How a brilliant entrepreneurial innovator thinks about climate solutions
I visited my friend Saul Griffith at Other Lab on August 9th, 2013. The lab is housed in the old Schoenstein & Sons pipe organ factory in San Francisco. It’s a beautiful building, with its offices and hallways straight out of a Dashiell Hammett novel.
I loved visiting the lab because it was so inspirational. I encountered inflatable robots, pneumatic solar mirror controls, a new kind of high pressure tank for storing natural gas or hydrogen for vehicles, 3D milling machines, high powered laser cutters, and custom-designed bicycles sized to fit your measurements. Cool stuff, and it reminded me that we need not be hamstrung by how things have been done in the past. The future is indeed ours to create!
Saul was good enough to write the forward to Cold Cash, Cool Climate: Science-based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs in 2011, and he’s given permission for me to repost it below. This will give you a flavor for how a brilliant entrepreneurial innovator thinks about climate solutions at a high level.
If equations aren’t your thing, just skip them and read the summaries just below each one. You’ll get the gist.
Saul Griffith’s Foreword to Cold Cash, Cool Climate
Climate change, energy independence, and sustainability: all of these things are rightly getting more attention than ever before. They are complex global problems requiring not one, but thousands, of solutions. Some solutions require mandates, some rely on politics, some need technology, and some hinge on behavioral change. All of the solutions will require entrepreneurs – stubborn, fast-moving, single-minded, goal-oriented individuals, either in the private or public sector. Without these entrepreneurs pushing boundaries and the speed of deployment, uptake of these solutions will be too slow to avert the worst consequences of these global challenges. This book is a motivational treatise that pushes the green entrepreneur of the future to fulfill this important role.
More than that, this book is about the scientific knowledge that helps define the character and limitations of these solutions. If we are to leave a livable world (and hopefully a vital and vibrant world) for our children and grandchildren, the scale of what needs to happen this century is daunting. Achieving even a mildly ambitious outcome of stabilizing the climate at 450 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 equivalent will mean the world of our future will look very different from today. Our transportation systems, heating and cooling systems, built environment and architecture, food systems, and even healthcare and education systems will all need to change – some a little, most a lot. Lots of people are scared of change, but the true entrepreneur embraces it. This is the green entrepreneur’s century.
Back in 2007 I was bedridden with chicken pox. Like most entrepreneurs I don’t take to idleness very well, so I set myself a task: measure every measurable impact of my lifestyle in terms of energy. I was already a ‘Green Entrepreneur’ – the CEO of a venture-financed, utility-scale wind energy start-up – and generally someone that people would look at as a model citizen when it comes to the environment and combating climate change. I was (mostly) a bicycle commuter; I was working on audacious new energy technologies.
What I learned shocked me. Although I thought I was a model citizen of the new cleaner world, I found that my lifestyle was consuming double or more the amount of energy that the average American was, and more than ten times that of the average Chinese citizen! Measuring everything that I did, quite literally down to my use of aluminum foil for cooking, and of the choice of textiles that I wore (as well as the more obvious things like miles travelled and electricity consumption), I realized that we now live in an age of consequence. It is possible to measure everything that you do – and its environmental impact. Whether you care about water, energy, carbon, or habitat destruction, we can now infer or estimate the impact of any purchasing decision on any of those outcomes. This exercise also made me furious with the often misleading reporting on new ‘green’ products and technologies. I became an angry young man again.
Being angry doesn’t help much though, whereas being an entrepreneur does. It’s been a few years since I had my wake-up call. People typically believe that the future for their children will be better, brighter, cleaner, and more wonderful than the past. That’s our challenge right now. We have to figure out how to make the future better than the past, while meeting the implied demands of the science of climate change. I no longer get angry about poorly written press releases and green-washing. In fact, they’re probably useful in that they socialize the idea of a cleaner and greener future, while the entrepreneurs who do the math, and have the analytical rigor, create the truly revolutionary products consumers are increasingly starting to demand.
I’m personally dedicated to creating these new products and services and bringing them to market. I have to acknowledge, however, that we need lots of entrepreneurs, working on lots of things, so that all of our contributions will add up to the kind of future that we want to live in – one that will be more wonderful than the past. It means that we’ll need to develop new sources of energy, and that there are thousands of technologies, solutions, and great companies to be built in the trillion-dollar energy generation game. There are even more technologies, solutions and great companies to be built in the consumer space. Here’s the trick: think of any product or service that you use today, whether it be how you get your milk, how you heat your home, or how you get your music. Figure out a way to deliver that product or service at one-half, or even better, one-tenth the amount of energy/water/habitat destruction/toxicity, and you likely have yourself a multi-million or multi-billion dollar product or service. This is why this book will be a great guide for the entrepreneurs of this century, and why Koomey’s treatment of the subject matter provides a great handle for the time-strapped entrepreneur.
There is a huge amount of science and engineering and math that the entrepreneur of the future would like to know, but in some sense we can reduce the problem to a few handy pieces of technically grounded practical advice. In the sections that follow, I include the equations for the technically minded reader, but you can just jump straight to the summaries that immediately follow those if you prefer.
Regarding travel of any kind
In high school, we learn mechanics in the Newtonian world, but in reality, almost any time we move, we do so through a fluid, usually air or water. Thus, for almost any transportation the power P required to move an object is given (roughly) by
where ρ is the density of the fluid (usually air or water), A is the frontal area of the moving body, Cd is drag coefficient, which is determined by the shape, and v is the velocity of movement. Colloquially speaking, this means to design any product or service that has to move with a lower power or energy requirement:
• Decrease A. Make it small and long.
• Decrease Cd. Make it aerodynamic, or ‘fish-shaped’.
• Decrease v2. Travel slowly.
This means that a really big, fast, low-energy super car is never going to exist, despite the attractiveness of the idea. Beautiful designed cars that recognize the constraints of the physics above could be far more efficient, and more of a pleasure to drive (or be robotically driven in). For short trips we will do even better by not driving at all, and by utilizing modern electric drive trains in lightweight personal vehicles.
Regarding the heating or cooling of anything
The power P required to heat or cool any object is given by
where k is the object’s thermal conductivity, A is the cross-sectional area between hot and cold, ∆T is the temperature difference, and ∆x is the distance between hot and cold. As above, this equation implies that to make more efficient transfers of heat, we must
• Decrease k. Insulate well.
• Increase ∆x. Use thick walls.
• Decrease A. Small is beautiful.
• Decrease ∆T. Heat or cool only as much as necessary.
Regarding the manufacturing of anything
The average power requirement over the life of a product is given by
And Eembodied is the energy content of the material of which a device is constructed.
What these equations say is that we must:
• Decrease Mmassofobject. Make it weigh less.
• Decrease Eembodied. Use materials with lower embodied energy (e.g. substitute wood for aluminum).
•Increase Tlifetime. Making objects that last much longer, perhaps with service and repair-based business models, will have the biggest effect.
Regarding the design of electronics
The average power requirement over the life of a product is given by
where I = current and R = resistance.
This equation implies that lowering resistance and current will reduce the power needed to accomplish a task. For electrical devices:
• reduce the current (I) by improving efficiency and redesigning the task
• make the wires bigger (reduces R)
Harness the power of information
Of course, the most important new tool we have in our toolbox is information. Wherever possible, use information technology to eliminate wasteful energy use. Examples abound: Replacing flights or driving by teleconferencing is a huge win for the environment. Using information to match needs with wants, such as ZipCar or City Car Share, eliminates the need for ownership of energy-intensive items. Using information technology such as Netflix, the Kindle, or the Apple iPad eliminates the physical delivery of goods.
A call for prompt action
The battle is not over once we have pioneered newer, more ecological technologies. We must still overcome the political, cultural and economic barriers to get people to adopt the low carbon options really fast. With these challenges, the imperative of this book is more apt than ever: we need entrepreneurs to lead the decarbonization of our lives now, and to make it happen pronto! I hope this book serves as a call to action for the next generation to capitalize on this age of consequence, building an awesome future harmonious with our understanding of how our home planet works.
-Saul Griffith, Ph.D., Other Lab, San Francisco, CA, October 12, 2011
