Dana Blankenhorn

Moore's Law of Renewable Energy

There is a lot of dispute among renewable energy advocates over whether Moore's Law applies to what they do, or will ever apply.

Strictly speaking it should not. Gordon Moore was a trained scientist, who worked as an engineer. His famous Electronics article spoke only about circuit density on a silicon substrate. Moore himself has repeatedly said his law can't go on forever.

But many other exponential improvements emerge naturally from Moore's Law, so many that I wrote a book about them called Moore's Lore. What we learned in making circuits smaller came to apply to other components.

• Moore's Law of Storage -- it's easy to see exponential improvements in magnetic storage. Desktops have hundreds of gigabytes of storage, some even terabytes, where my first hard drive 26 years ago had just 10 megabytes.
• Moore's Law of Optical Storage -- We've gone from CD to DVD to BluRay. Progress is slowed by a need for standards that doesn't exist in the magnetic world.
• Moore's Law of Optics -- Dense Wide Division Multiplexing (DWDM) means we can run multiple channels on a single optical fiber, exponentially increasing carrying capacity by simply identifying colors.
• Moore's Law of Radios -- A decade ago a 10 Mbps WiFi signal was considered great. Now laptops come with 100 Mbps standard. It's possible because of Digital Signal Processors (DSPs), which Texas Instruments decided to focus on rather than microprocessors.

Then there are the other outgrowths of exponential abundance made possible by these other corallaries to Moore's Law.

Moore's Law of Knowledge is what you're soaking in. You have immediate access to exponentially more facts today than you did a decade ago. Or Moore's Law of Connection, which your teenager is probably enjoying right now on his or her iPhone.

To the popular mind, all these other changes are just as much Moore's Law as his original silicon conception. Moore's Law has become a shorthand for the computerized world all around us, and for our (correct) assumption that it's just going to get better and better, faster and faster.

So how does this apply to renewable energy?

History and the War Against Oil

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 46 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The big advantage of history is you can learn from it.

This is especially true for business history. And technology history.

In contemplating a War Against Oil I have emphasized the importance of standards. If I know the marginally-efficient solar panel I buy today can be replaced later, at just the cost of the panel, I am more likely to buy it.

In computing history a lot of the important standards work was led by government.

The Internet was entirely a government project -- only after its standards were established was the private sector allowed in. I think it's because there was so much money on the line that private companies just refused to cooperate. They focused on who would pay who and not on how do we move the data. (Picture from the University of Alberta.)

So private sector standards are easier to establish when an industry is new.

The Economics of Abundance

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 43 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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You can't say a new political thesis even exists until it is fully engaged.

The election of a crisis leader does not always engage the Thesis, as the election of Abraham Lincoln precipitated the Civil War. It's not until the crisis leader sees the real problem of his time, the real obstacles, and calls upon the will of the people that the process begins.

After the crisis election of 1896, it took nearly five years for Theodore Roosevelt to issue his call against the "Trusts." After the crisis election of 1932, it was not until the Supreme Court called the New Deal unconstitutional that the issue was engaged.

This is not unusual.

No matter what happens in the coming elections, it's a good thing. The President is being pushed to confront political enemies, to embrace his political base, and to seek a message that will save both him and his party.

The economic crisis the President confronted was not the crisis we in fact face. It was a symptom of a deeper economic problem, the economics of scarcity.

The economics of scarcity have defined the last decade. It's why the Texas oilagarchs got involved in politics. It's why we went to war. It's why economic growth today seems impossible -- each appearance of sustained growth is met by a rise in energy prices.

An Opportunity Agenda

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 33 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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This is the point in any crisis Presidency when the ghouls come out.

The problems haven't been solved. The President seems to be moving too slowly. He's trapped between his need to be the old AntiThesis (Clinton the Triangulator in this case) and the old fading Thesis (Bushism) still practiced in the Capitol. His own troops are dejected. Change is hard.

What turned things around for all past crisis leaders was, simply, an agenda. Setting a course against the true enemy, in defiance of political assumptions, is the test of leadership.

In the current case, that agenda is simple.

The War Against Oil.

As I've said before, a climate bill isn't really a climate bill. It's really a jobs bill. It's also, right now, the hardest bill to get through the Congress. Republicans won't touch it, and many Democrats are wary as well.

The argument is over stimulus. The question should not be how much, but what the stimulus does. A stimulus that doesn't take us in a useful direction is mindless spending. Whether that's in the form of government aid or tax cuts, it's equally mindless.

We need a stimulus that creates stuff.

The last depression was ended by World War II. Republicans love to say that. They don't like to admit that the war was fought at a deficit, although it was. But we don't have to build bombs to win this war. We can win it with plowshares.

But we first have to declare it.

The Blitz of the Gulf and the War Against Oil

What has happened in the Gulf, what continues to happen, is not Barack Obama's Katrina. Nor is it anyone else's. It's not Pearl Harbor, nor is it 9-11.

What it's most comparable to, in terms of American history, is the London Blitz.

(I don't like using AP or even linking to them, but the picture on this page, by the APs Charles Riedel, is becoming the Iwa Jima Flag-on-Mount-Sirabachi moment in this disaster, so I've thumbnailed it. Historians know that an earlier group's arrival on that mountain, with a smaller flag, was the real deal to the men fighting there, and the second flag was put up for show. Yet it's that one we remember. As we'll remember Riedel's Laughing Gull. I entirely agree with AOL's Matt Mendolson on that.)

For most Americans the Gulf is distant. This can be hard to believe but it's true. Even here in Atlanta, where I live, the impacts for now are slight. My neighbor won't be heading to Destin any time soon. Beyond that life remains normal.

This is how America was during the Blitz. It was something happening elsewhere and to other people. What most today have forgotten is that, for many Americans of that time, this was highly desirable. War was highly controversial.

What President Roosevelt did, what Barack Obama needs to do, was to mold public opinion, slowly, toward a war footing. The movies which appeared and were green-lighted in 1940 were not all propaganda pieces, as they would become in the succeeding years. But many did take the gathering darkness as their subtext. And in that era, movies were the dominant medium.

Today the Internet is the dominant medium. It is a medium that is very difficult to dominate. Anything with the taint of propaganda is taken with a grain of salt. Yet, as we see time-and-time again in the Middle East, propaganda gets through.

It gets through when the target is clear and the aim is simple. The Administration's problem lies in its targeting.

The oil is not the enemy. Even BP is not the enemy. The enemy is the system that makes this eternal search for oil necessary, and that makes it the path of least resistance for BP's profit.

I'm not naive enough to think that we can flip a switch and create a world of bullet trains and windmills.  But I'm unwilling to accept the inevitability of oil, and all the bloodshed and destruction that entails.

What has people down right now is just this, the idea that we have no choice but to drill and fight, fight and drill, in order to continue our way of life. That's why the President's approval ratings are down so far, I believe, because his sights are set too low.

Raising those sights means creating a political environment in which an energy bill that moves incentives decisively from carbon to renewables is seen as patriotic, as a jobs bill, and as simple common sense, so that any opposition is seen as unpatriotic. In the face of Big Oil the President has been acting as Chamberlain at Munich, pushing back slowly hoping for "peace in our time."

He needs to become Churchill, not against BP but against the system that made this disaster inevitable. 

The Real Benefits of a Hydrogen Economy

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 4 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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So far we've been selling the idea of a hydrogen cycle (instead of a carbon cycle) as nationalism, as environmentalism, or as a way to make our electrical grid more flexible and robust.

But there is another, even more important argument for the hydrogen economy.

Water.

For thousands of years the history of civilization has been a history of water. Water defines civilization. It can't exist without water.

Read Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, or watch Michael Wood's The Story of India, and you learn how central Asia, what's now the deserts of Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and the "tribal areas" of Pakistan, are the real cradles of civilization.  Those civilizations were destroyed as water sources dried up. That's why the Ganges means life.

To give life water must be clean, and the most important technologies of our last century are those devoting to maintaining supplies of clean water. Water purification, water desalinization, these are the most expensive projects we have. And their reach is very limited. Man can't magically create water. He can only preserve, transport, and purify what he has available around him.

Until now.

Addressing the Crisis

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 1 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Despite all the problems of the world, there is a feeling of confidence in America. (Picture from UC Santa Cruz. Go Banana Slugs.)

The Crisis which has been building for a generation, and which has become obvious over the last four years, is finally going to be addressed.

But before we get to work there is something important which bears constant repeating.

It's going to be hard. At times, the task before us will seem impossible. We will be told it's impossible, by many people, we will be told to turn back, to turn away. And we will want to, very much.

Don't expect wisdom out of the opposition or the press corps. The first group got us into this mess and still refuses to own it. The second enabled this mess and still refuses to own that. To a large degree we will be on our own.

Our leaders will come to seem distant, no matter how hard they work to avoid it. The daily grind will consume them, and the minutiae will threaten to consume us as well.

The only hope is to keep our eyes on the prize.

A world without oil.

Big Threat to the War Against Oil

There is an enormous threat developing to the War Against Oil we all need to conduct in order to save the planet.

Low oil prices.

The price of crude on world markets has been cut in half over the last few months, as the recession we started with our Confederate Money spreads around the world. While the U.S. has responded appropriately, injecting new liquidity to partly make up for what has been lost, the world has yet to respond. The dollar is up against the Euro as a result.

Why is a lower oil price bad? If you spent the last year working on a plan to develop solar or geothermal or hydrogen energy, based on a price equivalent of $100/barrel oil, your project is now dead in the water. Your investors have pulled out and that energy won't be produced.

So long as energy prices are subject to the instant fluctuations of hedge funds and day traders, it is impossible to plan for new supplies.

The solution is simple, and it's time we went for it. As I have stated here many times, that solution is to set a floor price for oil.

Where I Am To Obama's Left

It's the War Against Oil.

Sen. Obama has couched his energy policy solely in terms of energy independence, specifically "independence from MidEast oil."  Since a lot of our oil comes from outside the Middle East (Nigeria, Venezuela and Mexico are all major suppliers) this makes his10 year  goals truly modest.

More important, Obama is not committed in his rhetoric to really fighting hydrocarbons. He and his running mate, Joe Biden, talk at length about "clean coal," which is a sop to Appalachian coal producers, not a working reality. They talk about "clean ethanol," but ethanol is not clean, nor is it really green. Even cellulosic ethanol systems, using non-food crops as feedstocks, are years away from coming onstream. Heck they're blind enough to support natural gas and offshore drilling, which is a sucker's game because it maintains our dependence on foreign suppliers, keeping their game going longer.

Then there is nuclear. Forget about the arguments over its efficacy. It is undisputed fact that a nuclear plant is most dangerous in its early years of service and its later years of service. Nuclear plants take years to permit and build, even in the best circumstances. You can't get much lift from this in the near term, and the danger from these new plants will be at a maximum just as existing plants enter their most dangerous phase of life.

When it comes to The War Against Oil, Sen. Obama is very much a conservative.

The Key To The War Against Oil

The key to winning the War Against Oil will lie in the appointment of a new Energy Secretary.

The Department of Energy has been moribund practically since the day it was born, in part because the President who created it, Jimmy Carter, became so discredited he wasn't even asked to speak at his party's convention this week, despite two Nobel Peace Prizes.

It was designed to implement an industrial policy, but instead it became a political dumping ground, staffed by businessmen under Republicans and party hacks under Democrats.

We can't afford that now.

The Department of Energy must deliver research and policy to guide public and private investment toward a hydrogen economy. Since people really began recognizing the priority we have seen scam-after-scam-after-scam get funding, get publicity, and get power.

1. Ethanol is a scam. It raises food prices, and costs more in energy to produce than it delivers.
2. Clean coal is a lie. The technology does not exist, yet. It might one day, but until it does new coal investments are counter-productive.
3. T. Boone Pickens is a fraud. He wants government power, and subsidies, to turn West Texas into his own fiefdom, stealing and selling its water, running roughshod over property rights with special eminent domain laws.
4. Wind efforts are being wasted. Power lines lose half the power getting it to market. There is, as yet, no infrastructure to turn that power into hydrogen and get it to market.

That's not all. Nuclear power is making a comeback, even though we still don't know what to do with the waste, or even how to protect it against dirty bomb makers. Drill here, drill now advocates threaten to seize the capital we need to make the future and re-enslave us to the past.

I have a very simple plan for the next Energy Secretary: