Clean Disruption of Energy

Today's lecture by Tony Seba - author of the book "Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation" painted a fact-based and optimistic view of the future disruption within energy. In short, Tony argues that by 2030 fossile fuels will be abandoned in the same way as the salt-mines of Salzburg has been abandoned due to new ways of producing salt. I had a short chat with Tony after the lecture, and he explained the theory more in detail. Essentially there are 2 factors that drives this, and that is:

1. The price of solar panels are dropping every year, and efficiency is increasing, which eventually will make solar electricity very cheap. One of the biggest impact to the adoption of solar panels has been innovation in business models, for example Solar PPA's done by companies like Solar City, where private persons can sign an agreement to lend their house-roofs to Solar City which will provide, setup and maintain solar panels. This means that private persons does not need to take any risks or have to front the initial investments of installations, and can start saving money from day one!
Currently - according to this article from IEEE -  the price/performance of solar panels are on pair with the price of electricity from the grid (Grid Parity) as far north as in Holland.
IKEA is powering 89% of their shops with solar panels in the US (source)!
Some claims that productions of solar panels consume a lot of power, but Tony sais that First Solar claims that their panels recover their energy payback in 9 months. The same time for power payback of a nuclear powerplant can be as long as 14-18 years according to some studies.
Tony also mean that in 2020 - for the US Southwest - the cost of solar power will equal that of transmission of power through the power grid (cables, poles, etc). This means that even if grid-power would be FREE, it would be cheaper to go solar. Details can be found in this video

2. The price of power storage has fell by 16% since 2010, and this trend points to that Electrical Vehicles (EV) will drop in price to a point where it's just not feasible to run on gas anymore. The recent news of Tesla open sourcing all of it's patent is also driving innovation in this field, and will help lowering the costs of EV's.

Tony also talked about nuclear power, and said that it's clearly so that the spread of nuclear weapon material in the world is due to the spread of nuclear energy. There is no clear boundary between nuclear power and nuclear military industry, and some countries which invests in nuclear power actually wants a viable 'civilian' nuclear ecosystem to maintain their military nuclear options. I.e. producing nuclear power for the ability to have nuclear materials and rest-products for bombs, and the infra structure and know-how on how to assemble one. Examples of this could be Japan, US and France.
The cost of nuclear power has increased 10x since 1970, so nuclear in itself is not economically justified. There are also an interesting study published by Versicherungsforen Leipzig in Germany one month after Fukushima, which claims that IF a nuclear failure where to happen in Germany, this could cost 5.5 Trillion Euros! And there is NO insurances that covers this, which means that the government (and in the end the tax-payers) are paying the insurance based on the Price-Anderson act

So, the energy question is clearly political, and Tony points to an example of this from India: According to the IMF-report the subsidiaries of fossil-fuel is mostly benefiting the top-earners, even though the  arguments for the subsidiaries is that it should benefit the poor. In the IMF-report it has been proven that these subsidiaries are mostly benefiting the industries, and in the end the very top of the population. If India would spend the same money building residential solar panels, this would provide electricity to all those 500 million users that currently does not have any electricity at all. At no additional costs for electricity production.

And why is this important?
Because 7 million people die every year from the effects of fossil fuels (mostly due to air-pollution)
Aftermath of Fukushima has caused cancer in around 200'000 children

More on solar power:
Grameen Shakti and their micro credit institute has managed to help 1.3million homes in rural areas to be run on solar panels

To be continued...

First day at Singularity University

After 5 years silence, I've re-purposed my old "general purpose" travel blog to use for writing about what I experience here at SU.
It's sunday and we've had a first round of introduction,  and it's amazing how many intelligent people is gathered here at NASA's research facility in Silicon Valley. We also did Peter Skillman's "Marshmallo challange", and managed to build 13.5inches tower.

(Winner managed 29 inches).
Paulo (om my right) is my room mate here at SU, and we're both aspiring DJ's!!

But, here are a few random ideas that we've been discussing so far:
Space elevator & astroid mining:
A gigantic space elevator could make astroid-mining possible, and trigger the world of abundance, and inflation similar to what happened when the Spanish brought gold from the "New World" to the "Old World" as described in the book "The ascent of Money".
The lab...
here at SU looks very promising, and i've only scratched the surface by playing around with the Oculus Rift, dissecting a spider with Leap Motion controller and discussed the problems with 3d-interfaces and "confirm actions" (clicking) with the lab assistants.
Body tracking:
I learned about the Scanadu which is a medical device (1-min overview here), and we've been talking about how new non-invasive sensors for monitoring your body could be combined with personalized nutrition supplement to help you perform better.