Bill Gates: We need crazy energy entrepreneurs | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates: We need crazy energy entrepreneurs

gigaom.com

88 pointssuprgeek48 comments

Most effort on the climate change front seems to be going towards linear solutions to essentially exponential problems: A few percent solar/wind in the grid mix, smart meters that allows utilization of those to go up a few percent, more expensive gas to discourage driving, incentives to buy more efficient vehicles. Encouraging better insulation of buildings.

But it's obvious that you can't fight an exponential battle with linear weapons.

Making cars run on an available non-fossil source of energy seems to be where the biggest win is - but it's much bigger task than inventing a good battery, electricity is still expensive, fossil in many places and the grids have nowhere near to capacity to sustain a large population of chargeable electrics. Bio-fuel tech is here, but we don't have the bio-mass to make it from. Etc.

The only area in this field that is ready for one-point disruption as far as I can tell is liquid bio-fuels. There is a world-wide mature infrastructure, and the market is hungering for a lower-cost alternative. I read about a bio-start-up that's developing an algae-catalysed process that converts sunlight and atmospheric carbon dioxide into a sort of crude oil that can be directly refined just like crude oil.

I actually live off the grid using a system of solar panels inverters and batteries (lead AGM batteries), the batteries are the most expensive part of the system, in the summer there is a lot of sun - I can cook with electricity, in the winter I'm using a netbook instead of the notebook to save electricity.

"I'm using a netbook instead of the notebook to save electricity." Why? A notebook uses less power than a lightbulb these days.

We don't use lightbulbs for lighting we use leds, so our lighting consumes less electricity than a notebook. In the evening I check how much electricity is left in accumulators and after using notebook in a cloudy day there is less electricity than after a netbook.

I didn't mean you had to use lightbulbs, I just wondered whether the difference between using a notebook and a netbook was actually significant. Do you by any chance know how much of a difference it makes (in energy)? I would be interested in knowing. :)

For Asus EePC it's about 20Wt for Toshiba Notebook it's about 40Wt.

Care to describe this in more detail?

I have:

two solar panels of about 70-100Wt (self made from ebay elements)

a bundle of two 200Ah 12V AGM accumulators

a cheap ($30) Chinese charge controller

a cheap Chinese invertor it writes on it 1500Wt but it sometimes stops on some 800Wt hardware (may be starting currents are too big)

I'm using the invertor for notebooks, water pump, blender, even when it doesn't have load it consumes about 0.4A/hour so we're turning it off, especially during winter. We're trying to use as much car chargers as possible also our led light is 12V linked directly to accumulators.

Do you manually repoint the panels based on season (for elevation)?

How far north are you?

No, they're positioned for winter position, because in the summer there is much more sun and accumulators are usually full.

"Most effort on the climate change front seems to be going towards linear solutions to essentially exponential problems:"

Quote of the freaking century.

This is exactly the problem that most fail to realise.

This is not just a matter of replacing the current energy sources with greener alternatives.

This is about finding radically new ways to mine the universe for power because we sure are going to need it in order to survive and progress.

I concur - brilliant quote. I was thinking about this earlier today, how to put into words the seeming inadequacy of 'green' / 'alternative' energy projects. Some of them might really be good alternatives by now but what we really need is an 'exponential' breakthrough.

Aren't most those solutions suppose to be applied by everyone, and therefore, it's a very large degree polynomial which could beat an exponential over a finite time frame?

Furthermore, electric cars are cheap to run... I heard a quote of £1.25 per hundred miles? They are expensive to buy and the range is a little on the small side, but both are improving (probably exponentially :P)

Cars are responsible for some 15% of carbon emissions globally. Even if we could replace all cars globally (a very long shot already), we haven't accounted for the fact that most electricity generated is by burning fossils. China is by far the biggest builder of new nuclear power, but they can't even keep up with their growth, much less overtake it.

Let's say we can get all cars replaced (meaning we fix range, cost, the sophistication required to service, grid capacity etc.), you've maybe shaved 5% off emissions - and that's a one-off, not a continuous improvement, the growth in carbon emissions keeps soldiering on.

It's irrelevant. We have to find ways of generating electricity cleanly anyway. So, we can kill 2 birds with one stone by making cars use that electricity. Better than driving hydrogen bombs around.

IMHO running out of fossil fuels and their escalating price is a much more compelling reason to use electric cars than the emissions argument.

>But it's obvious that you can't fight an exponential battle with linear weapons.

Well sure, but actually fixing the way our society runs to stop exponentially expanding our energy requirements would require, frankly, some minimal dose of social democracy. Can't have that!

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Yes, we can slow down the rate at which the rate of growth grows. We may even feel awfully good about that. But if any meaningful projection of climate data is to be believed, we don't need slower growth, we need a total collapse in emissions: we need to get to net negative emissions. Soon.

I think going green etc. is nice, and often just common sense with a new label on it. But very often it's just distracting from realising just what kind of breakthrough that is necessary.

Yes, we can slow down the rate at which the rate of growth grows

Yes, in the UK it's called taxing the hell out of everything. Petrol is now £1.42 a litre. That's right, A LITRE. That's about $8.50 a gallon. That'll make people use their cars less and move to more efficient vehicles very quickly.

you'd think so, but it probably doesn't make much of a difference. The london driving tax was supposed to make a difference, and I don't think it did much - there's not enough good alternatives.

there was some sarcasm meant in my comment but you are right of course, but unfortunately the way things are going we'll be forced to find an alternative cos we'll be priced out. Until that point governments know we will continue to pay and use it as a stealth tax. Yet we are still broke. And so the vicious cycle continues!

i couldn't tell if you were being sarcastic or not. it worked either way. ;)

What am I getting at? We need to shrink our energy usage. Efficiency gains are linear, energy use grows exponentially.

So what do we do? Try old-fashioned solutions like a healthy dose of localism and urban/geographical planning so that we exponentially decrease our energy requirements.

Manhattan is the greenest city in America, in the sense of spending the least energy per citizen.

This is in line with what Peter Thiel is saying: IT has been taking a lot of attention and talent from the "hard" sciences and it is certainly arguable that major scientific breakthroughs have been getting more rare. During the cold war it was cool to be an astronaut, now it is being the CEO of the next mobile social local photo sharing startup.

Damn, you nailed it. This is exactly what I think, we are wasting so much brain power into stupid and superficial things it's a shame.

It's only stupid and superficial if no one wants it.

Stupid and superficial is very relative and means very different things to different people.

Facebook, Amazon, iTunes, iPads etc etc... all very stupid and superficial when you don't know where your next meal is coming from. But the West will happily preach on to the less developed nations to use inefficient methods of power generation which are still very expensive tech when they themselves have not been able to solve the problems associated with cheaply mass producing power using that same technology.

It's going to be interesting to see how all these technology develops, no doubt at least some of it will filter done to mass produced consumer goods. Hopefully some of the profits will go towards helping the poorer nations develop their tech.

"Stupid and superficial" is a good description of today's low-need, low-investment, small-problem start-up environment.

During the cold war it was cool to be an astronaut, now it is being the CEO of the next mobile social local photo sharing startup

, in Silicon Valley.

Believe me, it's a very local cultural thing. If you live there and read HN, which is basically projecting said culture into the world and attracting the few outliers elsewhere who feel the same, it's easy to think that the whole world is like this. It isn't.

Or, at least, where I live, nobody thinks it's cool to be the CEO of the next mobile social local photo sharing startup.

> where I live, nobody thinks it's cool to be the CEO of the next mobile social local photo sharing startup.

And I still would love to be an astronaut. Just in case someone is hiring around here ;-)

I'd change careers in a blink.

I wouldn't neccessarily say that. Starting your own startup has definitely gained "street-cred" over the years. Then again, I go to college in Boston

I disagree. It's a lack of research job opportunities that pushes people from hard sciences and into, especially finance IT. At the risk of sounding like NDT, funding for research labs (and yes, NASA) would suck up the hard sciences people like nothing.

And until you have the basic research figured out, it's pretty hard to just "entrepreneur" your way through these problems.

There are plenty of people who pursue degrees in the hard sciences --- PhDs in physics, chemistry, etc. Then, somewhere around their third year, they all realize that:

1) To get a faculty job, you have to be beyond brilliant. I'm not. Research labs? Also barely scraping by. Be prepared to, at best, be on soft money and have to apply for grants every 2-3 years, most of which run between a 10-20% acceptance rate.

2) There are some industry labs. They pay decently, but it's basically carrying out others experiments in line with short-term goals. Where can XX find / extract more oil?

Is it any surprise they wake up and shift, particularly to finance IT, where they can at least get paid well? Spend a month learning stochastic calculus and you're good to go. Yes, I oversimplify, but not by too much (at least, for the hard sciences people I've talked with here at the UofC and in the post-graduation Chicago finance shops).

I'm in my 4th year at Warwick doing a Maths degree. I could have done a PhD for £14000 a year, or get a job in Financial Software Development at £40000. Furthermore, I'm more employable after the 4 years of work than the PhD.

I didn't even have to learn any Stochastic Analysis!

Agreed. I was a physics major for three years, but here I am doing webdev as a fulltime gig.

but dont you think when kids are in high school or college, they think about what they wanna be? I doubt people look into NASA funding to decide whether to go into the hard sciences or just stick with computers

Are you arguing not enough kids go into the hard sciences? That's certainly another debatable point, but different from the one I'm making.

I'm pointing out that of the people who _already_ go into the hard sciences and even get a PhD, we can't keep them in the hard sciences due to a lack of good research jobs for them. So they take an IT job.

Quote from HN user shingen, someone who has been hellbanned. I thought it was a valuable contribution to the discussion, so I reposted it here for people who don't have showdead on (or would like to save their eyes):

Electricity isn't expensive, we have a government that tends to make everything extraordinarily expensive. Obama's trillion dollar stimulus shot could have built a hundred nuclear power plants in America. Or 50 plants, plus transmission to carry the juice. Except the runway from here to there is a minefield filled with lobbyist groups, endless regulatory hurdles, congressional reviews, lawsuits, etc. All of which are government failures tied to tort reform, lobbying reform, and bad regulations and bad processes related to regulation. The rest of the world thinks America is a joke when it comes to energy. Canada understands energy; China understands energy; Japan understands energy. We can't even build a simple pipeline - until the next week, when Obama goes from claiming he's a protector of the environment, to bragging he has built enough pipeline to circle the world. Canada and China look at this and laugh. http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/03/22/450397/obama-worst-.... I think it can easily be argued that America has the most ineffectual government among major economies. We spend the most, for the least results (which blankets most segments, including education).

You can't store electricity so it's mostly pointless to build extra power plants beyond what we are actually using.

So, if we don't need more power now what should we be spending that trillion on? IMO, R&D would have a much better ROI both in terms of economic development and climate change. However, for various reasons, the Bush / Obama stimulus plans focused on protecting bankers in the short term vs. long term economic growth.

The world may need such people but the majority of the scientific population is very quick to ridicule them, and existing industries like oil do their best to prevent them from executing. So not only must the entrepreneur have a unique viewpoint on the problems but they must be very courageous too. I'm glad someone like Bill Gates is standing up and saying this but I'm anxious that it's too late, and that it won't be possible without big changes to the way our society is structured.

Right, energy is awfully political.

Between the technical challenges and the political challenges, I recon the political ones are the harder of the two. Get the politics right, and the technology will sort it self out. Don't get the politics right, and the technology doesn't have a chance.

I'm also glad Gates has turned his attention to energy. 'Tis good to have someone of his resources and temperament focused on the problem.

Loved this line...

He’s also a limited partner in Khosla Ventures, Vinod Khosla’s fund, and Gates jokingly referred to Khosla as “the pay master of crazy people — some of whom we’ll declare sane,” in the future

Would love to have seen some energy-industry ideas in pg's essay on Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

With all the wind in bay area a wind mill in every house can solve major part of energy problem. But HOA rules are the roadblock in their widespread installation

And, from the experiences in Germany, I can tell you: Wind mills suffer badly from "not in my backyard" syndrome, since they destroy the scenery and make noise.

Am I the only person that finds these things beautiful to look at? They're captivating to me.

I love windturbines too, for some very strange reason. I could stare at them for hours. Especially fields of them.

FYI it can be a sign of being somewhere on the autism spectrum. A lot of programmers are.

Just let's not forget we also need ethical ones too.

In fact, I'd trade a crazy unethical one for a sane and ethical one without thinking twice.

If Bill Gates need energy miracles why doesn't he spend his own money on that? Stay away from taxpayer money!

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