There’s growing sentiment in the United States that countries across the world are getting the jump on renewable energy innovation. Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times has written repeatedly of the need to go green, and he warns in a recent column that China’s decision to go green should be seen as, “The New Sputnik“. There’s also a recent column in the San Francisco Chronicle that extols that the “U.S. Must Take the Lead In Renewable Energy.” While the sense of urgency is compelling in light of energy’s role in climate change, what else is at stake regarding this new global competition for renewable energy dominance?
Economics of Innovation
America has long been on the global forefront of innovation, leading the way in developing automobiles, electricity, computers, and information technology. While a great deal of early renewable energy innovation took place here in the 1970’s during that oil crisis, the world has largely passed us by in developing renewable energy technologies and harnessing clean power.
There’s a pride of innovation here as well as the distinct potential for China’s large-scale renewable production efforts to make it become the number one global economy. America has largely gone from a producing to a consuming nation, which works when the technology that we buy is owned by U.S. companies, but manufactured elsewhere. Without American companies innovating in the renewable energy sector we stand to suffer a large economic impact as global change continues to force us to go green.
Energy Independence
The fossil fuel dependence in the United States is largely blamed as the impetus for our involvement in the conflicts in the Middle East. This dependence on foreign oil leads to dramatic economic imbalances when oil prices spike, harming the viability of a number of oil-dependent businesses.
The global security implications of this dependence has spurred the U.S. military to make sweeping commitments to renewable energy to power their bases. It’s interesting that the Pentagon has embraced renewable energy far in advance of our political leaders.
Without more federal leadership in the shift to go green, Americans will be surpassed by other countries, regions and companies. Energy technology is the next great emerging market, and no country can afford to lag in innovation.
Electricity was first harnessed successfully in the “Golden Age of Invention” by Thomas Edison and a number of innovative peers. This age of invention saw the creation and proliferation of the automobile and a great many other devices, largely of a mechanical nature, to improve the quality of everyday life.
Since that time, mechanical skills have flagged as we’ve put more energy into software and system development in our current Information Age. The rise of the Internet has led smart minds on a frenzy of software invention that have dramatically changed our outlook on the world. One could certainly equate the impacts of the “Age of Invention” with today’s “Age of Information” in terms of life-changing developments brought about by human innovation.
The world is now faced with global change that is largely brought about by the way that we live upon the planet. This change demands that we consume fewer fossil fuels, turning to cleaner fuels to reduce our impacts on our planet. There are abundant opportunities to harness free and available energy from our Earth systems with little environmental impact. In this coming age that’s focused on our survival on the planet, we’ll need a strong focus on mechanical solutions along with a broader and deeper understanding of the balance of life on our planet.
The challenges that we face from climate change will need to bring together the brightest mechanical and system-oriented minds, striking a balance between efficient machinery and tools to monitor, maintain and balance energy creation with the minimum of environmental impacts. It will be necessary to unleash a tsunami of creativity and innovation in order to address these overwhelming challenges.
Our mechanical minds have a broad range of challenges to address in order to efficiently harness hydro, biomass, wind, solar, wave and geothermal power. We need new machinery to transform these sources into clean and efficient energy sources at all scales.
The sharp minds that have been honed on software and systems design need to create new tools and systems to monitor our Earth from a granular to global scale. At this point we know that our impacts have pushed our planet into a climate crisis, but we’re just beginning to understand how we got there, and we’ll need far better monitoring and analysis to be able to reverse the course.
We’ve seen what great minds can accomplish when sparked by a flurry of innovation. The momentum is now growing to train our young people to address these issues that are of critical importance. Thankfully, we have an exciting foundation of mechanical and software innovation to build upon. We’ll all need to collaborate to bring the best of both to the problems ahead.
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Matt Ball is editor of V1 Energy and V1 Magazine for the Americas and Asia Pacific.
