Day 2 of the TED conference was as stimulating as Day 1. There were so many artists, musicians, neurologists, actors, and technology revolutionists, all presenting so many exciting new developments. The common theme that was my takeaway, is that often it is our apparent success that holds us back from looking for new solutions. We need to rethink old technology and business models. We need to strive for creative, bold and audacious solutions to address the urgent needs of society. The solutions are here if we can think out of the box! There were many examples shared, new ways of doing surgery, new ways of removing bone marrow, new types of architecture, observing geckos to learn how to make better robots, etc.
I will share three examples, which relates to the interest of this blog, i.e. the “Green Technology” issue.
1) Having listened to Al Gore’s speech on Climate Change, Kevin Surase and his friends decided to see what they could do to help. They investigated and realized that “dirty” construction of building materials and buildings, and inefficient energy use in building contributes to 52% of C02 emissions! They also found that we were actually using age-old technology from the 1800s in construction. So he started with drywall (we are still making it the way we did back in the 1800s) and invented a new drywall material that takes 80% less energy to produce hence reducing carbon footprint by 80%. He has built a “Green” factory in China (Serious Materials) and is going for mass production to make his mark, and looking at windows next (we are using old technology there too).
2) Another keen entrepreneur found that we were still making circuit breakers as we did back in 1879. There are 10 billion electrical sockets in the United States alone that still use this old technology, and thus 83% of homes are below the safety level. Electrical sockets today are the main causes of fires, child accidents and inefficient use of energy. So he worked on putting in microchips into at the plug end and the socket receiver. These are called “EFCI” or Intelligent Electrical Outlet. These sockets and other similar developments will help reduce energy consumption and increase efficiencies dramatically (not to mention fires and child safety).
3) Shai Agassi, the genius behind the networked electric car, pointed out that car manufacturers tends to focus inwardly to find solutions for electric cars. They try to put the solution within the car rather than on the infrastructure. They focus on making better batteries to store energy, thus making the car the mini crude oil well or storage tank. Consumers have then to pay for the whole well rather than just what they use, making electric cars too expensive for them to buy. This is a very old business model and so he decided to learn from the cellular phone model to create a new business model and infrastructure that creates new possibilities.
He separates the car ownership from the batter ownership, and created the concept of battery swap stations (which in turn use Green energy to charge the batteries at these stations). So now we can make cheaper electric cars (can even be commoditized to be free as we do with cell phones i.e. tied with a battery use plan), and the consumers pay for battery power as they use. We are talking about 8cents per mile by 2010, 4 cents per mile by 2015 and 2cts a mile by 2020 (as battery lifecycle improves).
He challenges us to move away from small steps i.e. saying that we will reduce C02 by 20% by 2020, to thinking in terms of just two numbers. 0 and infinity. 0 for zero carbon footprint and scale to infinity. If we don’t change this mindset, we will loose our economy right after we loose our morality.
Israel, Denmark, Australia, Hawaii and San Francisco Bay Area will be some places that this model will be launched over the coming years.
