The Transition

Path dependence: institutions are self reinforcing.  Initially, the market offers a wide range of solutions to a problem.  Over time, various economic effects tend to cause consolidation.  The market “chooses”, and other alternatives are left by the wayside.  Consumer choice is traded off in the long-run for total surplus.

Consider the typical example (quoted from the wikipedia page linked above):

Two mechanisms can explain why the small but early lead gained by VHS became larger over time. The first is the bandwagon effect of VCR manufacturers in favor of the VHS format in the U.S. and Europe, who switched because they expected VHS to win the standards battle. The second was a network effect: videocassette rental stores observed that more people had VHS players and stocked up on VHS tapes; this in turn led other people to buy VHS players, and so on until there was complete vendor lock-in to VHS.

This cycle repeats itself every time technology is refreshed.  VHS eventually became outdated and MMCD and SD formats squared off, with the DVD (the successor to the SD spec) emerging as the victor.  More recently, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray went head-to-head and Blu-Ray won out.  Markets go from periods of experimentation to periods of consolidation.

In transportation energy capture, the story reads similarly but over a much longer time horizon.  Transportation energy capture from 1800 to now has had three dominant technogies:

• Steam: 1800-1890
  
• Electricity: 1890-1910
  
• Oil: 1910-present

In between each of these periods of stasis was a period of significant research and experimentation.  Anyone every heard of the steam-powered sub?  The Swedish government tried it, but eventually decided that electric sub was a better option.  These periods of upheaval are capitalism’s brainstorming sessions: no idea is too crazy.

We are in the middle of one such period now.  With increasing oil prices, concern for climate change, and national security considerations all in the mix, the world has begun the search for its next transportation fuel.  Stop and appreciate how momentous that is: oil has been the dominant transportation fuel for 100 years.  Participating in the market that defines the next fuel is an exciting task.

Interestingly, this time around the search for a new technology has a novel feature.  The problem is being separated into two sub-problems: generation and storage.  This separation allows much more flexibility.  An internal combustion engine is formulated for gas or diesel, but not both.  A steam engine is designed to burn wood or coal, but not both.  An electric car, however, can have its electricity generated any way you want.  A hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle can have its hydrogen supplied in any way you want.  This flexibility is a very good thing and is a hopeful sign that our next technology doesn’t have to be monolithic for 100 more years.  We can swap out new engines and new fuels independently of one another.

This press release got me started down this train of thought.  Researchers at Monash University took the next step on figuring out how to generate hydrogen in the same way that a plant does: photosynthesis.  This technology won’t be commercialized for many years yet.  Fortunately, we don’t have to wait: if you have a hydrogen-powered BMW today, you’ll be able to plug in to this new power source whenever it comes along.

Big Picture

I constantly read sustainability and greentech articles.  Day after day, everything that I come across is very transactional. Company A has a new technology.  Company B is buying Company A.  Etc.  This is important stuff to know, but I think it’s also extremely important to have synthesis and analysis at a much higher level.  I’ve tried to make my recent articles more top-down as a result.

This graphic (courtesy of Greentech Media) is the best I’ve seen so far at showing the current greentech market breakdown.  Thanks to everyone at that quality shop for helping us all appreciate the big picture a little bit better.  Now, just turn the bubbles into links to sector overviews and put this on your home page!

Long Now update

I wrote about The Long Now foundation some time ago.  I think the foundation’s goal—helping us envision the future—is critically important for sustainable thinking since sustainability is necessarily a long-term concept. 

Recently the foundation undertook a new project called the Rosetta Disk.  The Disk attempts to act as a much more exhaustive version of the Rosetta Stone; translation guides to languages are micro-etched into a titanium plate that will hold up for at least 10,000 years.

There are a million places that my brain immediately went with this.  First, I wondered why a translation disk would be useful unless we were betting against ourselves.  Then I realized that civilizations lose knowledge all the time and that in our increasingly digital age, it’s hard to project how much staying power some of the things that we currently call “information” will have.  Then, how does history’s medium of recordation affect history itself?  And on and on…

The point is, I think it’s genius.  The project forces our minds to go where they otherwise seldom do—the future.  And, the more time that we all spend thinking about the future, the better it will turn out to be.

Non-Petroleum Car Lineup

After writing about EEStor and then doing some more reading today, I realized that I hadn’t come across a good listing of all current and prospective non-petroleum cars anywhere on the internet.  My attempt at collecting this information into one place follows.  Note that I’m only considering vehicles for this list that are slated to come out within the next five years.  Long-range concept cars are too speculative.

This is currently a work in progress.  I will continue adding to it as I run across new vehicles and information changes related to already-listed vehicles.

Make	Model	Release Year	Price	Technology	Range
Tesla	Roadster	2008	$109,000	Electric (lithium-ion)	220	link
Tesla	Model S	2010	$60,000	Electric (lithium-ion)	225	link
Tesla	“BlueStar”	2012	$30,000			link
Chevrolet	Volt	2010	$30-50,000	Electric (lithium-ion) with gasoline range extender	40 (360 using range extender)	link
GM	“Hy-wire”	2010		Fuel Cell		link
Mitsubishi	iMiev	2009	$37,500	Electric (lithium-ion)	100	link
Daimler	EV Smart	2010				link

Download this as an Excel document with a couple more columns here.

eeStor

For those of you who don’t spend quite as much of your time reading about cleantech, I wanted to provide a couple of links that will help explain a rather dramatic development in the field.

Some history.

1. Battery technology is the single biggest engineering challenge facing the design of an electric car fit to be mass produced.  Batteries of the size that could power a 200-mile, 60 MPH car are typically either very bulky (hundreds of pounds), very expensive ($10,000 or more), and take extremely long to charge.
2. The current Toyota Prius uses lead-acid batteries.  Lead-acid technology does not have a high enough charge-to-weight ratio.  In order to make a 200-mile, 60 MPH electric car using lead-acid batteries you would have a very, very heavy battery.
3. The current Tesla Roadster uses lithium-ion batteries.  This is a much newer technology with a much higher energy density.  The charge-to-weight ratio of lithium-ion batteries is fair, but they are extremely expensive.  Lithium-ion batteries may potentially power the Chevy Volt, the most high-profile and mass-marketed electric vehicle.  They make sense as a choice of the $100,000 roadster but Chevy will have a difficult time selling the mid-market Volt for a reasonable price.
4. A capacitor is very different than a battery.  Capacitors can charge and discharge very quickly but can store very limited amounts of charge.
5. Research into the supercapacitor, a close cousin of the capacitor, has progressed very slowly.  Supercapacitors rely on a somewhat different electrical design and store more charge as a result.  This makes them potentially excellent candidates for the job of in-vehicle power source.  Theoretically, a supercapacitor could provide good acceleration, overall mileage, and charge time in a vehicle.
6. Unfortunately, while such a thing might be possible, many scientific questions needed to be answered before that become a reality.  This put the supercapacitor on the same clean energy wish-list as fusion.

So that, more or less, brings us to the present day.  A small company called EEStor (their page, wikipedia) has recently been working on a supercapacitor which is thought to be moving into production stages now.  They are contracted to provide batteries for upcoming models of Zenn’s vehicles, and Zenn is heavily relying on the advantages of their product to push future sales.  So much so, in fact, that they purchased a minority interest in EEStor.

EEStor is a very secretive company (much like another of my favorites) and they have created quite a rumor-monger following on the web.  Any small piece of news becomes a touchpoint of huge speculation; you can tell that some people are hanging their hopes for the future of humanity on this tiny company.  Just this past week, though, the first piece of real hard evidence came out of EEStor—a third party verified their technology and manufacturing processes.

It seems that we really, truly, may be about to see a switch from gas to electric.  Anyone else wish they worked for EEStor?