•April 8, 2004 | 6:11 p.m. ET Hydrogen: Hope or Hype? The most contentious panel at last weekend's Bridging the Divide Conference, co-sponsored by the United Nations and the University of California at Berkeley, was the one called "Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels." While no one on the panel had any dispute that a transition must be made, the question loomed large as to whether hydrogen was a solution -- or a distraction.
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Part of the reason was the presence on the panel of one of this country's most prolific yet unsung inventors, Stanford Ovshinsky. Through his company, Energy Conversion Devices, Ovshinsky has earned patents related to everything from NiMH batteries and memory chips to OLED displays and advanced solar cell technology. ECD itself, however -- though it has stayed in business since 1960 -- has never seemed to reap the big monetary rewards that such innovation would seem to merit, and seems to remain perpetually in fund-raising mode.
Ovshinsky's newest push is hydrogen-fueled automobiles, having recently demonstrated a Toyota Prius modified for hydrogen power, with the hydrogen stored in solid form. If that proves successful it would overcome one of the big obstacles to hydrogen: the dangerous nature of the fuel when under pressure, which is the most common way to store the element. A trial program is already under way in California to test the vehicles in actual operation.
Ovshinsky paints a bright picture of solid-state hydrogen fueling hybrid automobiles that are possible in a matter of years, rather than decades. To add credibility, Robert Stempel, formerly CEO of General Motors, joined ECD as chairman several years ago.
Also on the panel, however, was long-time energy savant Joseph Romm, who helped oversee hydrogen and fuel cell research in the Department of Energy during the Clinton administration and has just published a fascinating new book, "The Hype About Hydrogen." Romm's book is a realistic look at the inherent difficulties in switching over to a hydrogen-fueled economy, but more than that, it's a chilling prediction of the kind of climatic catastrophes that may have to occur before the industrialized world is sufficiently motivated to wean itself off fossil fuels.
Romm doesn't feel that hydrogen will be a serious contender for decades, and so he and Ovshinsky spent much of the panel defending their positions -- with the audience joining in. Ironically, in the process, the smaller-scale energy alternatives that make sense for developing countries got short shrift.
It reminded me that many environmentalists charge that the Bush Administration's support for hydrogen research is an intentional distraction: an attempt to drag the focus off immediate energy solutions, such as automobile fuel efficiency, which would be uncomfortable for big business. If that's the case, then it certainly worked at the Berkeley conference: The shimmering dream of hydrogen managed -- no pun intended -- to suck all the oxygen out of the room. For anyone joining the debate about the future of energy and the environment, a sense of where hydrogen lies in the spectrum of possibility will be a necessary prerequisite for the next few years.
And now I'm logging out for a week to go off the Web and onto a beach in the Caribbean. I'll be back here on the 19th, recharged and ready to reboot. ...
•April 7, 2004 | 2:52 p.m. ET Energy for the Developing World Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the recent UN/University of California Bridging the Divide Conference was the track that dealt with the future of energy. In areas such as medicine and telecommunications, one can already see the kinds of technologies that can work for the developing world. What remains is the more daunting task of figuring out the economics and logistics that will bring those technologies into the lives of the two billion people on the planet who continue to subsist on a dollar or so a day. In my last post I described some specific examples of ideas that seemed to be working.
Energy, however, is a more open-ended question, with several somewhat selfish additional concerns. The first is that the industrialized world may find it has relatively little sway over what energy sources are adopted by the developing countries. And the second is that if the developing world chooses to go down the well-trod path of fossil fuels, the global environmental results will impact us all.
Certainly, renewable sources like solar and wind make a great deal of sense in the countryside, where a power grid doesn't already exist. However, the United Nations projects that by 2007, fully 50% of the world's population will be urban. (By the end of the decade, for example, there will be 20 cities over 20 million in China alone.) Those urban dwellers are likely to be served by electric grids running off fossil or nuclear fuels. And unless big new investments in mass transit are made, internal combustion engines will provide much of the transportation. One estimate suggests that if in 2050, the per capita energy consumption of China and India reaches that of present-day South Korea, those two countries alone will consume more oil than the entire planet did in 2003.
Yet at the same time, there's increasing concern that we're reaching the end of our global oil supply, most recently described in David Goodstein's "Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil." A sudden rise in consumption by the developing world could create an oil crisis to dwarf the 1973 oil embargo. And finally, if widespread use of fossil fuels continues to sustain global warming, we may well find ourselves in the grip of the "large-scale discontinuities" of which a recent Science article warned: including the death of coral reefs, flooding of coastal cities and the shutdown of the ocean currents that currently warm much of the industrialized world. At the very least, many scientists are increasingly convinced that global warming will create unstable climatic conditions, from heat waves and deep cold to an increase in hurricane activity.
So the stakes on energy choices in the developing world don't simply involve improving others' quality of life, but quite probably protecting our own. Yet our own country's obsession with SUVs, our automakers' slow start in the hybrid car market, our reliance on imported oil, makes a clear statement to the rest of the world: spendthrift waste of fossil fuels is just fine for us. To then go to the developing nations and preach the theoretical value of renewable energy is an extreme disconnect.
Clearly, alternative energy needs to be economically attractive, and the best way to perfect such technology is with the technical savvy of the industrialized nations. And that leads immediately to the question of what energy technologies we should concentrate on.
Next: Hydrogen-hope or hype?
• April 5, 2004 | 3:16 p.m. ET Treadle Pumps and Solar Villages At the Bridging the Divide Conference in Berkeley last weekend, the focus was on a distinctly unglamorous part of technology: How do you take the fundamentals of modern life to the literally billions of people worldwide who don't even have safe drinking water or basic health care-not to mention electricity or telephones?
The magnitude of that task dwarfs the "digital divide" issues that focus on information access (although that was a topic as well, covered here by CNET). After a few days of hearing what needs to be done, you understand why Bill Gates' extensive personal philanthropy is aimed at solving basic health problems rather than putting PCs in every village. Yet at the same time it is often advanced technology that makes the solutions possible, whether it's the falling cost of photovoltaic energy or sophisticated water purification systems or medical diagnosis based on molecular genetics.
The Berkeley gathering, co-hosted by the University's Business and Engineering Schools and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, included scientists, U.N. officials, students, and entrepreneurs. One of its goals was to create new research projects, funded by industry, to send graduate students into the field to study potential solutions in areas ranging from healthcare and energy to information technology and local industry.
There were already plenty of solutions on view during the three-day conference. What was striking was how many of the most successful relied not on pure charity or donation, but carefully thought-out small-scale business models that, once put in place, become self-sustaining. The most compelling programs not only did good, but created entrepreneurial opportunities and generated money within the local economy. Without that self-sustaining element, even the best-intentioned programs faced an oft-cited fate: "donor exhaustion."
Selco, a San Francisco-based company funded by European venture capital, installs small photovoltaic systems for homes off the power grid in south India and Sri Lanka. Selco has a network of storefronts where customers can come in, learn from locals about the technology, and also arrange financing from one of India's biggest leasing companies. Another local team installs and services the photovoltaic systems, which suddenly make everything from lights and refrigeration to computers possible. Given India's shaky power infrastructure, some customers are now opting for solar power even when, for about the same cost, they could connect to the grid. The company -- in the black and looking to expand -- is now making a deal with a major Hong Kong cellular phone company to install wireless telephone service as part of their package.
A much simpler technology -- the treadle pump -- figured in several projects discussed at Bridging the Divide. Meant to provide the first powered irrigation for subsistence farmers in places like Bangladesh and Vietnam, it's a simple foot-powered water pump not unlike a stripped-down Stairmaster. But it turned out you couldn't just drop them into the local economy: the pumps, again sold by local distributor networks, required plenty of savvy marketing.
In Vietnam, the distributors hosted marketplace events where farmers could actually try out the novel devices before sinking a significant chunk of their annual income into a purchase. "These are not cultures," said one worker, "accustomed to embracing new ideas." In Bangladesh, treadle pumps were promoted with three-hour movies, shown to audiences of thousands in the countryside. A typical plot: A poor farmer has a beautiful daughter who cannot wed since she has no dowry; the farmer gets a treadle pump, grows more and different crops, makes money, and at last the daughter marries.
The movies worked, and the treadle pump was a big success. That success, however, raised an interesting issue. As farmers used the pumps, they were able to move past subsistence crops and grow higher-value fruits and vegetables to take to market and sell for cash. But the treadle pumps still required hours of daily legwork. Within a few years the most successful farmers had enough money to pool their resources and buy a diesel pump.
Immediately, people in the Berkeley audience wanted to know: What was the environmental impact of switching to diesel pumps? One attendee even raised the issue of whether putting cash in the pockets of subsistence farmers and thereby complicating their lifestyles was in fact a worthy goal. To me, it seemed like an unsettling question -- rich Westerners imposing their own notions of proper lifestyle on people who had barely yet joined modern civilization. But the appearance of the diesel pump did raise what was, for me, the most troubling thread of the entire conference: the future of energy.
Next: How will we power the developing world?
• April 2, 2004 | 2:06 a.m. ET Bridging the Divide It's Thursday night and I'm in Berkeley for a conference called "Bridging the Divide" -- organized by the University of California and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. It runs through Saturday night, discussing how advanced technology can improve lives in the developing world, with an emphasis on corporate social responsibility. Attendees range from economist Robert Reich and Sun Microsystems guru John Gage to Microsoft vice presidents and a range of UC Berkeley professors.
Tomorrow I'll be moderating a panel on the future of energy beyond fossil fuels, while other tracks examine IT policy, health care and manufacturing. As Reich put it in an opening speech, the question is "how to allow more people access to society's resources -- to a world of possibilities for upward mobility." A tall order indeed, and it will be interesting to see what possibilities the discussion here at Berkeley produces.
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