Now: 6-second view of high-voltageover limited area, minimal view of distribution and customer
2020: Sub-second view of entire system in real time (<1 sec) across entire interconnection area

Today: Less than 2% intermittent supply
2020: Greater than 15% intermittent supply

Today: Less than 5% price-responsive loads
2020: Greater than 15% price-responsive loads

Today: Centralized generation and investment inertia
2020: More DG, storage, demand control

Today: End use relatively simple resistance, predictable
2020: Substantial new high-efficiency loads, hard to predict

Today: Conservatively rated to avoid blackouts
2020: Higher asset utilization and adaptive control

Today: No transportation interoperability
2020: Interoperability and ~25% electric vehicles

And the big claim of the day: 73% of current transportation demand could be met with the currently installed renewable resource, if PHEV’s were abundant and charged during off-peak hours.

**On the finance front, EERE should consider launching a collaboration with the Interamerican Development Bank to begin ‘greening’ the IDB project finance arm. See this link for good background.   There is some indication that the IDB is just beginning [pdf] to consider this type of change in the biofuels sector.   EERE should advise the IDB in finance concerns re solar, wind, and energy efficiency, too. Such a collaboration would help break the project finance logjam, and would also ensure scale, duration, and breadth of impact, far beyond EERE acting on its own.  (See also the “Green Bank” legislation just introduced in the US.)

FUEL /   Price/Terawatt

• 1 TW Coal   =  1 planet+ $0.7 trillion
• 1 TW N. Gas =  1 ecosystem + $1 trillion
• 1 TW Nuclear  = $3 Trillion + 25% chance of 1 planet
• 1 TW “Clean Coal” = 2 ecosystems + $4 Trillion
• 1 TW Solar PV  = $4 Trillion
• 1 TW Wind =  $1 Trillion
• 1 TW CSP =  $3 Trillion

This simplifies the cost calculations.  Try not to spend any planets; you’ve only got one.”

But I have lingering doubts…Certainly the movement is increasingly technologically feasible, and likely to create some sort of fringe guild ecology over the next 10 years.  But from an economic and social viewpoint, much remains to be sorted out in any rigorous way.   I should clarify here that my goal is to critique the OSH movement’s ability to have a meaningful impact for the welfare of the world’s poorest, or to meaningfully change the ecological footprint of the global economy.  Key to this dual goal are speed and scale: the OSH economy must grow at least as fast as the ‘traditional’ economy, and preferably should outpace it by an order of magnitude.   In other words, how can the OSH community lay plans to grow revenues by 25% per year for the next 10 years?

And in sorting out whether OSH has legs, we need to think about whether it will be able to harness the three forces that drive successful product/service growth: a business model that keeps investment dollars coming in, keeps producers gainfully employed, and keeps consumers happy.  I’ll look into possible business models for OSH in a later post.

“The problem with government attempts to manipulate the economy through fiscal policy — spending that takes resources away from those who are productive and redistributes it to politically favored interests — is that it is audacious. It assumes that government knows better how to spend and invest than individuals acting in their families’ best interest.”

Now I get the argument…and I am generally in agreement: more money in the consumer’s pocket is just and smart policy.  But Dr. Armey certainly wouldn’t argue that “individuals acting in their families’ best interest” would ever create public works, public education, NASA, Yellowstone Park, the Armed Forces, or the Pell Grant program?  Or would he?  Does he have a political theory of how self-interest can create public goods?  I’d love to hear it.

Furthermore, Hayek and Armey assume ‘normal times’ in the economy.  Do Hayekian tax cuts solve the problems facing a massively indebted, credit-frozen, psychologically-unstable economy?  Are they cure-alls for recessions generally?  If there are empirical examples of this, I’d love to see them.

Ideology over pragmatism is a dangerous choice for all points on the spectrum.   It is unfortuntate that Dr. Armey has chosen this path at a terrible time in our economy.

Cisco "EnergyWise" Smart Grid Software

This move by Cisco has already been blogged a lot, but I thought I’d comment from the perspective of someone who’s worked with a small smart grid startup: Cisco is going to eat small smart grid startups for lunch.

Their new flash demo certainly features lots of Oz, but it doesn’t take long to realize that they’ve been putting some thought (and cash) into this.  Their software appears to have a simple, user-friendly aesthetic, and offers the broad functionality that small startups struggle to engineer: device scheduling, predictive budgeting, user-, office-, and campus-level analysis, and capacity to track hundreds, if not thousands of networked devices.

Of course, the hardware at the other end of this dreamscape is vaporware, too, but for those small startups seeking to corner the software platform of the smart grid space, this certainly can’t be a good omen.

“Greater justice and economic improvement for the many is not always the result of social revolution. The Europeans’ guns overwhelming of the American Indian bow-and-arrow weapons was in most ways a retrogressive social revolution implemented by design-science revolution. It is always the design revolution that tips the social scales one way or the other. However, sum totally the combined design and social revolutions ultimately favor the many. Between 1900 and today, 60 percent of humans in the U.S.A. have attained a standard of living far in advance of those of the greatest potentates of 1900 while concurrently doubling the life-span of that fortunate 60 percent.

“Never before in all history have the inequities and the momentums of unthinking money-power been more glaringly evident to so vastly large a number of now literate, competent, and constructively thinking all-around-the-world humans. There’s a soon-to-occur critical-mass moment when the intuition of the responsibly inspired majority of humanity, in contradistinction to the angered Luddites and avenging Robin Hoods, faced with comprehensive functional discontinuity of nationally contained techno-economic system, will call for and accomplish a world-around reorientation of our planetary affairs. At this critical moment will occur a realization by the responsibly inspired majority that the adequate capacity of the invisible technology to sustainingly support all humanity depends on all the resources, physical and metaphysical, being always and only employed for all of world-around humanity as a completely integrated techno-economic system operating entirely on its daily income principally of Sun-emanating energy.”

As an MBA candidate with an international development background, I think that the damage done by secrecy jurisdictions is an overlooked ‘area of moral clarity.’  With regards to global poverty eradication, there is little debate that that resource-rich, governance-poor countries are prime targets for international organized crime.  The resulting industry for ‘corruption services’ is lubricated by tax havens.  While demand for corruption services may be difficult to staunch, the supply for these services is a really a question of international, and in some cases national, regulation.  Unfortunately these services are still big business in the developed world, with the UK, Singapore, Switzerland, and the US being the biggest offenders.

Until this question lands squarely on the regulatory agendas of the EU, UN, US, and ASEAN, the $80bn of aid money from the countries of the North is throwing good money after bad.  Until tax havens are recognized as accomplices in global corruption that drains tax revenue from the poorest nations, humanitarian aid will continue, perhaps inadvertently, to perpetuate aid-dependency around the world.