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What can a technologist do about climate change? A personal view. This started with a tweet. I’m embarrassed how often that happens. Frustrated by a sense of global mispriorities, I blurted out some snarky and mildly regrettable tweets on the lack of attention to climate change in the tech industry (Twitter being a sublime medium for the snarky and regrettable). Climate change is the problem of our time, it’s everyone’s problem, and most of our problem- solvers are assuming that someone else will solve it.
Stepping Up Our Game: Re-focusing the Security Community on Defense and Making Security Work for Everyone. Since the first Black Hat conference 20 years ago, the. This Cisco Validated Design prescribes a defined set of hardware and software that serves as an integrated foundation for both Citrix XenDesktop Microsoft Windows 10.
I’m grateful to one problem- solver, who wrote to ask for specifics —Bret Victor @worrydream - Aug 1. Worrying about sentient AI as the ice caps melt is like standing on the tracks as the train rushes in, worrying about being hit by lightning. Bret Victor @worrydream - Aug 1. If any "founders" out there want to "disrupt" our 4. CO2, or "moonshot" ocean acidification, that would be cool.
Bret Victor @worrydream - Aug 1. How do you think the tech community (startup community, or any community) can contribute to tech and/or policy solutions on a global scale?”The notes below are my attempt to answer that question. This is a “personal view”, biased by my experiences and idiosyncrasies.
I’ve followed the climate situation for some time, including working on Al Gore’s book Our Choice, but I can’t hope to convey the full picture — just a sliver that’s visible from where I’m standing. I urge you to talk to many scientists and engineers involved in climate analysis and energy, and see for yourself what the needs are and how you can contribute. This is aimed at people in the tech industry, and is more about what you can do with your career than at a hackathon. I’m not going to discuss policy and regulation, although they’re no less important than technological innovation. A good way to think about it, via Saul Griffith, is that it’s the role of technologists to create options for policy- makers.
The primary cause of global warming is the dumping of carbon dioxide into the sky. The primary cause of that is the burning of coal, natural gas, and petroleum in order to generate electricity and move vehicles around.
In order to stop dumping carbon dioxide into the sky, the world will have to generate its energy “cleanly”. For the purposes of this essay, that will mean mostly via solar and wind, although geothermal, hydroelectric, biomass, and nuclear will all have parts to play. This is well- known, but the scale and rate of change required is often unappreciated. Saul Griffith has a good bit about this, suggesting that what’s needed is not throwing up a few solar panels, but a major industrial shift comparable to retooling for World War II. In 1. 94. 0 through 1.
U. S. war- related industrial production tripled each year. That’s over twice as fast as Moore’s law. U. S. gross national product, WWII(source)In order to avoid the more catastrophic climate scenarios, global production and adoption of clean energy technology will have to scale at similar rates — but continuously for 1. The catalyst for such a scale- up will necessarily be political. But even with political will, it can’t happen without technology that’s capable of scaling, and economically viable at scale.
As technologists, that’s where we come in. U. S. by 2. 05. 0, Mark Jacobson et al. Those will be good things to have! But there’s more than enough power available to today’s solar cells and wind turbines — if only the systems were cheaper, simpler, and scalable. Here are a few examples of the kinds of projects I find interesting: Makani hoists its wind turbine to high altitudes with a flying wing instead of a tower.
Makani’s energy kite actually operates on the same aerodynamic principles as a conventional wind turbine, but is able to replace tons of steel with lightweight electronics, advanced materials, and smart software. By using a flexible tether, energy kites eliminate 9. Altaeros uses a blimp.
The Altaeros Buoyant Airborne Turbine reduces the second largest cost of wind energy – the installation and transport cost – by up to 9. Sunfolding does solar tracking with pneumatically- actuated plastic soda bottles. Actuation and control are the highest cost components of today’s tracking systems. Together they account for nearly 5. We replace both with our new approach to tracker design. These projects aren’t about better generators. They are about dramatically reducing the cost of the stuff around the generator.
Some of the best news of the last few years is the plunging cost of solar power. It’s instructive to look at what exactly is responsible for the drop.
It’s partly cheaper solar panels, due to improved conversion efficiency and falling manufacturing costs. But panels are now so cheap that they only make up 2.
MWh). (source)The majority of the price drop is now due to better inverters, and better mounting racks, and better installation techniques, and better ways for solar companies to interact with customers. There’s innovation everywhere, and you don’t need to be on the photovoltaic manufacturing line in order to play. The reason that these reductions in system cost are potentially so significant is the tipping point once solar and wind are consistently cheaper than fossil fuels and can be scaled up to meet demand. My point here is that there are many ways of contributing toward innovation in the production of clean energy without going off and building a fusion reactor. Look at the stuff around the things. Even for something as physical as power generation, the right software can make a signficant contribution. A few examples that come to mind: Kalyan Veeramachaneni et al at MIT used modern probabilistic modeling to dramatically improve the process of estimating wind capacity at a location, calculating more accurate predictions in a fraction of the time.
We talked with people in the wind industry, and we found that they were using a very, very simplistic mechanism to estimate the wind resource at a site. They didn’t invent a windmill; they invented an algorithm to determine where the windmill should go.
It’s now a startup. KL divergence (wrongness) of wind estimates from ground truth.
John Dabiri’s team at Caltech used aerodynamic analysis to dramatically improve the energy production and compactness of wind farms. Their work computes the optimal placement of vertical turbines so they reinforce each other instead of interfering, making possible large arrays of small turbines. This approach dramatically extends the reach of wind energy, as smaller wind turbines can be installed in many places that larger systems cannot, especially in built environments. Favorable economics stem from an orders- of- magnitude reduction in the number of components in a new generation of simple, mass- manufacturable (even 3. D- printable), vertical- axis wind turbines. Again, they didn’t invent a new windmill; they used computational modeling to make viable a much smaller and cheaper existing windmill.
Makani and Sunfolding both sprung from Saul Griffith’s Otherlab, and much of Otherlab’s magic lies in their code. A common theme is replacing physical material with dynamic control systems: [Makani’s kite’s] computer system uses GPS and other sensors along with thousands of real- time calculations to guide the kite to the flight path with the strongest and steadiest winds for maximum energy generation. Saul Griffith) The really big themes I’d like to emphasize, because we need more people to join the club, so to speak, is the importance of being able to substitute a control system — sensors and computers — for actual materials..
We are actually now replacing atoms with bits. Griffith’s team had to write modeling software for the inflatables, because nobody had done anything like it before. But Otherlab creates its own software much of the time anyway. The 1. 23. D line of 3. D modeling software offered by Autodesk grew out of one of his projects.“We write all of our own tools, no matter what project we’re building,” Griffith says.
Pretty much anything that we’re doing requires some sort of design tool that didn’t exist before. In fact, the design tools that we write to do the projects that we’re doing are a sort of product in and of themselves.” (source)1. D Make. My point here is that software isn’t just for drawing pixels and manipulating databases — it underlies a lot of the innovation even in physical technology. More on this below.
I recently visited the California ISO, which orchestrates the power grid to match energy production with consumption in realtime.