Dana Blankenhorn

Reinvention at 56

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 49 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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It cheered me this week to think of my career as being that of an old western hero. (Or anti-hero, if I'm on your bad side, or if you're on mine.)

I come to an undiscovered beat. I watch as people build out the town. When the money comes in, when the frontier is settled, I move on, not entirely by choice, to the next frontier.

Sometimes there is a Paint Your Wagon feel to the thing. The Houston oil boom crashed and burned in 1981. The dot-com became the dot-bomb in 2000. Knowing these disasters were imminent did not help me.

More often I'm kicked out when I get too comfortable. I have been fired from every good job I ever had. From the Birmingham Post-Herald. From the Atlanta Business Chronicle. From NetGuide. From ZDNet.

Like any western hero I have my faults. I'm not always diplomatic. I'm not always careful. I can be an arrogant know-it-all. I talk more than I listen. Again, being right most of the time does not help my cause.

But it lets me look myself in the mirror and be proud of what I see.

Today, with my 56th birthday looming, I still see a young man in that mirror. I still see someone young enough to start a big adventure, learn a new beat, see a new town, cover a new boom.

That boom is renewable energy.

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?

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.