noun, aeronautics
an adjustable tab or airfoil attached to a control surface, used to trim an aircraft in flight.
in other words,
a rudder for a rudder too large to be turned directly.
a lever to move a larger lever,
a leader capable of lead otherwise stubborn leaders to action
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Also, an open letter to the Canadian government, in advance of the global climate meeting COP21, on the part that we at LightSail are trying to play.
I’ve lived a lifetime this year. It sometimes feels as if so much is happening that one can feel however one chooses. Yet, sometimes, life gives you so much to feel happy about you can’t help but be overwhelmed with a feeling of gratitude.
We’ve launched our new website, and finally revealed the technology that we’ve developed and we think is going to change the world — regenerative air energy storage!
LightSail set out to prove that the science of our regenerative air energy storage concept works, and we have answered that challenge with a triumphant yes!
LightSail's Industrial Scale Prototype
We built an industrial scale machine by modifying a commercial natural gas compressor. We changed the cylinder head, added nozzles, replaced valves to allow reversibility, coated the surfaces to prevent corrosion, and threw our minds and hearts at the problem of showing that our approach could dramatically increase the efficiency of compressed air energy storage. Without water spray, and without burning natural gas, previous attempts at storing energy in compressed air topped out at less than 50% thermal efficiency — ok for a backup system, but not enough to change the world. This year, we aimed at greater than 80% thermal efficiency, at a high RPM (and therefore power), to show that unlike what people had assumed, high efficiency does not mean sacrificing performance.
We met or exceeded all our technical targets — demonstrating record breaking performance at the same time as record breaking thermodynamic efficiency — conclusively demonstrating our water spray heat transfer idea behind our regenerative air energy storage concept is effective at industrial scale.
Afterglow: the day I presented to Bill Gates
We presented to Bill Gates, a limited partner in the fund that invested in us. He was super excited by the potential of our project — that if we hit our targets it would change the world.
We spoke before hundreds of policy makers and energy executives, and helped instate groundbreaking legislation supporting energy storage in California.
Governor Jerry Brown
We have settled on our ultimate product architecture and design — a huge accomplishment. We’ve got a long way to go, but our models predict our experimental results within 5% RME accuracy, so we have some real confidence that it will hit all our hoped for technical specs.
We truly defined our market and value proposition. We’re aiming to make renewables plus energy storage a better and less expensive way to provide high value peak power than what the conventional sources — natural gas peakers, diesel gensets, and extra transmission wires — can muster.
The Trillion Dollar Formula
This is an utterly enormous market; at least a trillion dollars in size over the next couple decades.
IEA Estimates of Energy Infrastructure Investment Over 2008-2030. More than 30% could be economically addressed by renewables + energy storage
We’ve found that we’re uniquely positioned to reach that target, providing the lowest levelized cost of dispatchable electricity of any source, way ahead of our competitors.
But most of all, we’re excited about changing the world. Not only does energy storage make a renewables based grid possible, it also makes it economical. That’s the key to changing the world!
We’ve been working hard to uncover the greatest, most urgent opportunities for energy storage worldwide, and the opportunities we’ve turned up are simply massive. Energy storage is just what’s needed in places as diverse as Hawaii, Texas, Ireland, California, Paris, Denmark, Iceland, Nova Scotia, New York City, Australia, Chile, Dubai, India, and Subsaharan Africa. The scale and diversity of opportunities were astonishing. The most amazing thing? The willingness of governments to put their feet forward and most towards a future that’s right. We have been cynical; we believed that only once we had a full product, a long history, and economic parity under the most conservative of assumptions would governments move. We were proven wrong. Governments are leading the world into a clean future of energy. It’s utilities that are pushing back!
Steve the Redeemer
Take Iceland — a country of stark beauty. More than 80% of the country’s electricity is exported in the form of aluminum — the processing of which is one of the most energy intensive for any widely used material in the modern world. This single industry represents 40% of the Icelandic economy.
The Hellisheidi Geothermal Plant in Iceland's Golden Circle
Essentially 100% of their grid electricity comes from their amazing geothermal and hydroelectricity resources, and an enormous amount of their heating comes from geothermal cogeneration. Iceland is a land of abundant green energy.
Gullfoss -- the golden falls.
There’s a catch, though. Transmitting power across the sparse, weatherbeaten land is an expensive, unreliable proposition, where remote locations risk being knock completely off-grid with each storm. This is worse than it seems — if power is cut to aluminum smelters, the aluminum freezes, severely damaging the equipment. To backup the geothermal and hydro plants, then, industries have had to co-locate with diesel gensets — hardly a solution in light of the self reliance and environmental commitment of the Icelanders. We intend to replace these gensets completely. But we can do a lot more.
Low-temperature geothermal heat is available nearly everywhere in Iceland, and we can harness it. By expanding air at a higher temperature (and therefore pressure and volume) than when it was compressed, we get more mechanical energy out than we needed to compress it. This allows us to convert heat energy into mechanical energy, and from there, electricity. So instead of sitting idly like backup diesel gensets, our machines can be producing clean, geothermal energy, constantly; leaving the compressed air available for bursts of power when the grid fails.
So, we met with Iceland’s Minister of Energy — a former thermodynamics professor at Lund University, who bemoaned parliament’s inability to understand the concept of exergy.
We have therefore ‘rebranded’ our efforts. From now on, we have an initiative in ‘energy quality management.’ This they understand.
He understood the implications of an economical energy storage and geothermal electric generator immediately, and urged us to consider a project in Iceland. This is exactly the sort of progressive movement that governments are making and utilities resist. But we will overcome their skepticism! Stay tuned.
Catching My First Wave - A Good Omen
Of course, it wasn’t all business. If your mission call upon you to travel, it is your duty to truly experience the place. So I took the time harness some of nature’s forces myself. After I visited the grid operator and wind farms of Hawaii, I learned to surf!
We have continued to hire and improve our utterly world class team. We’re almost 30 people now, but I can tell you I have never before seen or even imagined such a diversity interests or depth of talent in a group. I work with the most amazing people I’ve met in my life! It is amazing to see how rapidly people are growing, but even more amazing to see how much more we can accomplish as a team. There are things that we literally couldn’t do on our own given all the time in the world — we have such a diverse set of skills in the company that we can make amazing things happen.
It was our first Burning Man. Our minds were blown. It is more than a festival, more than an amazing city. It is the most spiritually profound, unashamedly sensual, and maniacally creative place I’ve ever been.
Whiteout
Offering to the Sun
Deep Playa
We travelled as the chefs of the Airship Victoria last year; an airship project that eventually intends to hoist a Tesla-coil based lightning musical instrument. The camp, directly on esplanade, next to the flaming lotus girls, the sonic cannon, the flamethrower organ, and a 24 hour bar, was a surreal experience.
The Airship Victoria
It felt like… the future! It turns out, in the future, there are lots of lights, people float around on bikes, and jellyfish hover and flow.
Wonderful. But the main thing about the future is that people can’t help but be caught in the moment.
Stargate
Our camp featured tesla-coil concerts, and there, was, admittedly, high drama before the balloons were successfully fully deployed. Despite some initial setbacks, eventually the camp lifted their payload high into the air. In a city confined to a flat lakebed, the balloons added a third dimension to the playascape.
It’s impossible to describe the sense of flow one achieves in such a dizzying storm of self expression. We danced in drum circles in the nude, rode art cars and floated glowing jelly-fish, windsurfed and found inner peace. But what was most dazzling of all was the temple.
The Temple of Transition
A strikingly elegant wooden structure, built in just 10 weeks by inspired volunteers, the temple was a deeply spiritual place of reckoning. The visitors, pilgrims of every creed, came and prayed, and made offerings for their loved ones, those who that had left them, those who they had left behind. Poems, and pictures, incense and chants, old clothes or talismans, and cherished items of every description, laid respectfully to rest, ultimately fated to return to the atmosphere aflame.
Steve was so overcome that he bent down on one knee and made an offering to his mother, a brilliant opera singer, who left the world when far too young.
I miss you so much mom. You would have loved this place. I will love you forever.
As the temple’s towers, lean and graceful, slowly surrendered to the flames, glowing sparks rose deep from the inferno, and like wisps were carried up towards the heavens. The temple of transition, once a place of cool respite, now glowed brighter than the noonday sun. The crowd gasped as a shower of blue leapt out from the flames. Someone, days before, hid fireworks that launched streams of blue from the middle of the swirling firestorm, but in that splendid moment, it was impossible not to see those glowing blue apparitions, lifted high into the glowing sky, as souls, let finally free.
Meditation, Release, a Moment of Inner Peace
Upon our return, it seemed as if the whole of LightSail met us with faces silently asking us to bring them next year! We will.
This year, we’re starting a camp — tentatively named “Cleantech”. A solar powered shower and water recovery/purification system of our own design. It will be beautiful and efficient and environmentally friendly. Our kind of project!
LightSail's Firehouse Lab
At the end of the year, having wrapped up our work at our firehouse lab, having shown all we can with our current industrial scale prototype, we moved into our new facility — the former Scharfenberger chocolate factory, in which we will design, test , and manufacture our first product line. It is an amazing space. We will do outstanding work there, and we will be happy and proud.
As the move in completed, the holidays arrived, giving us the occasion to throw a lab-warming party for our friends and family. It was absolutely amazing. I felt as if the party unfolded as a microcosm of the entire project. It began with a simple idea: “let’s have a holiday party,” which lead to the conclusion “we clearly must have it at our new space,” and from that point, it took on a life of its own, spearheaded by people of admirable competence and outstanding creativity.
We were blown away by it all. The founders had no idea! Everywhere you looked there was perfectly executed brilliance.
Enter the space, we’re greeted with placards describing what all of the work is, what each of the rooms are, how each of the items work. There were demonstrations of our tank technology, our electronics and controls, our machineshop and quality assurance, our water spray lab, and even our original prototype (built in Ed’s garage using scrap parts and ebay!) We had no idea it would be there, and were blown away to see it!
Humble Beginnings: The Original LightSail Prototype, hydraulic, quirky, built of scrap, sweat, and parts ordered off ebay.
The original machine used a hydraulic approach — slower, with less power per unit mass or cost, and with higher inefficiencies, but we conclusively proved we could control the temperature of the air during operation, and control the valves to let only an amount of air in that would expand down to 1 atmosphere — yielding the very highest efficiencies. It was a cheap, quick way to show that some of our main ideas worked, and that we could build something. We sure have come a long way from that!
Travis O’Guin and his band played an incredible set of dixieland Jazz of some of the past century’s greatest compositions (ever wonder how “hit me baby one more time” is in dixieland jazz? Amazing.) Ed broke out into dance with a series of dancers, and the LightSail toddlers couldn’t resist the beat!
Machinemaster Todd Bowers breaking it down for Professor Robert Dibble and wife Helen
The machineshop was running — demonstrations included a CNC lathe disco ball, a hula dancer shaking it to an earthquake powered by the CNC mill, and just-in-time manufacturing of LightSail Branded Bottle Openers!
Dave Sprinkle spent years in the racing industry, but it's cupcakes that bring this smile to his face...
But what really stole the party were the cupcake cars, brought in by the brilliant Keith Johnson and his merry friends Lisa Pongrace and Greg Solberg. Our partygoers insist they’re even more fun to drive than a Tesla.
It was an unbelievable way to ring-in the new year. This is going to be a great one. That everyone injected such creativity and excellence in such a gathering just shows how much people care about their work and their team and this company and how high a standard they have for themselves. It seems as if everything at LightSail is like that — our people perform at a higher level than us founders can even think to ask of them, or indeed, even to imagine.
Energy Standout of the Year, Forbes 30 Under 30. Photograph by Harry Benson
To top it all off, we received coverage from none other than Forbes Magazine. I am honored to be highlighted as the standout in the field of energy in the Forbes 30 under 30 ranking! My extended family is finally less suspicious of my dropout ways. What a relief! I had a wonderful time at home with my brothers and little cousins and found to my amazement that my family had founded four businesses between us since we last visited. I guess it’s in the genes.
Christmas in Nova Scotia
This year looks to be even better. It feels like we’re reaching escape velocity.
I am honored to have been elected a mentor for the Thiel 20 under 20 Fellowship. These kids aren’t waiting to change the world, they’re just going out and doing it — I am so excited to be working with them!
I have been tapped to judge the Nova Scotia Cleantech Open, remarkable not only for being in my home province, but also for its amazing quality, rigor, and prize money ($100k free money with $200k of seed investment available.) I’m joining Matthew Nordan, of Venrock and Lux Research, whose work and judgement I have always admired greatly. His “The State of Cleantech VC is already a classic in the field.
We’re working full-speed on our product and technology, and are rallying allies across the planet to realize a wonderful number of as yet unannounced projects and partnerships.
Last year was an amazing year, but I have a feeling this one will be even better.
I am so happy to be alive at this moment in history. Great things are afoot. The winds are changing.
One month ago, I was interviewed by Jane Affleck as a profile piece for my Alma Mater, Dalhousie University. Unfortunately, long form responses weren’t quite what they were looking for — so I posted them here!
Jane: You “started” a PhD at Princeton… why did you stop? Was it boring? Did you feel driven to just do your own thing?
Danielle: I was more temperamentally suited towards my own thing – though that was only part of it. I entered a program in Plasma Physics to focus on fusion energy – the process that powers the sun. I thought that with a few good ideas, we could produce electricity more inexpensively than, say, planet-smothering, lung-blackening, mercury spewing coal.
Diptych - The JET Tokamak Fusion Reactor / Filled with Plasma
I guess I became disillusioned. The objective of fusion power is primarily to create a very inexpensive heat source. The reason people believed so strongly in fusion energy is that the fuel is practically free – unlike, say, coal. Unfortunately, we haven’t figured out how, even in principle, we might build a reactor that doesn’t wear out rapidly over time. Since you expend the reactor, it is most properly thought of as a kind of fuel. And if you consider the cost of ultra-high tech fusion reactors, versus pulverized coal, it looks like coal is going to be much cheaper.
I saw the technical work stretching out, endlessly before me, with no clear fix for our energy problem within sight. I got spooked.
There might be ways to solve these problems, but they certainly weren’t known.
I didn’t think the right things were getting funded. I saw my professors – brilliant scientists – spending most of their time in a struggle to acquire funding, rather than doing research. I thought there was a better way.
I came to Silicon Valley with the intention of making my fortune, and then funding research. After about nine months, I found myself compulsively doing energy research again, but this time, focusing on how to best harness and make use of energy from that great, fusion reactor in the sky, our sun.
Jane: On your Google profile, you call yourself an “ecopragmatist.” What does that philosophy mean on a day-day-basis, in your work and overall outlook?
Danielle: Environmentalism is a morality, or a philosophy. Ecopragmatics is a discipline.
Environmentalism, as a movement, achieves its greatest successes in raising awareness. Despite the fact that we live on this earth, cohabitate with nature and depend on nature for the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the land we live on, for the microbes that pervade and defend and compose us, and despite the fact that being close to nature brings people joy, people have become strikingly unaware of their environment, of the flora and fauna within it. Environmentalists have made personal and tangible, the plight of ecosystems worldwide.
Where environmentalism fails is in its mythology; both in the mythology it has developed and promoted, and the mythology of greater society that it fails to deconstruct.
Environmentalists – and I realise I am over generalizing here — imagine that we human beings are apart from, and the scourge of, pristine nature, and that to save it, we must depart from it.
I do not believe human civilization is apart from nature in any crucial quality any different from an ant’s colony, a beaver’s dam, or a coral reef. Collective beings, using whatever tools and artifice at their disposal, have for millions of years altered their environments, and adapted to fantastically diverse environments. Our artifice is no different in kind; save perhaps, a degree of understanding and intention, and a means of development within generations, and a mechanism for sharing – language, to pass our tools between generations.
What is most astonishing about the rise of humanity is not its use of tools, not its use of language, not its environmental cultivation. It is the scope.
We have spread to almost every ecological niche of the planet. Humans consume one quarter of the enter base of the food chain, either directly or indirectly.
Less than one quarter of the world’s ice free land is wild, and only 20% of this is forests – wildlands account for only 10% of the primary production – or plant life – on the planet.
During the reign of our influence, 40% of the world’s phytoplankton, representing 20% of the world’s plant life, and 20% of the oxygen in the atmosphere, has disappeared over the past half century.
Under our influence the world has changed faster, more widely, and more profoundly than since phytoplankton drove the atmosphere from methane to oxygen. It is not that our changes are distinct from those of nature; there are plenty of creatures that change their environment far more that we change ours. But we have done so within a few hundred generations, at a planetary scale.
Pristine nature is a myth. Mankind has already profoundly changed the planet; every acre of it feels our climatic influence. We coexist. We are in nature, the question is how to live within it.
Environmentalism fails us here, because it stresses the difference of our influence, rather than its scope. Environmentalism is unwilling to consider small sacrifices which might undermine the purity of nature – hoping to preserve untouched ecologies from our desecrations, and yet even preserved land, as the famous Nature Conservancy has discovered, cannot escape our global influence. We worry about the little things; the spotted owl, the desert tortoise. And yet all around us, the world is undergoing – has undergone – a paradigm shift. As the great Paul MacCready states,
10,000 years ago, at the beginning of civilization, the human portion was less than one tenth of one percent. […] Humans, livestock and pets are now 97 percent of that integrated total mass on earth and all wild nature is three percent. We have won. The next generation doesn’t even have to worry about this game — it is over. And the biggest problem came the last 25 years: it went from 25 percent up to that 97 percent. And this really is a sobering picture in realizing we, humans, are in charge of life on earth, we’re like the capricious Gods of old Greek myths, kind of playing with life, and not a great deal of wisdom injected into it.
Nature vs Humans. Biomass of Wild Air and Land Vertebrates vs Human, Livestock, Pets
Ecopragmatism rejects the myth that the wild is endless, the oceans an infinite bounty. We recognize that the needs of mankind must coexist with the health of our planet, and that it will take sacrifices on both sides, from nature and civilization, to achieve peace – we advocate for both sides at the negotiating table. Ecopragmatism accepts that we must overcome ideology, and enforce discipline – that we must work hard, combine ecology with economy, and, as inventors and influencers, accept human nature, and create solutions that make the easy choice the right choice, allowing even the greediest or neediest of people to work toward a healthy world.
Ecopragmatism recognizes that we are now the earth’s gardeners. The earth is now shaped by our whims. We must accept the responsibility that comes with power, and consciously guide planet growth, with wisdom, courage, and decision, toward a thriving, sustainable future.
Jane: You’re the “Chief Science Officer” with LightSail Energy. What that involve? What’s a typical day for you (if there is such a thing as “typical”)?
Danielle: LightSail Energy is a green energy startup company that’s trying to make it possible, and economical, to power the world with nothing but clean, green energy. We’re tackling what some call the holy grail of green energy – how to economically and efficiency store energy such that intermittent renewables such as solar and wind can reliably and economically power our electrical grid.
Two days of output and wind speed from a four section wind farm. See the sudden drop? That's why we need energy storage if wind is to be a major part of our grid.
To do this, we’re taking compressed air, an elegant technology from a more civilized age, and using it to store energy. Compressed air is already considered to be the most inexpensive method for storing energy. Our objective is to make it more efficient.
When you compress air, what you’re really doing is converting mechanical energy into heat energy, inside the air. Conversely, when you expand air, you’re converting the heat energy in the air to mechanical energy. The amount of energy converted, for a given mass of air, is proportional to the temperature of the air.
The trouble starts when the air is compressed. To achieve a high energy density, compressed air energy storage systems compress to more than 100 times atmospheric pressure, or higher. In doing so, the air reaches extremely high temperatures, nearly 1000 C. This is too hot to manage practically, and so the air is compressed in stages, rejecting heat to the atmosphere after every stage.
By rejecting heat to the atmosphere, you lose the energy you’ve stored. Conventional systems add heat back by burning natural gas, but that still presents both a carbon footprint and inefficiency.
We have a different approach. By spraying water into the air during compression, most of the heat goes into the water, rather than the air. And water has a much higher capacity than air – 3300x at standard conditions. You don’t need to spray in much before what would have been a temperature rise of, say, 800 degrees C, becomes a temperature rise of around 20 C – much more manageable. We can then just hold on to the water, and the heat in a tank. We then spray the water back in during expansion, recovering the heat energy and converting it back into mechanical energy. We then convert the mechanical energy to electrical energy, using a motor generator.
There isn’t a very typical day at LightSail, but I often begin my day with coffee and breakfast with my cofounder, Steve Crane – a lapsed Caltech geophysicist who found himself first in the 3D graphics industry, and then the entertainment business, responsible for some of the biggest hits in history. He tried to hire me for a videogame startup; I ended up convincing him to join me as cofounder, and funding our first efforts through the sale of a house. We talk about everything. We talk about our technical challenges; the engineering and testing effort, the physics, we (try to) invent solutions to the challenge of the day, we try to figure out how to make our team as happy and effective as can be, we discuss the broader implications and applications of our technology, we talk about our philosophy, and duty as a company, and we talk about the world at large; everything from oceanography to filmmaking to dancing to the philosophy of science to the finer points of Italian cuisine. We’ve become best friends.
LightSail
Then it’s off to the lab – a converted historical Firehouse in Oakland’s Lake Merritt/Chinatown district. Our laboratories occupy the bottom two floors. In the bottommost floor we have a test cell with a control center behind bulletproof glass (just in case), a machine shop with a CNC-mill, and an assembly and quality control room. In the stable (the fire engine used to be drawn by horses) we have a laser lab for imaging sprays, and a conference room. The tower where they used to dry the canvas hoses has been converted into an exhaust manifold, outfitted with a muffler and a heat exchanger. We converted the hayloft to our electronics lab, and upstairs are our main offices.
We’re a little jam-packed in there. There are nearly 30 of us in total, so we’re moving to our new facilities (a 25,000 ft2 former chocolate factory) in October. Until then, we’ve got our design room in the fire captain’s quarters, our experimentalists, electricians and technicians in the living room/kitchen/dining area, and our CTO and third cofounder, Ed Berlin, in a bedroom he’d converted to an electrical lab. The remainder are scattered throughout the machine shop, hayloft, and much of the analysis and business team (which includes Steve and I) reside in a penthouse in a second building across the street.
(I should mention that both Steve and Ed were prodigies in physics and engineering to the same extent that I was. Steve won his first research grant at 13, and entered MIT at 16; Ed, another MIT grad, built his first circuit at 3 and won the engineer of the year award from Grumman Aerospace – a 30,000 person company, mind you, at 21. People make a big fuss about me entering college at 12, but it was mostly that I had to find somewhere other than my dysfunctional middle school after dropping out. Plenty of other people could – and have – done it.)
The heart of the company is really the test cell, and we have a ‘driver’ from the racing industry (actually he focused on dynamometer tests, never racing in a car!) running most of the full-scale system tests. There’s a desk full of screens and controls, and one graph in particular, the pressure volume curve, draws particular interest from our theorists, and passersby.
If the test cell is the heart of the company, the whiteboard in the dining room area is the head! We often start discussions there, and people will drop in as they overhear and contribute. Our technical discussions can get quite intense, and we calculate much of what we need to make decisions by hand, in real-time, to verify the contentions and work that happens at our desks. All of our management comes from a deeply technical background, we all get our hands dirty, and we all dig into things and calculate them ourselves; especially with the most important technical decisions. There’s some replicated work, true, but we’re fast, and this gets us all on the same page. It helps to have generalists!
I’ll walk around the company, checking up on progress and issues, checking in to see if I can help people do their jobs, or if people are stuck, or need someone else to do something first to make progress. We spend a lot of time making sure people understand everything, and making sure that internal communication is handled correctly – it’s hard to get 30 people on the same page all the time! To that end, we get everyone lunch on Thursdays, which we have called “stupid question day.” Everyone is encouraged to ask their stupid questions – and people are obliged to answer them graciously!
Some days, we interview candidates. Our interviews are pretty comprehensive. We give a tour and the hiring manager introduces the position and the company. For most positions, we ask that people give a presentation on their previous work/explorations/education, and we ask lots of questions. Many people interview the candidate, and in the process we give both an in-person and a take home exam. The in-person exam involves much at the whiteboard, and sometimes we get people into the lab and have them solve an experimental puzzle and describe their solution. We have a world class team; the best that any of us have worked with.
I’ll return to my own desk at some point, and answer a slew of emails. Internal communication is critical! Then, every day, I’ve made a pact to myself to do at least one hardcore engineering thing – either in analysis, or making a spec, or designing a new experimental approach, or inventing something practical.
Maybe I’ll bike back, or grab dinner with Steve or friends. The evening and night are for big picture thoughts, and maybe a little music (I love my keyboard and guitar)
Then it’s to bed, and then, another day!
Jane: Would you have imagined five years ago that you’d be where you are now (career-wise)? Why or why not?
Danielle: I always thought I’d be working on my own projects, specifically in energy, but I fluctuated between thinking I’d do it within a university or my own company. It turned out that starting a company was right for me, at this time, with what I wanted to do!
Five years is a while ago now!
Honestly, despite the challenges and struggles I remember (among them, coughing my guts out before a critical presentation for us to raise our first bit of money during the financial crisis), I was surprised that it was this easy. Or maybe easy is the wrong term. I was surprised that it felt this right, at every step. There were no agonizing decisions. I went with my gut, and I am happy where I am.
Jane: What do you remember most about Dal’s Physics and Atmospheric Science program? What do you remember most about being at Dal? (i.e., “best” memories of both)
Danielle: I brought a friend of mine to the physics phyridays one summer. He couldn’t help but exclaim, while watching the players of hacky sacky, Frisbee, soccer, etc, watching the barbeque, and the liquid nitrogen shots, that the strangest thing about physicists was how *physical* we all were.
So those are my favourite memories: my friends and classmates camping, playing games, and being happy and young and brilliant and free.
I also fondly remember working with Jordan, my advisor, who really taught me a lot about how to *think* about science, and prowling around the labs, asking what people were doing, and naively offering to help.
Also – I loved the candy room. Whoever thought of putting a candy room right next to my office is an evil genius, and I offer kudos.
Jane: What was your biggest challenge while studying Physics and Atmospheric Science? How did you overcome it?
Danielle: The biggest challenge for me was balancing the wonder and curiosity that I had for the fundamentals of physics (and whatever question happened to interest me at the moment) and staying studious. You’d hope that doing one’s homework, and trying to get at fundamentals would be equivalent, but unfortunately not. Trying to understand why processes can be thermodynamically irreversible, yet are governed by fully reversible physics, isn’t something that helps you (much) in doing homework. Nonetheless, you need to do both to really grow as a scientist. I use the knowledge in from both my more disciplined physics training I received at Dal, and my personal investigations, every day. Dal gave me a lot of freedom to explore what I wanted to explore, but being the somewhat undisciplined person I am, I still found it hard to steadily “be a good student” when other inspirations stuck me!
Jane: Do you remember any particularly encouraging advice from profs, or any who were particularly inspiring because of their research interests or their engagement with teaching/students?
Danielle: There were so many! Jeff Dahn plucked me out of the giant Physics 1100 class and introduced me to physics research. His classes were also hilarious, which helped! My advisor Jordan Kyriakidis taught me so much of what I know about the scientific method, and rational thinking in general, and then set me loose on a bunch of incredibly interesting problems – some of which still bedevil me! Stephen Payne put up with my many questions about thermodynamics, and I credit much of what I finally understood – and what I put into practice at LightSail, to him. Andrew Rutenberg encouraged me to go to graduate school, and really got me thinking about my career path. There are so many more – I really enjoyed David Tindall’s astrophysics class, and the late Masoyoshi Senba taught me much about perseverance and rigor in solving scientific problems. But many of the best teachers were my classmates – we were a really tight knit group of kids and we learned so much from each other. We had a blast too!
Jane: How did the Physics and Atmospheric Science program prepare you for your current career? (either directly or indirectly…) Or, what do you find most satisfying about your current career? What’s the most challenging thing about it, and how has your education helped you?
Danielle: I haven’t really reached a point of satisfaction. I am like a traveler on a long journey, who knows the destination is yet beyond the horizon. But I know I am headed in a good direction – that I am on a good path.
The most challenging thing is when you worry that you’re off the right path! These existential questions are the most harrowing aspect of being an entrepreneur, or an inventor. We’ve made it through all of them though, so far.
Physics taught me how deeply one needed to dig in to something before one could say that one really understood it. How tenuous our knowledge was – and is – having our system of the world reconceived by each generation of scientists, over and over again. Physics taught me both to ignore the experts, accept my own fallibility, and to keep asking questions, to keep working!
Jane: What words of encouragement would you give students thinking of applying to the Physics and Atmospheric Science program, or students who are currently enrolled in it (especially those who might be questioning their choice of major)?
Danielle: Physics is like a bootcamp for your mind; I don’t think there exists another field of study that develops such powerful and versatile mental skills. It gives us a powerful lens with which we can ask questions of the universe, and of ourselves. Physicists can, and have, gone on to make major contributions in almost every field. Physics, as a field of study, gives you freedom.
Beyond this, physics is one of the most fascinating fields of study just by itself. It satisfies some of our curiosity, but then rewards us with still greater wonder. There are still a great many mysteries yet to be solved!
Jane: What’s your greatest accomplishment so far? (in any aspect of your life – from education to career…)
Danielle: Always looking ahead, yet having fun in the present! I don’t think about the past too much; what’s fun and satisfying is the journey.
I’m really proud of the work I’ve done as an entrepreneur at LightSail Energy, but I’m just getting started – it’s not an achievement yet!
Honestly, the two proudest moments in my life were dropping out of junior high and dropping out of graduate school. I’ll always remember to listen to myself if something’s just not feeling right – and I’ll always remember to strive to find something that does. I don’t know if that qualifies as an achievement, in the common idiom, but it’s something I’m proud of.
Jane: Where do you hope to be in 5 years? In 10?
Danielle: In five years, I hope to have caused the replacement of fossil fuels sufficient to power ten thousand people. In ten, I hope to have made renewables the economical choice for almost everywhere on our planet. And I hope to have helped hundreds of young entrepreneurs follow their dreams, and strike out, toward the unknown.
If there’s one thing I’ve been surprised by while trying to start startups, it’s the extent to which the business landscape is shaped by law.
One of my first serious startup business efforts involved skin cancer: melanoma, specifically, by far the most malignant and dangerous type. It turns out that one can really do a pretty good job in terms of detecting melanoma in the early stages, when it’s still relatively easy to treat. This is in part because it is a cancer on the surface of the skin, and typically the cancerous, rapidly multiplying melanocytes produce an excess of melanin in patterns of characteristic irregularity. In other words, one can spot melanoma in ugly moles. If (a) one knows what to look for and (b) actually does look, in the vast majority of cases you can catch the disease before it spreads, and thus, save a life. The World Health Organization pegs melanoma deaths at 48,000 per year.1
The ABCD's of Melanoma. Part of the ABCDs for detection of melanoma. On the left side from top to bottom: melanomas showing (A) Asymmetry, (B) a border that is uneven, ragged, or notched, (C) coloring of different shades of brown, black, or tan and (D) diameter that had changed in size. The normal moles on the right side do not have abnormal characteristics (no asymmetry, even border, even color, no change in diametry).
The chain breaks in both places. There are papers2 that estimate the sensitivity of physicians to melanomas at 86%, which is not bad, if they happen to look, but not great either. The big problem is that it’s by no means certain that the doctor will look: most melanomas are still found first by the patient. That is, if they’re found at all before it’s too late.
A friend of mine refused to see a dermatologist, despite her friends urgings. Once she finally did, the cancer had grown out of control. She did survive, but she had to suffer through an extremely painful excision followed by reconstructive surgery followed by a recovery period nearly a year long. Prevention and early detection are the key weapons against disease.
This could have been prevented. There’s a heck of a lot you can learn from a photograph, even one taken from a cellphone. From that photograph, a trained individual can determine whether the mole is a cause for concern — whether you’re really just fine or whether one should be examined more closely by a specialist. There are even papers showing how an algorithm can be made to be as accurate as physicians in diagnosing the cancer.3
It seemed like a great hack. Within a week or so, I rallied some friends of mine, threw together an application to Y Combinator, and tried to put a business together.
Whatever the technical challenges were, I was unprepared for the legal and social challenges I was to face. The partners at Y Combinator did like the idea on some level, but declined to fund us. In Paul Graham’s words
“The trouble with the melanoma detection idea is that you’d spend most of your time dealing with legal and regulatory crap. That sort of work doesn’t really take advantage of your skills.”
There were other problems too (we were rather cavalier about the quality of images we’d get in practice from widely varying cameras, lenses and lighting conditions), but in the end it was the specter of law and regulation that cowed us. I still maintain that we could build this, and while perhaps it might not have been the absolute best focus for my efforts or launching point for my career, I still think we could have done a lot of good.4
What concerns me most isn’t that we couldn’t get the melanoma detection idea to take off. It’s that anyone trying to work in the field of medicine is going to have to slog through legal and regulatory crap. There’s a lot that can be done with simple little pieces of software and hardware to help people look after their health. Detection is the first line of defense. But as long as we persist in the current regulatory environment, where detection aids must disclaim whatever they imply or slog through the same lengthy and expensive FDA approval process regardless of their capacity for harm, entrepreneurs, engineers, doctors and scientists are going to be limited in the good that they can do, as well as the bad. Lesson one.
[JessNordell notes that both SpotCheck and SkinScan have taken up the charge! ]
It doesn’t take too long before the familiar seems sane, and what we grow up with seems to have always been, bequeathed to us by ancestors blessed with the virtues of invention, vigor and foresight. I remember, as a kindergardener, when my mother took me to the local power plant, chimneys three hundred feet tall, how awed I was by the sights and sounds — the enormous burners and boilers, steam blasting through turbines powering vast generators, electrons pumping through transformers in gray substations of metal ringed insulators, transformers, cylinders, a geometrical landscape adorned with fins, cathedrals of wire, lines buzzing. Deep sounds metal clangs reverberated through the boiler room, amid hot steel, as my tiny feet traced halting paths along innumerable iron grates. Six years old, seeing this, I imagined the builders of these machines surely must have known what they were doing. Promethean gods walked the earth: behold! This was their handiwork.5
It shocked me to find out how the electrical grid really worked.
The grid, as it exists today, has almost no capacity to store energy. This means that at every instant in time, the amount of energy going on to the grid must almost exactly equal the amount of energy coming off. Otherwise, the grid rapidly fails in its operation, rising too high or too low in voltage, or shifting frequency, or succumbing to noise, spelling disaster to everything dependent upon a smooth, steady stream of power for its operation. That is to say, nearly every device of the modern world.
And while we have some provisions to redirect power on the grid (primarily, giant, motor driven switches of a kind not unlike those which control your household lightbulbs), our ability to throttle the amount of power we put onto the grid is slow and expensive. Gas turbines are the power plants that can be controlled most readily, however their power must be throttled over a period of nearly 15 minutes. When they do this, however, they operate away from their most efficient operating point, meaning that lots of fuel is burned, power is expensive, and more CO2 goes out the stack into the air. Hydropower stations can be throttled nearly as readily as gas turbines, but they can operate in a wider range before they lose most of their efficiency. Coal, petroleum, and nuclear plants, on the other hand require periods on the order of days to speed up and slow down — it takes about that long for them to relax to a thermal equilibrium, keeping thermal stresses within safe bounds.
However, the electrical demand is quite unpredictable, and it can vary significantly in a period much shorter than the 15 minutes it takes for our fastest power plants to significantly alter their power output. So to respond in faster timescales, power plants must run as ‘spinning reserves.’ This is where fuel is burning and the turbine is spinning, constantly, in expectation of a fluctuation. There are now massive power plants, burning fuel this very second, for no purpose other than to smooth out the rapid fluctuations on the grid. I hope I don’t need to point out how crazy this is.
What’s more, electrical supply from renewables is very unpredictable, especially whatever’s coming from distributed power. Wind power is the least expensive (in fact, according to Prof. Marc Jacobson of Stanford University, considerably less expensive than coal power!)6, but in terms of supplying controllable, usable power, wind is terrible! Wind power varies rapidly and widely, is extremely difficult to predict, is quite correlated over large regions, and, what’s probably the worst, wind power comes mostly in the dead of night, when nobody needs it.
Two days of output and wind speed from a four section wind farm. See the sudden drop? That's why we need energy storage if wind is to be a major part of our grid.
The entire world has wired itself up with an electrical grid that is fundamentally insane, and as we plug in renewables to solve the other problem with the electrical grid, controlling it is only getting harder.
We need a way to store energy. The current state-of-the-art8 is pumping water up a hill to store energy (essentially using a hydropower plant backwards), and letting it run down to retrieve it. This works well and is relatively inexpensive if you have the ideal geography, but those plant sites are mostly taken up: from now on pumped hydro energy storage is either going to be a lot more expensive or a lot more exotic (current plans call for giant undersea bladders, or the use of enormous underground aquifers).
Pumped Hydro Energy Storage
There are a number of other energy storage technologies, including electrochemical batteries, flywheels, and compressed air. There are good people working on every one of these approaches, and from our perspective, technically, there’s a good chance that at least one of us will find a solution allowing for energy storage so efficient and inexpensive that renewables, especially wind power, are economically competitive on the world scale, and on an unsubsidized basis.
However, among the many obstacles we find along the way appears the government. Despite their problems, technologies now exist that can both regulate the grid on short time scales (that is, dampening the second to second and minute to minute fluctuations) and, over a longer period, buy unneeded power in bulk at low prices and sell it when needed at high prices. If, on a single device, you can only provide the short or long term service, the economics don’t make sense. Luckily, it is technically feasible to do both simultaneously, on the same device, and thus the economics for the current technology can work out, in at some cases. The electrical grid can be buffered by energy storage, and utilities could make money doing it, to boot! How sensible.
Unfortunately, it’s illegal!7
Let me explain.
Transmission assets, like roads, railways, telephone networks and the electrical grid, have been shown to naturally tend towards a monopoly. In the case of the electrical grid, after a number of political fights the following deal was struck: the government would grant the electrical grid transmission monopoly to a single entity (in some cases more specifically the last few legs leading from the power plants to your home) in exchange for certain powers. In particular, the utility could, using its monopoly pricing power, impose practically any price on the unwitting public, which would pay just the same — they have almost no choice and electricity demand is notoriously inelastic. However, it would be restrained to charge a price only up to a certain regulated return on their capital, and no more. The regulatory commission has other powers, such as being able to define which sorts of investments and projects can proceed, and it places on the utility certain contractual demands to supply power.
Therein lies the first problem. In effect, were one selling power equipment for the grid, one’s real customer is not the utility, but the regulatory commission. It’s in the utility’s interest to buy the most capital intensive equipment that the regulatory commission will allow, and to incur the greatest expenses. After that, it may jack up prices such that it achieves its regulated rate of return, but now, due to its greater expense, it is now earning a greater profit as a greater entity for more investor dollars.
I never imagined such a perverse set of incentives. There are only three reasons for which utilities regulated in this way will look beyond the most expensive corner of the status quo. Firstly, in order to reduce risk on their capital investments, secondly, to explore the use of alternative technologies and broaden their strategic options, and finally, out of the goodness of their hearts. They’ve actually done a lot on that last count; that renewable energy is deployed at all seems to me shining evidence of a desire to do good. But utilities are conservative organizations, they’ve already figured out how to run their capital investments with very low risks (lower than most new technologies could possibly manage) and dollars for technology exploration are in short supply.
So, there’s the first shocker. Utilities with a regulated rate of return (I think this is most of them, though I’d love a better quantification for this) have essentially no incentive to save money, and hence no incentive to try out new money saving technology. If we’re to sell to anyone we have to sell to the regulatory boards, who are even more conservative. Oy.
Secondly, as the government is fond of doing, parts of the electrical utility business have been broken up, and they are not even allowed to talk with one another and share information, much less operate with the same hardware. The transmission department at PG&E is kept sealed off from the generation department at PG&E. Unfortunately, despite the fact that it is ludicrous, that it is patently insane to operate an electrical grid without energy storage (just as it’s insane to operate a network with no buffer, a computer with no cache or memory), there is no energy storage department at PG&E, or at least it doesn’t fit into the existing regulatory structure. There are no requirements for a certain amount of energy storage, and even the things that you could do to save money for the utility are unattractive for the reasons described above, and even those are unlikely with current technology to be good investments because they are both risky and it is illegal to operate the same device for both the generation department (people are saying now that storing cheap energy at night and selling it at a higher price during the day is called ‘generation’ for some reason) and the transmission department (regulating short term fluctuations in the grid and storing energy to ease congestion is called ‘transmission’ for some reason). So, a sensible and practically necessary thing (energy storage) is not allowed to be run in a manner which with existing technology which could save the public and the utility money and could enable the economic competitiveness of renewables. But that doesn’t matter because utilities aren’t trying to save money anyway.
Wow.
A couple of these problems can be avoided in the new, deregulated, ‘ancillary services’ markets. These deregulated markets, humorously enough, are markets for regulation — utilities and electric co-operatives pay a premium for MW scale power slices, so as long as you’re in the right spot and can deliver power on extremely short notice (people are pushing this as short as 4 seconds) you can stand to make a fair bit of money on a deregulated market selling to utilities. There are a few companies (Beacon Power is a prominent one) that try to make systems to do this now: in addition to the technology they’ve developed they’ve put in an incredible amount of political effort to get utilities to open up and deregulate their (*snicker*) regulation markets.
Unfortunately, the economics are still somewhat marginal. Current energy storage technologies are really expensive compared with the wasteful throttling of fossil fuel power plants. Better technologies (we’re working on one) might be able to make a really substantial profit. And if you can do energy arbitrage (buying power low, selling it high), or do something else that’s useful with your energy storage device, you can make even more money. Unfortunately, as above, it’s illegal to sell regulation services and do energy arbitrage on the grid — you have to do something else. (If any investors are reading this, don’t worry, we’ve got a few tricks up our sleeves!)
Someday, by our actions and with the help of others, enough of these problems will be solved so that the electrical grid can be buffered and made sane, that the public will save money by using energy storage, and renewable energy will be free to take over the world.
Someday.
Until then, we’ve got a lot of work to do. Here I thought we were working on a complete, technical solution to solve a massive problem in the world. A straight shot. And what do we find? Legal and regulatory crap, my nemesis, as defined by Paul Graham.
Lesson two.
So it goes.
Inventing things is what I do. It’s an inseparable part of who I am. I can’t get three chapters into a book before I have an idea for a new technology, product, startup, or hack. Parties are brainstorming sessions. I pester romantic partners as we fall asleep.
Some of my ideas are good. Some, not so good. Those that pass all my filters probably each have a decent shot at solving a major problem in a way fundamentally better than what’s come before with an approach that’s within my eventual capability to execute. Maybe it’s a little better than 1 in 3. I can’t really know until I try. But because I have so many ideas, and possibly because of practice, they number in the hundreds. If they were they only idea I had, I could really see myself giving them a go. And succeeding. I am not at all unique in this.
One thing that helps tremendously is to be able to talk about one’s ideas. Maybe even bring another person in to help work on bringing them to life. Oftentimes one’s ideas are too much for one to handle at some time, or maybe one is missing some crucial missing piece that needs just the right person or the right piece of knowledge.
If good ideas are too plentiful to fully utilize by oneself, if the difficult part of profiting from a good idea is bringing them to life, and if being open about them aids in this process, then ideas should be free.
Or, at least, it should not make one unduly vulnerable to reveal one’s ideas. One should at least be free to let one’s ideas free.
My friend, let me tell you about the patent system.
If I hold a patent on something (a widget), it does not allow me to build, license or sell the patented widget. It merely allows me to prevent others from building, licensing, or selling that widget (or anything else that falls under the widget classes and widget constituents for patented widget uses under the widget claims).
If my widget involves some device (a sprocket) that someone else (Eve) has patented, Eve can prevent me from building, licensing, or selling my widget unless I purchase a license for Eve’s sprocket.
If my something absolutely requires some crummy little item (a doohickey) that I forgot to mention or didn’t quite yet invent in my papers, my blog posts, my patent applications or my brochures, the sum total of my disclosure to the public domain and the patent office, and Eve notices this, she can patent said doohickey and the rational use of her doohickey and extort an outrageous price from me before I can sell any widgets at all.
Herein lies the problem.
The Race to the Sea of the First World War, 1914. While the war was still mobile, both sides attempted to find an open flank. This began a race that ended when it reached the sea. Before these lines were drawn, armies were mobile. Afterward both sides became mired in grueling siege trench warfare from nearly unassailable positions. An analogy with patent strategy is apt: intellectual property is territory, and you do not want to be surrounded.
If you mention almost anything specific about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, then you’re making yourself vulnerable. Eve can now take a look at what you’ve done, run through possible improvements, and possible requirements that you either have not claimed or disclosed or have not invented yet, and patent the ones that will hurt the most. Once you’ve given away your position, she can surround you, choking you off from the possibility of profiting from your work.
The important patent on the sewing machine was the sewing pin. With a tiny little hoop through the head. It is easy to forget the little things.
In the current legal climate, there are three options.
1. Stay hidden indefinitely. Protect everything that you’ve got by trade secret. If you personally (with or without corporate backing) expect to be able to bring your ideas to their full potential, this might be best for both you and the world.
2. Race to the sea. Patent your work — stake your ground, and reveal your position. Once your first patents are filed, you have to, urgently and carefully, check to make sure you’ve thought everything through. Are the relevant uses and markets patented? Are all of the incorporated or required devices available as commodities, or public domain, or inexpensively licensable, or do you own those patents yourself? Are you absolutely sure that you haven’t left anything critical out — that there’s nothing that you still need to invent that someone else might patent first? Are substantial improvements and variants of your design included in the first patent? There is a relatively short delay (on the order of a year) between when you file a patent and it appears for publication. If any of the vulnerabilities describe above exist, you’ve got until the publication date to protect yourself before Eve can make her attack. The clock is ticking.
3. Use your judgment, talk and write as freely as you desire, and cross your fingers. Hope that no one patents around you, and no one litigates.
I personally would love to be able to open source many of my patentable ideas. Engines. Desalination plants. Solar collectors. Refrigerators. Waste water mining. Wind turbines. Boats. Planes. A crowd beacon. Medical devices. Heat lamps. Translucent coatings. Metallurgical processes. Bioreactors. You name it. But the legal climate does not make it very safe for me to do so. If I write about them too freely, Eve might patent around me — now neither I nor anyone else can pursue my idea without encumbrance. If I protect myself by racing to the sea, I need to engage in an extraordinary investment of time, energy, and money on an idea that I probably crystallized in three seconds. It’s clear that even in the best of circumstances I’d be rate limited, but for almost all practical purposes this would become an untenable demand on my time (unless I have the resources of Nathan Myhrvold at my disposal.) Finally, I can protect myself by keeping my ideas trade secrets. Unless they are one of the few which I actually find the time and resources to seriously work on, this accomplishes exactly nothing. There is no pile of precious ideas I keep to stroke at night. I do not hoard them.
Some members of the free software community have been brainstorming ideas which have some relevance to tackling this problem. They include the Patent Commons and retaliation provisions in the GPL v3.9 Unfortunately they really do not provide full protection. Patents can only prevent people from building or selling things. They are weapons. Patent trolls, on the other hand, don’t build or sell anything. There is nothing to retaliate with, nothing to counter-sue, there is no center, no target. Patent trolls occupy an ecological niche in the legal landscape equivalent to cell based terrorist organizations in today’s political world. A sufficiently determined and evil person could extract billions of dollars from the world and destroy billions of dollars in wealth via long and painful lawsuits, simply by surrounding the patents and inventions that the world now relies upon. Perhaps at this time our only real protection is how grueling and soul destroying that path to fortune is versus the creation of wealth.
The patent system is supposed to encourage innovation. But I think what it’s done is cause everyone to overvalue ideas, and that has shifted the balance of power away from those who want to turn their ideas into something concrete and towards, marginally, those who have the ideas in the first place, but much more worrisomely, those who wish to wage war with them.
I’d love a discussion on how to fix this system. Specifically, not what to fix, but how: what specific actions can we take to make a difference? Quite apart from this, what should I do? Suppose I want nothing more than to do good for the world, to let my ideas, if they so deserve, blossom fully into life. Just talk about them and hope there’s no lawsuit? I do not want to be thinking about this!
Lesson three.
More legal and regulatory crap. Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised: without law, there’s no formal property, no real capitalism, pretty much just anarchy, really. Of course it undergirds business. But what’s strange is that it’s constraining my thought. I just want to talk to people about my ideas, help the world, and be good. This shouldn’t be so hard!
So it goes.
Post Script: Trevor Blackwell of AnyBots and Y Combinator gives a thoughtful reply on Hacker News as to how the regulations that come into being are so malformed.
Big companies are smarter than gov’t regulators, they understand their business better, and they have a longer time horizon. So when the government comes around to regulate them, they think “OK, how can we turn this into a huge barrier to entry for new competitors?” They have large lobbyist and strategy budgets. They generally win.
The most misregulated industries in the US are energy, medical, and transportation. So there are lots of glaring inefficiencies, but they are there for a reason. Technologists assume the reason is stupidity and that clever inventions can fix things. Frustration ensues.
1 – Lucas, R. Global Burden of Disease of Solar Ultraviolet Radiation, Environmental Burden of Disease Series, July 25, 2006; No. 13. News release, World Health Organization
2 – Delays in diagnosis and melanoma prognosis (II): the role of doctors. Richard MA.
3 – Neural Network Diagnosis of Malignant Melanoma From Color Images, Ercal F. et al.
4 – I was told later by an entrepreneur formerly employed by the FDA that with a sufficiently awesome disclaimer one can put nearly anything on the market (“Nothing this program tells you means anything”) though I am really not sure how well this works in practice. I have read horror stories of the offices of a breast cancer detection aid being raided by the FBI — the case had to go up the the supreme court before they were acquitted.
5 – I do remember, however, challenging my tour guide in the waiting room when my cartoon host ‘Zappy the Electron’ claimed that both electricity and electrons traveled at the speed of light!
6 – Jacobson, M. Z., and G. M. Masters G. M., Exploiting Wind Versus Coal
7 – I should mention that I only know about these problems in the context of the USA regulatory framework. I’m sure there are analogous problems elsewhere, but I have not examined them in sufficient detail.
8 – State-of-the-art if one is considering cost effectiveness, and not energy density! Pumped hydro plants are gargantuan.
9 – This is a good discussion: Copyleft versus Patents: The Open Source Legal Battle, By François Lévêque and Yann Ménière
The clock stuck twelve. It’s October 30th. In a heartbeat I emerged an adult in the eyes of American law. In an alternate universe, I danced the night into a hazy sunrise. But I left celebration to Haight St. patrons, their addled revelry spilling muffled through the crack in my window. Tonight, we work.
Dawn, a night and two weeks later. It was ready; the design for the both the engine and the drivetrain, encoded in a scattered handful of drawings and documents, one wiki, two heads, and a thousand lines of physical simulation code. The first test: powering a scooter through a staccato ride amid frenzied Manhattan traffic, calculating, by the hundredth second, the will of the engine, and the vehicle’s reply. We’d follow a path devised to track emissions from humming, throbbing combustion engines, byproducts of fuel burnt in tiny explosions sparked every second by the thousands.
But nothing save cool air would our machine exhale. Compressed air, ‘a thermomechanical battery’ of sorts, is cheap, long lasting, and quick to recharge (one need only open a valve, and if impatient, run a pump, the tank will fill in seconds.) What’s more, it’s efficient. A batteries charge begins life in mechanical form, in a spinning turbine if charged off the grid, or in the inertia of a vehicle, during regenerative braking. This is then converted into AC electrical current, which is converted into DC current, which, finally, is converted into mechanical energy, losing power at each step. To power the engine this whole process runs in reverse! But compressing or expanding air keeps mechanical energy mechanical (so long as temperature is kept reasonably constant.) In powering vehicles it is superior to the most advanced battery systems known. That is, in every parameter but one.
Historically, the low energy density of compressed air had crippled any attempt to venture further than a couple dozen miles; physics, it seemed, demanded tanks of excessive proportions to travel longer. At 300 bar (‘scuba pressure’), compressed air could release only half a percent as much energy as the same volume of gasoline burnt. We understood, however; it was an efficiency war. We knew that conventional vehicles were incredibly wasteful. There were many battles left to fight.
The Laws of Thermodynamics1
“You can’t win.”
“You can’t break even.”
“You can’t give up.”
We hunted losses relentlessly. We were repaid with a series of compounding improvements, each building upon another, reversing the conventional patterns of efficiency losses endured by vehicles for more than a century. Finally, in a brilliant and unusually compact layout by Steve Crane, we found room to replace the paltry 1.3 gallon gas tank with one ten times its size. Nights yielded to our toil, and, slowly but surely our enemy routed.
“We’ve cracked the code,” we exclaimed. “The city is ours to conquer.” On the highway, whatever benefit earned by our scooter’s light weight, low rolling resistance and ultra-efficient regenerative braking would be dominated by air resistance.2 But air resistance falls quickly with speed, and in the stop-start motion of the city our combined inventions would give our scooter an efficiency historically unmatched.
I keyed in the last few drivecycle parameters, drew a shallow breath, cocked my head, and pressed the enter key. The simulation lasted only a moment, but in that time, my little scooter ran more than one hundred and twenty miles, the equivalent of dozen rides between Wall Street and the Bronx on a single tank. “We’re in business,” I said. With that, and for all of a New York Minute, the questions, worries and restlessness retreated from our hearts. We huffed. “What’s next?”
[1]: To paraphrase C. P. Snow. Hat tip to Jonathan Smith.
[2]: Scooters are not particularly aerodynamic vehicles. Ordinary scooters have a drag coefficient of nearly 0.9, and a frontal area of 0.6 meters squared. We hope to achieve a drag coefficient of 0.6, similar to faired motorcycles ridden upright, but due to the rider’s position this will be difficult: some have described the aerodynamics of a scooter as like a “brick attached to a parachute.”
I have here several charts of driving cycles. These are standard plots derived from real traffic data, of velocity versus time. Unfortunately I cannot find the data anywhere. So I hatched a plan: maybe there’s software that will reconstruct data from a graph or chart? Does anyone know? If not, I’ll just write it myself and open source it. It seems like a generally useful thing in engineering and science. It deserves an application (maybe even a web application).
Many believe that technology simply gets better over time: that every class of invention can improve endlessly into modernity. That is not so. Most of the hard constraints on technology are imposed by physical or mathematical laws. These remain constant. Those who truly understand this may work, instead of towards the solution of individual problems, towards timelessness, and the ideal platonic form.
Insights by Danielle Fong 