Major Downturns Have an Upside – The Emergence and Growth of New Business Ideas

Economic recessions create bursts of economic and cultural change. Did the buggy and coach business just fade away?  Or did those companies die most quickly in the Panic of 1907-1908 and the Post-WWI Recession, only to be replaced by rapidly expanding businesses involved with motor vehicles, and a rising economic tide to lift them?  What new inventions attained increasingly levels of acceptance and use as people struggled for every advantage to dig themselves out of the recessionary problems of the Great Depression?  Were businesses developing lighter construction materials, alternative energy systems, and fuel conservation technologies some of the positive outcomes of the Oil Crisis and recession of 1973-1975?

The Future of Energy: Things Never Change So Much …

Things never change so much as they stay the same. That’s the saying, anyway, and I figure I’ll see how things balance out if I stick around long enough.  I expect that there will be surprises, and some advances people expect won’t happen, or will be disappointing, while other inventions will become mainstays of our civilization.  Inevitably, the deciding factor behind the decision to discard or keep something involves money, and I believe that will extend to our energy infrastructure.

Whose Lives Will Change Most as Fossil Fuel Prices Rise?

Fossil fuel prices will rise. There’s no doubting that, in the absence of any other supply of cheap, high volume energy, fossil fuel supplies will decline, and prices will rise as population continues to explode.  It is interesting to examine who is most likely to feel the effects of the change, as I don’t think many people, at least in North America where I live, are thinking about it.  In the end, it appears that the middle classes in the most developed countries and in the temperate climates will feel the effects the most.

Future Cost Increases for Fossil Fuels Will Change Architecture

My new job puts me in a large windowless warehouse-like building, much of which has been turned into office space, cube farms with offices embedded in the walls nearby.  At any given time nobody inside knows if it is raining or if the sun is shining, if it’s day or night.  As in most commercial buildings, the lights and ventilation fans run almost all the time, which seems costly.  One nearby building has a small wind turbine on it that runs a lot of the time, however, and another I see near work has a solar panel on the roof.   All that has made me consider what the buildings of thirty years from now will be like.  Certainly they will be quite different, and I expect the inevitable rise in the cost of fossil fuels, and all energy sources “in sympathy”, to be an important influence on their architecture.  So what will commercial buildings be like in the future?

“The Bomb” is Here, But It’s the Population Bomb

My childhood fears of nuclear war have come to pass, but not the way I expected. When I was a kid I had a great fear of nuclear war.  At school we drilled, hiding under our desks, in case Russian missiles with nuclear warheads should wreak terrible, radioactive firestorms on us.  One winter night around the age of 6 I woke up from a dream and looked out the window to see the sky glowing yellow – I was immediately convinced that either a nuclear attack was creating the incredible light in the sky, or that the nearby Fermi nuclear power plant had blown up, and in either case the radiation would soon get us.  As it turned out, it was just a full moon illuminating a light snowfall, but I will never forget the terror of those moments.  These days, with nuclear war seeming to be a much more remote possibility, I don’t even think about it.  The other night, however, I noticed the sky glowing orange most of the way around the horizon, and realized that, if I didn’t know it was street lights illuminating the falling snow, I would have thought a nuclear war had broken out.  The lights were like those of an explosion frozen in time.  Then I realized that this IS an explosion – a population explosion.  This extremely long, slow-motion explosion started over a century ago and the echoes won’t die out for decades, or maybe centuries, to come.  Unfortunately this explosion has consequences potentially more devastating than even a global nuclear war.  So what are we doing about it?  How can we mitigate the effects of this very-slow, long term explosion on ourselves and our descendants?

What Will Happen to Businesses When Energy Cost Eclipses Labor Cost?

Today the cost of labor is the biggest single cost element for many businesses, and drives most decisions. The rise of fossil fuel prices will not be smooth,  however, as we have seen in 2008, when oil prices doubled in a matter of months and then fell back to 30% of their peak in a few months more.  During these spikes, and in the longer term as fossil fuel sources become more difficult and costly to extract, energy costs will rise to a level that challenges or surpasses labor as the biggest component of cost for many or most businesses.  The law of supply and demand also kicks in as population continues to expand, and labor costs in many industries will fall as increasing numbers of people are seeking those jobs.  At the same time, rising energy costs will reduce or eliminate the advantage of manufacturing in “low cost countries” such as China.  How will businesses react?  Will the net effect be to cause people to generally live at a lower economic level and make less money for equivalent work compared with today?  Will manufacturing of progressively lower cost and higher margin goods return to the developed countries?

Why Can’t I Shingle My Roof with Solar Cells Now?

Why can’t I shingle my roof with solar cells now? Years ago I heard about a company in the Southwestern U.S. that makes polymer solar cells in sheets, so inexpensive that they were predicted to be able to provide a roofing product that would generate electricity by perhaps 2003. Since I first heard of them, I have heard of other companies in Europe and the United States with even more interesting technologies – solar cells being printed by ink jet printers on rolls of polymer, and which use nano-scale particles to achieve much higher efficiency than previous, similar concepts. Where are they, and why aren’t we seeing these new technologies coming on-line?

Future Energy Sources

A new high-technology energy source could be useful for low-power applications. The news of a team of scientists making electricity by collecting mechanical energy from falling rain drops (link) illustrates the creativity available to humanity, and that the possibilities for invention always exceed our expectations. I fully agree with certain political leaders that we need a lot more people inventing in their basements and garages if we are to overcome our energy problems. How can incentives be provided to get people thinking and working that way, though?

Sea-bottom gas hydrates keep resurfacing. Another source of energy has been in the news recently. Gas hydrates frozen on the floor of the oceans, while so far untapped, contain huge amounts of energy, some estimates as high as several hundred times the total natural gas reserves. All we need is the technologies to mine them, and such technologies are under development (link). Of course, this is not a renewable fuel source, and the most probably use involves burning and all the emissions associated with that. Also, anything non-renewable is temporary by definition, but it could still help bridge the gap between when petroleum and coal become too scarce and expensive, and when we can implement some other energy source such as fusion power.  (Side note: some scientists attribute the sudden and mysterious disappearance of ships and planes over the Gulf of Mexico or Bermuda Triangle to releases of flammable gas hydrates from the sea bottom, and their subsequent rise to the surface where they could be ignited by a passing vehicle.)

These aren’t the only rarely-mentioned or new alternatives out there, fortunately. I look forward to learning of more of them and discussing them here. Please comment on any other interesting alternative energy sources you may know of.

As always, I welcome your comments and thanks in advance. – Tim

Transportation Off-Earth Could Become Less Prevalent in the Next Few Decades

If rising fossil fuel costs were all that mattered they would eventually make space travel prohibitively expensive, but such decisions are more political than economic. Still, as fossil fuels become increasingly scarce and expensive, traveling off-earth will become accordingly more costly, especially for human beings, whose need for as bulky life support equipment greatly increases the energy requirements for space transportation systems. As a result, cost will become an increasing concern in space-related projects, and take on an increasingly high profile in the political and scientific debates that govern space programs. Recent cutbacks in funding to NASA shows evidence of this. Increasing costs and decreased funding may result in an increasing proportion of robotically-manned space expeditions, and could even reduce the human presence on the space station in the future and see it refitted for increasingly automated operation.  Eventually a new, cheap, and powerful energy source (fusion?) will be developed and a new era of space travel will come about.  How soon that happens, however, depends on us.

Nanotechnology Developments in Paint Show Promise

Nanotechnology-enhanced paints and coatings are already on the market. Several companies have collaborated to create a paint product that containes no toxic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and which has the additional functions of stopping algae and fungal growth while also destroying bacteria the come in contact with it (link). The initial application is intended to be doctor’s offices, clinics, and hospitals, but I am sure there will be other uses such as biological laboratories and even breweries and wineries, where the intrusion of unwanted microorganisms can cause serious production and quality problems. A Wired magazine article from February of 2006 detailed a variety of other nanotechnology applications in the area of paint and coatings (link). Paint manufacturer Behr is now selling a line of kitchen and bath paints that resist stains and mildew (link), and giant Dupont is getting into the act with paints that cure in seconds under ultraviolet light and have enhanced properties (link).  In October 2007 Industrial Nanotech announced a line of nanotech-enhanced, thermally insulating paints that have the interesting property of generating electricity from the difference in temperature between the two sides of the surface they are coating (link).  These new products are just a beginning, however.

Biofuels Which Use Existing Energy Infrastructure May Be Implemented First

Biofuels (link) appear to be among the best alternative energy sources under development.  Production yields per acre for advanced biofuel sources such as algae, for example, significantly exceed those of both food and non-food crops, and it is possible that both gaseous and liquid fuels can be produced in quantities that could make a meaningful dent in the demand for fossil fuels within a decade or two.  As for any energy source, though, while innovators tend to focus on power generation technologies, delivery and storage systems may be even more important in making them economically useful. 

It’s Not Carbon Footprint That Matters Most, but Energy Footprint

The global climate never stops changing. Everything changes, even the global climate. Is it getting warmer? Or colder? That’s for the scientists to answer, and it appears that they will take a very long time to come to anything remotely approaching a consensus, which means that all the polarized rhetoric, Gore-bashing, etc. is just so much hot air (not enough to warm the globe, fortunately, though sometimes I wonder).

Is humanity affecting the climate? We’ve affected many other things as our numbers have increased by a factor of 6 in less than two centuries – a blink of an eye in natural time. If our numbers keep increasing as they have, and our energy use keeps increasing as it is, we will affect the global climate at some point, if we aren’t already. That is another point for scientists to study, and about which there will also probably never be complete agreement. Generally, though, if we are affecting the climate, it is as much tied to our energy use as anything.

Calls for Offshore Drilling and More Nuclear Plants May Be Ill-Advised

Panic over rising energy costs is something we can’t afford.  It would be easy to panic about energy supplies when faced with the 33% gasoline price rise in 16 weeks such as I documented here in the Detroit area.  Panic doesn’t put one in the mood to make sound choices, however.  Now conservatives, some of whom stand to make a lot of money if their advice is followed, are telling everyone that we in the US need to start drilling for oil on our continental shelves (link) and in previously forbidden parts of Alaska, and that more investment in new fission-based nuclear power plants is needed (link).  I believe that, once again, those with profit motives are going to try to play on the fears and desires of average citizens in order to become richer.  Fortunately there are many more who have opposed increased oil drilling and more nuclear power plants (link), and with good reasons. 

Iraq Provides Illuminating Insights on Decentralized Solar Power

Rebuilding Iraq’s economy could go faster with solar power.  A radio story on Iraq this morning cited the fact that banks there have video surveillance systems, among other security measures, but that the systems don’t work when the power is off, which averages a significant part of each day.  Banks, obviously, are a key part of reviving the Iraqi economy, but while banks are being re-established in neighborhoods where violence has declined, their security is still an issue due to daily power outages.  This presents an obvious opportunity for solar power systems, even if they only power the security systems.  It also brings out the question of why, in a country with a lot of dry weather and little cloud cover, solar power isn’t being pursued with vigor in all its forms. 

Alternative Power Sources are Coming, But Not Before Fossil Fuel Costs Reach Greater Heights

Alternative power sources have been in the news for years, with many exciting developments, but won’t be available in time to prevent much higher fossil fuel costs.  If you “google” terms like “solar cell developments” or ”wind power trends”, or just pay attention to the daily news, you will see glowing accounts of new developments in alternative energy sources.  New developments in alternative energies have been trumpeted to the world for decades, but we see few effects on our daily lives (or bills).  This is understandably frustrating, and even more so when fuel costs are rising as they have recently (in my area a 33% increase in a 16 week period in the spring of 2008).  So why is it taking so long for all these wonderful ideas to become “real”?