The Energy Grid

It may have to be us.  All of us.

As they stand today, I think the realms of technology and politics may affect each other in too many multi-dimensional ways to arrive at any simple conclusion about their ability to "save" us.  More importantly perhaps, given the presumed severity of our energy situation, our rapidly degrading natural environment and the complexity of our current techno-socio-political system(s), it may be reasonable to suggest that neither politics nor technology (alone or combined) in their present forms can save us in time.

It seems that all too often the relationship between technology and politics is specious and highly non-linear.   The involved parties work on radically different time scales, with variously-motivated incentives, and at least until now, many systems have been able to derive great profit from leveraging (or dare I suggest, creating...) market inefficiencies.

Policy, while useful, is created by individuals, or groups of individuals who exert control over a wider network of information than they generally have individual ability to understand.  A friend of mine, Joost Bonsen, recently said to me in conversation, "The modern era is defined by the division of labor."  I found this to be such a great observation that I wrote it down, and it made me later think, "why can't the next generation also be defined by a division of management?"

Ideally, a smart techology policy, like I saw described by U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu during MIT's Compton Lecture last Tuesday, could create a network of new research laboratories similar to Bell Labs, aimed at addressing the energy issue in a rational and predictable way.  The concentration of great minds in these highly collaborative and open research hub environments might one day lead to a commercial distribution of clean, low-carbon power (and food and goods) to the masses via the political and economic structures, perhaps within the next 40-50 years.  However, even Dr. Chu made a distinct point that the challenge is great and expensive. 

Addressing a question about his plans to structure the new government research labs, he said that the energy market will have to become more high-tech in the future, and that to do so may require investment of 10% or more of sales in R&D, a percentage reflecting other successful high-tech firms' R&D investments.  Given that $1-2 trillion US dollars are spent every year on energy, that would mean an annual investment of $100-200 billon.  Yet, he said, the Obama administration has only pledged around $2 billion.

Who will mind the gap?

That's where I think the rest of us come in.

Increasingly we hear calls to crowdsource the answers to our problems.  Why don't we take our individual knowledge of our personal values and needs, combine these with existing and ever-improving data about embodied energy and use energy, and utilize that knowledge to calculate (and reduce) our personal energy budgets, as suggested by new websites like WattzOn.com or sourcemap.org?

• Let's think about energy in terms of what we have and how we use it.
• Let's ask ourselves about our "inputs" (coal, oil, gas - also, solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, etc) and our "outputs" (electricity, heat, information, transportation/mobility, communication, food, architecture, products, waste, etc).
• Let's consider the true costs of our resources by working together to understand what those actually are.
• Let's consider efficiency (how much goes in versus how much do we get out?) and effectiveness (how little can we put in to achieve a delightful result?).
• Let's equip ourselves with tools to do this study together, as a group.
• Let's KISS.

We have created systems for gathering information and sharing it that are improving at exponential rates and making it possible for us to communicate ever more effectively about our present states and our desired states.

If we continue to allow the formation of what may be emerging as the new technopolitical or infopoliticalblogoweb sphere, we may see that we have literally been sitting on the answers all along.

After all, we have been pondering the concept of energy for at least two and a half millenia, when the word energy (derived from Greek ἐνέργεια (energeia)),  appeared for the first time in the work Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle in the 4th century BC.