Dana Blankenhorn

2012: The Landslide

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 52 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The future is hard to know, but in this case it's easy to guess.

There is a Democratic landslide in our future.

No one in the media wants to admit this, but it's baked in.

Once Americans take a decisive turn, and we've only taken six in our whole history as a nation before now, we don't reverse course.

We validate that turn, moving closer to our historic balance of rights and responsibilities, between money and power, between rich and poor, among one another.

Understanding Solyndra: Solar is not Silicon

I have talked about Moore's Law in many posts here, because I have an expansive view of the concept. But it's confusing to people, so from now on I'm going to talk about Dana's Law instead. 

Dana's Law holds that the amount of solar energy in production will double every year or 18 months as far as the eye can see. It's a Moore's Law frame applied to technology that's not entirely silicon.

Take Solyndra, for instance. Not silicon. Solyndra was using thin film CIGS technology and a new circular panel design. It hoped to produce energy at $3/watt, including capital costs. A year ago, when panel prices were at $5/watt, that was a breakthrough. But Chinese oversupply this year sent prices plunging to $1/watt, and Solyndra went bankrupt.

Some people are trying to spin this as bad news. It is not. It is good news. Production efficiency and market competition have cut the cost of producing solar energy.  The “problem” is that Chinese companies produced more panels than their own market could absorb and so “dumped” a ton of them on the U.S. market, killing some suppliers that were using technologies, like CIGS that could not scale as fast.

This happens often in tech. It's one reason our big tech companies hold so much cash. It's only a “scandal” if you're looking to make up a scandal. The solution is to do what some smart energy companies have been doing – make a switch from solar thermal to solar electric, and pick up some bargains. Lower costs now mean big profits later.

The Birth of Civilization

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 26 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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There is no energy shortage.

Global warming means there is more energy in the air than there was. How can there be an energy shortage?

What we're short of is stuff we can burn. Stuff we can burn is how we've defined energy throughout the eras we've called “civilization.”

Can you really call yourself civilized if you define energy the way cavemen did – as stuff you can burn? Didn't civilization start with farming?

Fact. There is abundant energy all around us. The Sun shines. The wind blows. The tide rolls. The Earth we know is a skim coat on top of molten rock.

What we're not doing is harvesting this abundance. Civilization has barely begun.

We know what has delayed the day of harvest. Fading industries always capture the political system to forestall their demise. But in the end technology wins out, then economics wins out. Massive factories became the Rust Belt, production without consumption became the Great Depression, unregulated utilities were harnessed by the Progressive Era, and we fought a Civil War to free human labor from southern planters, unleashing America's machine age.

This is what I have learned in my study of history. American history is a process. Technology leads, the economy follows, and politics struggles in vain to catch up with it all.

Where is the change happening? It's happening all around us.

 

Terraforming

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 22 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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My mom came to visit recently. Blogging is light as a result.

She's 87 now, we all love her and are proud of her relative independence. She uses a walker, but she can get around, and does. She took a red-eye in from the coast. But, best-case scenario, the world's oldest folks are going around age 114, and mom's frailty makes her unlikely to be a champion in the sport of Extreme Aging.

When most folks see this sort of scene in their lives they think about the past, but I'm not most folks. I think about the future.

More particularly, the future I won't see.

Today's crisis of shifting from burning stuff to harvesting the abundance all around us sets us up for the next crisis, which for lack of a better word I'll call the crisis of terraforming.

Consider. The explosion of air temperature we're seeing right now is a second hint (the ozone crisis was the first) concerning a very large question. Now that we can terraform the Earth, what kind of Earth will it be?

There Is No Energy Shortage

(The following originally appeared today at Renewableenergyworld.com, but since we have a lot of new visitors I'm reposting it here.)

It's Earth Day. It's Good Friday. It's a three-day Easter weekend.

And Americans are depressed.

Despite a rising stock market, despite falling unemployment, most Americans feel the economy is going into the tank.

The reason: high gas prices.

For those who did their efficiency homework years ago (which probably includes many readers of this site) high gas prices are no big deal. In fact, evidence suggests we're weathering this bout much better than in the past, thanks to efficiency technologies, where America has a lot more room to grow than its economic rivals.

Still, it's time we change the frame of the debate, starting with this Earth Day.

How Easy it is to Go Native in Washington

The process of “going native,” accepting the groupthink and frames of Washington policy wonks, has always upset activists of all kinds.

Writers in the Netroots call what happens The Village, and those who engage in this groupthink Villagers. When I hear the term I think of the old TV series The Prisoner, the villagers being those prisoners who obeyed orders and answered to their numbers, blindly following orders from whatever Number 2 was put in front of them.

Today's contestant is Darren Samuelsohn, who took a job at the ultimate villager site, Politico, after a decade as an environmental reporter. His latest basically calls the American renewable industry easy prey for foreign competition, and blithely notes it's being replaced in policy discussions by “cheap natural gas.”

In writing this he's accepting a whole lot of frames put forward by the cavemen who captured the Village with the first Bush and got utterly blatant about it with the second.

• Size is all that matters. It does in fossil fuels. In new tech industries innovation counts for a lot more, and we have more of it. Small companies can also move into niches quickly.

• Natural gas is cheap. Really? Really. Only if you ignore the environmental damage, a cost no one seems willing to account for. Accepting lousy accounting as reality means giving in to the frame.

• Solar and wind depend on government grants, while fossil fuels are free enterprise. Samuelsohn knows this to be a lie, yet he repeats it as though it's not.

Why the Economy Still Sucks (And Why It Won't For Much Longer)

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 15 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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This is not an April Fool's joke. Abundance is coming. The hard times are ending for good. But the hole Republicans got us into is a profound one, and making the turn from this crisis will take time.

There are two reasons why economic growth remains low, despite good policies which have staved off a second Great Depression:

1. Money Remains Underemployed
2. The New Game Hasn't Scaled Yet.

I have solutions for both problems today. Let's take them one at a time.

Money Remains Underemployed

There's plenty of capital around, but it is sitting in short-term storage. It's unemployed. Money managers say they're “preserving capital,” when what they should be doing is risking capital in hopes of a gain.

How do we bring that capital out and put it to work?

Inflation.

 

2011 Will Be Better

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 52 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Every year I use my last Clue to peer into the future and see what the next year may hold in store.

From here it holds almost nothing but good news. (Explore The World of Escher, from which this crystal ball was borrowed. Still under-estimated among the great 20th century artists.)

The economy has bottomed up, and it has been growing (albeit slowly) for six quarters. Employers have been squeezing employees for productivity, getting P/E ratios down toward a rational level, and looking around the corner for the next boom. When they see it they will start hiring again.

Recessions have causes. Since field computing ended the problem of "inventory recessions" in the early 1980s, recessions have been financial events. The leveraged buy-outs of the 1980s, the Internet stocks of the 1990s, and the housing bubble of the 2000s all created irrational exuberance that had to be unwound for growth to resume.

This last has been a harder fall than the others, and unless regulators around the world are watchful the next fall will be harder still, because financial interests control many governments including (it turned out) our own.

But that fall is now behind us. The markets have been recapitalized. What people are looking for is the Next Big Thing.

The key to mass market alternative power

Storage.

Electrical utilities must maintain a constant load to work. They monitor use of the resource on one end, push new electricity into the system at the other.

They're used to thinking big. And they want their big inputs to be flexible. Coal and natural gas are very flexible. You can turn them down, turn them off, turn them back on pretty quickly. Solar and wind power aren't flexible. If the wind doesn't blow or the Sun doesn't shine it doesn't matter how much demand you have for what they make -- you won't get supply.

So while most states, including Georgia, have laws requiring  utilities to buy alternative energy -- it's called net metering -- most limit the amount of power a utility is obligated to buy. In Georgia it's .2% of the system's peak load. If it's unreliable the power company won't treat it seriously.

The key to making alternative power reliable is storage. When I first approached this subject, I assumed the best way was to turn electricity into hydrogen, then store-and-forward the hydrogen in some way, either as a gas or as liquid ammonia, NH3.

Turns out that's not the only way to go about it, and right now the power loss from the round-trip hydrogen conversion makes it uneconomic anyway.

Most current mass energy storage methods -- raising water, compressing nitrogen, underground heat storage, wind bags -- are still on the drawing board. Two are not:

• Beacon Power is building a 20 MW plant in upstate New York (above) that uses a flywheel, spinning on magnets, to store power until it's needed. The company says it can scale this to the GW range.
• General Compression uses excess power to compress air, which is stored underground, and then released to create power when needed. It's planning a commercial launch next fall and is backed by, among others, Duke Energy, so it should have customers.

Believing in Abundance

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 48 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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It may be the hardest test of a political leader or of a people.

How do you get people to believe in abundance? How do you believe in it, when the evidence you see around you screams scarcity?

This feeling of hopelessness has been at the heart of all America's past political crises.

• Can America remain one country or will it become like Europe, a collection of warring states?
• Can America grow when monopolists control essential prices and manipulate the markets to their benefit?
• Can American democracy survive this Great Depression which seems to prove it doesn't work?
• Can America keep growing in the face of social divisions tearing it apart?
• Can America keep growing in a world dominated by the price of oil and other energy resources?

These questions were all based on an assumption of scarcity. They narrowed what we could see to horrors in front of us. War. Money. Depression. Division.

You know the response. Can we? Yes, we can.