will be manufactured by Siemens, Europe’s largest engineering conglomerate.

“In Europe, the oil and gas industries have much less influence on government policymaking,” Dehlsen said. “That kind of environment is crucial for wind.”

Likewise, in the field of marine renewable energy, the U.S. is roughly a decade behind Europe, where 15 tidal energy and 13 wave energy plants are in operation or pending, primarily in the British Isles. By contrast, the U.S. has installed only a few pilot projects, including a “power buoy” off Hawaii and tidal energy turbines in New York City’s East River. As noted in a special issue of Oceanography this month on marine renewable energy, the industry doesn’t even have the proper infrastructure to test new devices.

Dehlsen hopes the country will learn from its past mistakes.

“The real subsidies are going to carbon fuels,” he said. “How can we turn this around in the U.S.? It’s ingrained in the whole system.”

Wind is the world’s fastest-growing energy source: In the U.S. alone, the wind-power industry expanded by 39 percent last year.

But in the early days of modern windmills, Dehlsen recalled, investors wouldn’t even look at wind farms. “It was just too far out,” he said. “The response was, ‘You’re going to do what?’ You could see their eyes glaze over.

“Early-stage technology is really the appropriate place for government support to be involved, because traditional financing can’t deal with new concepts. They put a risk premium on it.”

When the government began offering tax credits and grants for emerging wind technologies, Dehlsen was able to test his design, attract investors and compete with oil, an industry that has been heavily subsidized in the U.S. since the 1920s. By 1985, he employed 600 people at his windmill manufacturing plant in Mojave. But the nation’s memories of the 1973 and 1979 oil embargoes faded, and the government allowed the subsidies for wind to expire.

“It really killed off the industry,” Dehlsen said. “We managed to survive, but we were one of the few.”

Dehlsen later sold his wind farm to Enron, which sold it to General Electric. To date, he said, GE has produced 13,000 of the Mojave-style windmills, with some refinements to his design.

In the 1990s, as U.S. support for wind picked up again, Dehlsen received $32 million in federal grants to create three generations of wind turbines, each the largest in the world when they were built. He also won an additional $9 million federal grant to develop a windmill that could operate in variable wind speeds. This model was a significant technological advance that opened up new areas for the industry, places where the wind was not perpetually howling. The blades of variable-speed wind turbines accelerate in gusts of wind, retaining their momentum when the gusts pass.

It’s the kind of breakthrough that would not have been possible without government support, Dehlsen said. Plus, he added, “you got to have crazy people like me who think they can do it.”

In testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Energy and Environment in December, Dehlsen told how the $9 million grant had helped attract $150 million in private investment for his Liberty wind turbine. It is now being manufactured in Cedar Rapids by Dehlsen’s company, Clipper Windpower Inc.,which recently sold 49 percent of its stock to United Technologies Corp. Clipper has 700 employees worldwide and has produced 500 windmills for 17 projects in the U.S. and Mexico.

“But there is the other side of the coin,” Dehlsen told the committee. He related how the government abruptly ended its support for offshore wind projects in 2006, just as Clipper was trying to partner with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory on a project.

“Perhaps the hardest policy lesson that has come out of the American wind effort has been the repeated crippling effect on the industry from discontinuity in government support,” Dehlsen testified.

In 2007, finding no support for offshore wind in his own country, Dehlsen turned to United Kingdom and was received with open arms. To date, Clipper has received nearly $30 million from the royal family’s Crown Estate and the British government to develop and manufacture what will be the largest offshore turbine in the world. The Crown Estate owns the rights to the offshore regions of the British Isles and is advancing the price of Clipper’s first commercial windmill. The manufacturing plant for the blades is under construction in Newcastle, once best known for its coal; production will begin in 2013.

Dehlsen’s views on government support are shared by entrepreneurs and investors alike.

Peter Grubstein, the founder and managing member of NGEN Partners, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based firm that bills itself as “one of the most active cleantech venture investors in the world,” with $500 million under management, said that government grants are “extraordinarily important” for emerging technologies to succeed. Without that help, Grubstein said, “a lot of little companies will not get funded, particularly given the dearth of capital in the financial sector.”

NGEN typically invests in early-stage companies that have developed proven prototypes for the products, a process that can take five years, Grubstein said.

“Companies that are small and not well-financed are unlikely to get our financing,” he said. “Taking a chance on the new technologies that are unproven is very, very hard for an investor to do.”

Sidney Tassin, the founder and president of Carta Energy LLC, a Dallas-based investment firm, and a director of Clipper Windpower, oversaw an $11 million investment in Clipper in 2001 when the Liberty turbine, then the world’s largest, did not yet exist. It was in very early design stages. Dehlsen needed the money to launch Clipper, develop the turbine and purchase options on land. It was not a traditional investment for Energy Spectrum Capital LLC, the Dallas firm that Tassin headed at the time, and, he said, his partners were initially reluctant to take the risk.

Dehlsen’s stature as a pioneer in the U.S. wind industry helped change their minds, and so did the government’s $9 million grant to Clipper, Tassin said.

“It definitely helped attract the capital,” he said. “It said that our equity dollars would go further because we would be matching these federal government dollars.”

“I tend to be a strong free-market oriented person,” Tassin added. “I’m not looking for the government to decide who’s going to get the money and who’s going to have the better idea. But I think a nascent industry like renewables is an appropriate place for government research dollars to help prime the pump of innovation.

“We can always find another deal somewhere. Deals are like streetcars; one comes by every 15 minutes. But government funding helps energize the entrepreneurial part of it.”

Zachary Solomon, a project manager for American Ventus Energy LLC, an Austin, Tex.- based company that develops wind farms, put it this way:

“Without government subsidies, I wouldn’t be in this business,” he said. “Private industry can only invest so much. If you look at Europe’s successes in this area, you have to recognize the fact that the governments there have been very open-minded when it comes to investing in renewable technologies for the past two decades. Europe has a better understanding of the potential applications of renewable energy.”

Robert Thresher, a research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a facility of the U.S. Department of Energy, and a former director of the lab’s National Wind Technology Center, said that Europe first “started to get religion” about renewable energy after the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986. In 2007, the European Union set a goal of supplying 20 percent of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2020. The U.S. clean energy bill passed by the House last year set a similar target, but the Senate last week shelved plans for a broad energy bill.

American support for renewable energy has been driven by crises and the high cost of oil, Thresher said. “It’s a classic American way of doing business. We do everything sort of piecemeal, so there’s no stable policy. That’s been the key problem. Every administration changes its energy plan. It’s been very difficult for people like Jim Dehlsen to know what the ground rules are so that they can make a rational investment.

“But no matter what happens, I don’t think this industry can be stopped. It may have slowdowns and speedups, but it’s the cheapest form of very low-carbon energy. And people want jobs.”

On Dehlsen’s hypothetical energy map of the U.S., there are land-based wind farms in the Midwest and offshore wind farms along the East Coast north of North Carolina. As previously reported by Miller-McCune, the combined output of a fleet of offshore wind farms could provide more than enough electricity for the heavily populated East Coast, without interruption, because when the wind dies down in one spot off the Atlantic coast, it’s invariably kicking up in another spot.

Florida has no good wind resources, but it could get power from the Gulf Stream, Dehlsen said. The U.S. Minerals Management Service has calculated that harvesting just one one-thousandth of the Gulf Stream’s energy flow could supply Florida with 35 percent of its electrical needs. Ocean current speeds are lower than wind speeds, but because water is 835 times denser than wind, a 12 mile-per-hour water flow packs the same amount of energy as 110-mile-per-hour hurricane.

As for the West Coast, Dehlsen said, wave energy could be harnessed along the windy shores north of San Francisco and at Point Conception in Santa Barbara County.

“It’s all stuff to be done,” he said.

Palpable federal support for marine renewable energy began in 2008, the first year of a $250 million five-year appropriation for research in the field. At the House committee hearing in December, Dehlsen and others requested a reauthorization of those funds. In its report, the committee noted that approximately 10 percent of U.S. national electricity demand “may be met through river in-stream sites, tidal in-stream sites and wave generation,” not including ocean currents.

A 10-year reauthorization has been included in a Senate energy bill, but the upcoming House version does not yet include those funding levels. Meanwhile, the proposed Marine Renewable Energy Promotion Act, legislation that would accelerate federal tax breaks and technological aid, has been stalled in Congress for more than a year.

This spring, in a “roadmap” drawn up by Thresher and modeled after the U.K.’s, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory proposed setting a goal of 23 gigawatts from marine renewable energy in the U.S. by 2030. That’s the equivalent of 23 nuclear power plants – an aggressive plan, Thresher said, but attainable, in part because the technology of wind is transferable to marine energy.

“It reminds me of where wind was in 1985,” he said. “But it doesn’t have to take 30 years for marine renewables to mature. There’s a potential for a much more stable market with climate change and the rising cost of carbon fuels.”

In a recent survey, the department found that most entrepreneurs in the field, including Dehlsen, were operating on small amounts of money – between $2 million and $10 million – and were struggling to find the capital to test their expensive designs beyond the lab. They said they needed between $4 million and $25 million each to build demonstration projects and get certified by an independent engineering firm. That’s how an emerging technology proves that it is “bankable” and can borrow money.

“In the early stages of an industry, the support has to be continuous,” Jim Dehlsen said. “You can’t build projects if it takes three years to put it together and the support expires and you’re not going to get financing.”

The Dehlsens have patented their design for the Aquantis Current Plane, or C-Plane, a series of “windmills” that would be suspended about 150 feet underwater, tethered to the ocean floor about 12 miles offshore. The Dehlsens also have patents for the Centipod, which can be installed in waves 6 feet high between offshore wind turbines or along the coast, a mile from shore.

Dehlsen has received $3 million in federal funding for the Aquantis and about $150,000 for the Centipod for preliminary engineering expenses. He estimates there will be two more years of engineering costs before prototypes can be built. For Aquantis alone, Dehlsen says he’ll need $26 million, primarily in government funding, to get it ready for the market.

For this undaunted entrepreneur, it’s not just clean energy: It’s the way to rebuild America.

“There really needs to be consistent support for these projects, or you kind of waste your money,” Dehlsen said. “Ten years ago, we had the luxury of being frivolous about supporting this type of thing. We don’t have that luxury anymore. We have so much loss of industry, we’d better find a way to start building it back. How will we ever regain our position as an economic force in the world?”

New “Peel and Stick” Solar Panels Could Turn Ordinary Buildings into Power Dynamos

(Thanks to Cassius--jef)


Written by Tina Casey | Published on July 14th, 2010

For what is believed to be the first time in the southern U.S., “peel and stick” solar laminates have helped a new house achieve official Passive House certification, meaning that the structure is designed to use 90% less energy than a conventional home. The laminates were manufactured by Whirlwind Solar, a division of Whirlwind Steel Buildings, Inc., a 1950’s-era manufacturer of metal buildings that has reinvented itself to take advantage of the emerging green economy.

With four factories in Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma and Minnesota, Whirlwind is among the largest manufacturers of metal buildings in the U.S., so it’s perfectly positioned to leverage its expertise in metal-based construction into the mass market introduction of solar-laminated roofing, with a consequent growth in green jobs in the U.S.A., too.

Cheaper, Easier Solar Power

Whirlwind Solar’s laminate system consists of panels that fit between the ridges of conventional metal roofing systems (a familiar sight if you’ve ever taken a drive through the Southeastern U.S.). They literally stick to the metal roof, and are then connected to an inverter that converts DC current from the panels into AC current that can be used to power the home. The lightweight panels use amorphous silicon solar cells that absorb blue, green, and red sunlight in different layers (amorphous silicon is a flexible form of silicon which can be deposited in a thin film). Crystalline solar cells are more efficient at capturing energy from the sun, but they are more expensive and require precise positioning in order to achieve maximum efficiency. The amorphous panels do not have to be positioned perfectly in order to operate effectively, which means that they would lend themselves more easily to retrofits and other building conditions where it would be uneconomical to orient a structure around its maximum solar potential.

Passive House and Solar Laminates

Whirlwind solar’s laminate system was applied to the home in partnership with Corey Saft, a University of Louisiana architecture professor, and H.J. Construction, a company started by former student Jaron Young. Aside from achieving Passive House certification, the house is also going for LEED platinum status. The solar laminates are only one element in a comprehensive building-integrated system for conserving energy. The home’s specially designed insulation mimics that of a thermos, to cut down on the need for air conditioning in the hot, humid south. Other features include a high efficiency air conditioning system, an energy recovery ventilator, an air-to-water heat pump, and a rain-screen system that shades the house. Although the integration of the various systems involved a new level of design expertise, the actual equipment and materials are all standard and easily available to contractors or dedicated do-it-yourselfers.

Solar Laminates and Living off the Grid

The ease and flexibility of solar laminates adds yet another item to the off-grid toolkit. Once thought of as a fringe movement, the off-grid lifestyle is rapidly slipping into the mainstream. It’s a system of great interest not only to home owners but also to businesses looking to cut costs and increase the reliability and price-predictability of their energy supply. Even the U.S. military has adopted off-grid as a goal for its facilities, in the interests of energy security and independence.

How to Make an American Job Before It's Too Late

By Andy Grove - Jul 1, 2010 | Bloomberg

Recently an acquaintance at the next table in a Palo Alto, California, restaurant introduced me to his companions: three young venture capitalists from China. They explained, with visible excitement, that they were touring promising companies in Silicon Valley. I’ve lived in the Valley a long time, and usually when I see how the region has become such a draw for global investments, I feel a little proud.

Not this time. I left the restaurant unsettled. Something didn’t add up. Bay Area unemployment is even higher than the 9.7 percent national average. Clearly, the great Silicon Valley innovation machine hasn’t been creating many jobs of late -- unless you are counting Asia, where American technology companies have been adding jobs like mad for years.

The underlying problem isn’t simply lower Asian costs. It’s our own misplaced faith in the power of startups to create U.S. jobs. Americans love the idea of the guys in the garage inventing something that changes the world. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently encapsulated this view in a piece called “Start-Ups, Not Bailouts.” His argument: Let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back startups.

Mythical Moment

Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.

The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that’s the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.

Scaling used to work well in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs came up with an invention. Investors gave them money to build their business. If the founders and their investors were lucky, the company grew and had an initial public offering, which brought in money that financed further growth.

Intel Startup

I am fortunate to have lived through one such example. In 1968, two well-known technologists and their investor friends anted up $3 million to start Intel Corp., making memory chips for the computer industry. From the beginning, we had to figure out how to make our chips in volume. We had to build factories; hire, train and retain employees; establish relationships with suppliers; and sort out a million other things before Intel could become a billion-dollar company. Three years later, it went public and grew to be one of the biggest technology companies in the world. By 1980, which was 10 years after our IPO, about 13,000 people worked for Intel in the U.S.

Not far from Intel’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California, other companies developed. Tandem Computers Inc. went through a similar process, then Sun Microsystems Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Netscape Communications Corp., and on and on. Some companies died along the way or were absorbed by others, but each survivor added to the complex technological ecosystem that came to be called Silicon Valley.

As time passed, wages and health-care costs rose in the U.S., and China opened up. American companies discovered they could have their manufacturing and even their engineering done cheaper overseas. When they did so, margins improved. Management was happy, and so were stockholders. Growth continued, even more profitably. But the job machine began sputtering.

U.S. Versus China

Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000 -- lower than it was before the first personal computer, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975. Meanwhile, a very effective computer-manufacturing industry has emerged in Asia, employing about 1.5 million workers -- factory employees, engineers and managers.

The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., also known as Foxconn. The company has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenue last year was $62 billion, larger than Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Dell Inc. or Intel. Foxconn employs more than 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel and Sony Corp.

10-to-1 Ratio

Until a recent spate of suicides at Foxconn’s giant factory complex in Shenzhen, China, few Americans had heard of the company. But most know the products it makes: computers for Dell and HP, Nokia Oyj cell phones, Microsoft Xbox 360 consoles, Intel motherboards, and countless other familiar gadgets. Some 250,000 Foxconn employees in southern China produce Apple’s products. Apple, meanwhile, has about 25,000 employees in the U.S. -- that means for every Apple worker in the U.S. there are 10 people in China working on iMacs, iPods and iPhones. The same roughly 10-to-1 relationship holds for Dell, disk-drive maker Seagate Technology, and other U.S. tech companies.

You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work -- and much of the profits -- remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work -- and masses of unemployed?

Since the early days of Silicon Valley, the money invested in companies has increased dramatically, only to produce fewer jobs. Simply put, the U.S. has become wildly inefficient at creating American tech jobs. We may be less aware of this growing inefficiency, however, because our history of creating jobs over the past few decades has been spectacular -- masking our greater and greater spending to create each position.

Tragic Mistake

Should we wait and not act on the basis of early indicators? I think that would be a tragic mistake because the only chance we have to reverse the deterioration is if we act early and decisively.

Already the decline has been marked. It may be measured by way of a simple calculation: an estimate of the employment cost- effectiveness of a company. First, take the initial investment plus the investment during a company’s IPO. Then divide that by the number of employees working in that company 10 years later. For Intel, this worked out to be about $650 per job -- $3,600 adjusted for inflation. National Semiconductor Corp., another chip company, was even more efficient at $2,000 per job.

Making the same calculations for a number of Silicon Valley companies shows that the cost of creating U.S. jobs grew from a few thousand dollars per position in the early years to $100,000 today. The obvious reason: Companies simply hire fewer employees as more work is done by outside contractors, usually in Asia.

Alternative Energy

The job-machine breakdown isn’t just in computers. Consider alternative energy, an emerging industry where there is plenty of innovation. Photovoltaics, for example, are a U.S. invention. Their use in home-energy applications was also pioneered by the U.S.

Last year, I decided to do my bit for energy conservation and set out to equip my house with solar power. My wife and I talked with four local solar firms. As part of our due diligence, I checked where they get their photovoltaic panels -- the key part of the system. All the panels they use come from China. A Silicon Valley company sells equipment used to manufacture photo-active films. They ship close to 10 times more machines to China than to manufacturers in the U.S., and this gap is growing. Not surprisingly, U.S. employment in the making of photovoltaic films and panels is perhaps 10,000 -- just a few percent of estimated worldwide employment.

Advanced Batteries

There’s more at stake than exported jobs. With some technologies, both scaling and innovation take place overseas. Such is the case with advanced batteries. It has taken years and many false starts, but finally we are about to witness mass- produced electric cars and trucks. They all rely on lithium-ion batteries. What microprocessors are to computing, batteries are to electric vehicles. Unlike with microprocessors, the U.S. share of lithium-ion battery production is tiny.

That’s a problem. A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer-electronics devices. Whoever made batteries then gained the exposure and relationships needed to learn to supply batteries for the more demanding laptop PC market, and after that, for the even more demanding automobile market. U.S. companies didn’t participate in the first phase and consequently weren’t in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up.

Job Creation

Scaling isn’t easy. The investments required are much higher than in the invention phase. And funds need to be committed early, when not much is known about the potential market. Another example from Intel: The investment to build a silicon manufacturing plant in the 1970s was a few million dollars. By the early 1990s, the cost of the factories that would be able to produce the new Pentium chips in volume rose to several billion dollars. The decision to build these plants needed to be made years before we knew whether the Pentium chip would work or whether the market would be interested in it.

Lessons we learned from previous missteps helped us. Years earlier, when Intel’s business consisted of making memory chips, we hesitated to add manufacturing capacity, not being sure about the market demand in years to come. Our Japanese competitors didn’t hesitate: They built the plants. When the demand for memory chips exploded, the Japanese roared into the U.S. market and Intel began its descent as a memory-chip supplier.

Intel Experience

Though steeled by that experience, I remember how afraid I was as I asked the Intel directors for authorization to spend billions of dollars for factories to make a product that didn’t exist at the time for a market we couldn’t size. Fortunately, they gave their OK even as they gulped. The bet paid off.

My point isn’t that Intel was brilliant. The company was founded at a time when it was easier to scale domestically. For one thing, China wasn’t yet open for business. More importantly, the U.S. hadn’t yet forgotten that scaling was crucial to its economic future.

How could the U.S. have forgotten? I believe the answer has to do with a general undervaluing of manufacturing -- the idea that as long as “knowledge work” stays in the U.S., it doesn’t matter what happens to factory jobs. It’s not just newspaper commentators who spread this idea.

Offshore Production

Consider this passage by Princeton University economist Alan S. Blinder: “The TV manufacturing industry really started here, and at one point employed many workers. But as TV sets became ‘just a commodity,’ their production moved offshore to locations with much lower wages. And nowadays the number of television sets manufactured in the U.S. is zero. A failure? No, a success.”

I disagree. Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning today’s “commodity” manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry.

Our fundamental economic beliefs, which we have elevated from a conviction based on observation to an unquestioned truism, is that the free market is the best economic system -- the freer, the better. Our generation has seen the decisive victory of free-market principles over planned economies. So we stick with this belief, largely oblivious to emerging evidence that while free markets beat planned economies, there may be room for a modification that is even better.

No. 1 Objective

Such evidence stares at us from the performance of several Asian countries in the past few decades. These countries seem to understand that job creation must be the No. 1 objective of state economic policy. The government plays a strategic role in setting the priorities and arraying the forces and organization necessary to achieve this goal.

The rapid development of the Asian economies provides numerous illustrations. In a thorough study of the industrial development of East Asia, Robert Wade of the London School of Economics found that these economies turned in precedent- shattering economic performances over the 1970s and 1980s in large part because of the effective involvement of the government in targeting the growth of manufacturing industries.

Consider the “Golden Projects,” a series of digital initiatives driven by the Chinese government in the late 1980s and 1990s. Beijing was convinced of the importance of electronic networks -- used for transactions, communications and coordination -- in enabling job creation, particularly in the less developed parts of the country. Consequently, the Golden Projects enjoyed priority funding. In time, they contributed to the rapid development of China’s information infrastructure and the country’s economic growth.

Job-Centric Economy

How do we turn such Asian experience into intelligent action here and now? Long term, we need a job-centric economic theory -- and job-centric political leadership -- to guide our plans and actions. In the meantime, consider some basic thoughts from a onetime factory guy.

Silicon Valley is a community with a strong tradition of engineering, and engineers are a peculiar breed. They are eager to solve whatever problems they encounter. If profit margins are the problem, we go to work on margins, with exquisite focus. Each company, ruggedly individualistic, does its best to expand efficiently and improve its own profitability. However, our pursuit of our individual businesses, which often involves transferring manufacturing and a great deal of engineering out of the country, has hindered our ability to bring innovations to scale at home. Without scaling, we don’t just lose jobs -- we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.

Blade Didn’t Drop

The story comes to mind of an engineer who was to be executed by guillotine. The guillotine was stuck, and custom required that if the blade didn’t drop, the condemned man was set free. Before this could happen, the engineer pointed with excitement to a rusty pulley, and told the executioner to apply some oil there. Off went his head.

We got to our current state as a consequence of many of us taking actions focused on our own companies’ next milestones. An example: Five years ago, a friend joined a large VC firm as a partner. His responsibility was to make sure that all the startups they funded had a “China strategy,” meaning a plan to move what jobs they could to China. He was going around with an oil can, applying drops to the guillotine in case it was stuck. We should put away our oil cans. VCs should have a partner in charge of every startup’s “U.S. strategy.”

Financial Incentives

The first task is to rebuild our industrial commons. We should develop a system of financial incentives: Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars -- fight to win.) Keep that money separate. Deposit it in the coffers of what we might call the Scaling Bank of the U.S. and make these sums available to companies that will scale their American operations. Such a system would be a daily reminder that while pursuing our company goals, all of us in business have a responsibility to maintain the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability -- and stability -- we may have taken for granted.

I fled Hungary as a young man in 1956 to come to the U.S. Growing up in the Soviet bloc, I witnessed first-hand the perils of both government overreach and a stratified population. Most Americans probably aren’t aware that there was a time in this country when tanks and cavalry were massed on Pennsylvania Avenue to chase away the unemployed. It was 1932; thousands of jobless veterans were demonstrating outside the White House. Soldiers with fixed bayonets and live ammunition moved in on them, and herded them away from the White House. In America! Unemployment is corrosive. If what I’m suggesting sounds protectionist, so be it.

Choice Is Simple

Every day, that Palo Alto restaurant where I met the Chinese venture capitalists is full of technology executives and entrepreneurs. Many of them are my friends. I understand the technological challenges they face, along with the financial pressure they are under from directors and shareholders. Can we expect them to take on yet another assignment, to work on behalf of a loosely defined community of companies, employees, and employees yet to be hired? To do so is undoubtedly naive. Yet the imperative for change is real and the choice is simple. If we want to remain a leading economy, we change on our own, or change will continue to be forced upon us.