Powering The Dream The History and Promise of Green Technology by Alexis Madrigal

Powering The Dream The History and Promise of Green Technology by Alexis Madrigal


This is a history of alternative energy technology. It is a story of failure as much as it is a story of success. We learn that the ideas behind green technology are not new. There are many historical examples of early green technology in this book. For example, an attempt to build a 1 megawatt wind turbine was done in 1951. We also learn that many of the failures are not about the technology. It is as much about politics, philosophy, and business practices whether or not a new technology fails. The first battery operated cars hd horrible customer service and maintenance.


Alex Madrigal also compares other energy sources to renewables. Most notably he describes how the nuclear industry created a view that it was our future. We get a sense that history repeats itself with different energy sources being touted at different points in recent history. The historical examples are not what you might expect.


We learn that there were solar water heaters in 1930s, solar homes in the 1950s, wind energy was used in the American West to pump water, there was a wave energy demonstration plant in 1906 in San Francisco, compressed air was considered as an alternative to electricity as a way to store energy, and that historically green energy was part of a number of philosophical movements like transcendentalism. This is a very different picture than what is presented in the mainstream press.


In this book, green energy is as much a state of mind as a technology. For example, Google has a program called RE


We learn that only after many tries did wind become a viable renwable energy source, and that Luz solar concentrating power went through a variety of different companies selling the same technology with slight improvements over time.

The black and white photographs in the book are quite interesting. There are pictures of the first solar hot water heaters, first 1 megawatt wind generators, articles about wave generators from 1906, and pictures of other energy technnology.

This is an excellent book both from the viewpoint of a history of technology, and as a review of the philosophies underpinning renewable energy. I especially liked the first book on renewable energies title, The Paradise Within The Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature, and Machinery An Address to All Men by John Etzler written in the 1830s, which described early forms of wind, wave, and solar power. It reminded me of Lewis Mumford's ideal of a "technic civilization" built on wind and wave power.

Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor for the Atlantic. There is a blog which is related to this book on the history of renewable energy. http://www.greentechhistory.com/

Clean Technology

Pelamis Wave Energy Converter. This image is Copyleft.

Clean Technology (The titles in italics are book titles).

I have been posting some of my green political ideas on various forums. I have always been fascinated by green technology. I follow it pretty closely. I am a big fan of the Apollo Alliance http://www.apolloalliance.org/ . I reviewed a book on this organization called Apollo's Fire Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy.

The idea that we can completely eliminate oil is not a new one. I also posted Winning The Oil Endgame by Amory Lovins. http://www.oilendgame.com/ReadTheBook.html The Rocky Mountain Institute has http://www.rmi.org/ pointed the way on building a clean economy focused on what would be called Natural Capitalism-- http://www.natcap.org/ . It is possible to build a clean energy economy. It is more of a matter of political will than anything else.

There is more than one roadmap to a clean technology future with a revived industrial base for the United States. Listening to the endless drivel which we are being fed every day won't get us to where we want to be. Not only do we need to talk to our politicians, we need to invest in the future technologies which will make a clean future. Silicon Valley is more than willing to create a surge of investment in clean technology. http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_9308526

Another book which I reviewed earlier was The clean tech revolution : the next big growth and investment opportunity. This book covers environmentally sound technologies which can offer changes in industry because they are cleaner, more energy efficient, and use less waste. It covers things like green buildings, efficient appliances, renewable energy, and other clean tech.

Contrary to what many more conservative people say, clean technology will not drive the country into a recession, quite the opposite will happen. At a minimum it will create whole new industries and massive economic growth. There is a potential of at least 3 million new jobs created. These jobs are industrial jobs and manufacturing jobs, not service jobs.

In Freedom From Oil by David Sandalow which I reviewed earlier, he pointed out that there is no magical formula for energy independence. It is not hard to figure out what we need to do. We need to plug our cars into a wall socket. The majority of our non-transportation energy comes from energy that is not dependent on oil. This means we should be building more hybrid cars and more electric cars. We should also as an interim step increase the amount of ethanol blended with gasoline as well as biodiesel blended with diesel.

The coal industry, the nuclear industry, and the oil and gas industry are mature industries. This means there is very little room for growth. The newer clean technologies have room to grow and develop. They also offer significant environmental benefits.

Investing in clean technologies could provide the boost to create what would be renewable energy cheaper than coal. We are not as far from this as you might think. Wind power with economies of scale could also approach this. This is what the coal industry is afraid of. It is not about destroying our economy, it is about the process of capitalism, creative destruction.
http://cleantechnica.com/2008/05/10/solar-power-goes-to-extremes-for-5cents-per-watt/

I think there is real potential for green economics to be much more potent. There is increasing interest. I read http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/ occassionally.

I also follow a variety of publicly traded companies, verenium (vrnm), mgp ingredients (mgpi), capstone turbine (cpst), finavera (fvr.v), and others. I think there is a real interest in investing in green technology.

People spend a lot of time writing about companies like http://www.phoenixmotorcars.com/ and http://www.teslamotors.com/ which represent near term change. Without people being aware of these kind of companies and buying their products, they will never get off the ground.

There is a real interest in seeing the idea of the electric car revived. I look forward to seeing when General Motors rolls out the Chevrolet Volt http://www.chevrolet.com/electriccar/ . There is not too much hope for GM unless there is real change.

Americans are facing a real crisis in our manufacturing industries and blue collar jobs. Greening them will end up saving a lot of jobs and bringing a lot of change. Change that will be uncomfortable, but in the long run necessary.

The best thing that can happen now is to level the playing field and make the energy industry much more competitive.

What got me so interested in the concepts of a sustainable future was a book called Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming: Ecology As The Basis of Design by John and Nancy Todd. It was written in 1984. The writers described how to design cities that were extremely green, introduced concepts like aquaculture, vertical farms, and many radical scientific ideas on treating wastewater and solids using ecological designs. At the time the time they were writing no one was even close to thinking about things like this.

John Todd currently runs http://www.toddecological.com/ . I tried to place their more recent work, A Safe and Sustainable World, The Promise of Ecological Design by Nancy Todd and John Todd on hold through interlibrary loan but could not get it. I am debating on whether to just purchase it.

Earlier, I had a vague idea of civilization being able to run on renewables. R. Buckminster Fuller had predicted that in the future society would run on renewable energy, the sun and the wind. Also, I had come across the idea of a "Technic" civilization or a society that ran on wind and water technology proposed by Lewis Mumford. Lewis Mumford's book Technics and Civilization is a brilliant, if somewhat bizarre history of the development of technology.

The Clean Tech Revolution by Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder-- Review

Venture One Hybrid Three Wheel Vehicle

The book The Clean Tech Revolution The Next Big Growth and Investment Opportunity by Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder is about how green technology will be a tremendous future business opportunity.

The writing is very exuberant with an almost bouncy quality to it. It reminds me of Red Herring during the dotcom boom, or Wired Magazine. It can get annoying at times. However, it does bring out the quality of showing you a lot of information very fast in a fun manner.

Another unfortunate aspect of the book is that many of the companies that are investments are not publicly traded. I was hoping that I could find publicly traded stocks to investigate. There are some of these like Cree, Florida Power and Light, and GE. Also there are a lot of foreign stocks listed like Q-Cell AG and Vestas which are on foreign exchanges. I even saw some stocks from the Indian and Spanish stock exchange.


The book is initially broken down into eight sections on different kinds of technology; solar energy, wind power, biofuels and biomaterials, green buildings, personal transportation, smart grid, mobile applications, and water filtration. I think the book is more an introduction to the topic than for an advanced reader. I had a number of quibbles with the content in the book.

The section on solar energy focuses on how solar will scale up with larger production. One of the major problems with solar power is that it is not profitable unless it is on the large industrial scale. Walmart for example has invested in buying bulk quantities of solar panels and using them to power a lot of their stores. They believe this will lead them to long term savings. There is a bit on solar in developing countries. Solar power is non-grid based so it can be used to make things like solar powered lanterns for developing countries like India. For investments, there were not a lot of companies I was interested in.

The next section on wind energy was much better. In November of 2005 in Colorado, Xcel energy sold wind power for cheaper than natural gas or coal to 33,000 customers. Wind power for the first time had achieved parity in pricing with other forms of energy. This has led to a boom in production of wind energy in the United States as a viable alternative form of energy. I was quite happy with this chapter. It is very hard to find out about publicly traded companies for wind energy. I know of one that wasn't listed here, Western Wind Energy, but the listing for Florida Power and Light was quite useful to me as an invester.

I thought the chapter on biofuels and biomaterials was shoddily done. I don't think they gave the concept of the biorefinery justice in this chapter. The one point which I liked is that they described the point where ethanol mixed with gasoline became cheaper than just gasoline alone. Biodiesel and ethanol are currently cheaper than gasoline at the pump. There was also an over focus on cellulosic ethanol a future technology which is in development. Cellulosic ethanol seems to be pie in the sky to me.

I think they are much closer to developing ethanol from algae than cellulosic ethanol. Two companies that are working on algae ethanol are Aquaflow Bionomics in New Zealand and Greenfuel Technologies in the United States. These companies are already in the demonstration stages for commercial production of biodiesel from algae.

The picks for stocks annoyed me as well. I understand the choice of ADM, the monster of ethanol and agribusiness giant. But, they aren't exactly an environmentalists dream. If I had a choice to put down a company instead, I would have put down MGPI http://www.mgpingredients.com/ , a company that makes multiple products from wheat, alcohol-- including ethanol, personal care products, pet products, vegetarian products, and biopolymers. MGP Ingredients is a very interesting example of a biorefinery, or a refinery which makes multiple products from a single biological source. An interesting tidbit from the chapter was that Toyota plans to produce $30 billion dollars of bioplastics per year.

The chapter on green buildings was one of the better chapters in the book. It gave good descriptions of the benefits of green buildings. Green buildings cost slightly more but in the long run save money on energy, sewage, recycling, water reclamation, and air conditioning. It is interesting to note that 46% of our energy usage comes from the built environment, and 76% of electricity use. The dichotomy of long term planning versus short term profits comes out very clearly in this chapter. A green building will pay for itself in approximately 8.1 years. From my understanding, most companies survive for approximately 20 years. This means that huge green buildings won't be viable except for larger corporations with strong finances that can plan for the long term. For example, Bank of America is working on building the greenest building in the world. http://newsroom.bankofamerica.com/index.php?s=press_releases&item=4405

The book also talks about the concept of the ZEB-- Zero Energy Building. This is being done with large housing developments where houses are built green from the start and include energy efficient insulation, solar power, water conservation and enough green features to make them not need the energy grid most of the time. The features are amortized into the mortgage, ultimately saving money in the long run.

The next section is on personal transportation. I found the focus on personal transportation only to be odd. From the perspective of clean transportation, clean trains and airplanes ultimately have more environmental impact. I understand the urge to have your own car. I even think that the description of the Toyota prius becoming a mainstream vehicle is very interesting. I also think the concept of the Tesla all electric sports car is interesting. But, the Tesla is still $92,000 to buy, not exactly a mainstream item.

I am going to add in my own two cents here. I wished they had included things like the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, a new passenger airplane that is 20% more efficient in fuel usage than other planes. http://www.boeing.com/commercial/787family/ . Also a bit on trains like the Green Goat hybrid diesel electric train being developed by Railpower would have been nice.

The section on the smart grid fails to hold my attention. While it is interesting, they are talking about using superconductors to transmit power as well as carbon nanotube power lines. These are very interesting subjects, but they seem to be ten to twenty years from now. Their story on grid monitoring software to check peak usage seems to be the most practical thing being discussed. They also mention in passing that Google locates some of its data centers near hydroelectric power plants to guarantee a continuous supply of power. Again, they fail to mention a very important technology, net metering, meters designed to allow people to sell excess solar and wind power back to utilities.

I found the section on mobile technologies to be very future oriented. Too future oriented. They talk about things like portable fuel cells and carbon nanotube ultracapacitors. These seem to be things that are in the future not now.

The water filtration section was kind of odd. It was a step away from the talk about energy usage and efficiency. It almost didn't seem to fit in with the rest of the book. They posit that water will be the new oil. People need to make massive investments in desalinization plants along the coastlines to meet the United States water needs. It was a little bit too much hype for my tastes.

Where the book fails is that it makes no mention of updating existing hydroelectric dams so they produce more energy and are more environmentally sound, nor does it mention geothermal energy.

The final sections of the book are "cool". I especially like the chapter called "Create Your Own Silicon Valley". This sets up steps on how to encourage clean tech centers in cities which create new jobs, encourage research, and improve the economies of cities. The writers of the book do a very good job with this because it seems to be what they are focused on in real life. Their website http://www.cleanedge.com/ is basically about publicly traded clean technology stocks and clean venture capital.

I would recommend this book as an introduction to the concept of "clean technology." However, if you are beyond the introductory stage you might have some difficulties with the book.

Clean Technology (Green Technology) and Natural Capitalism Books,

I am very interested in industrial ecology and clean technology. It is very hard to get good reading material on this subject. I tried to get A Safe and Sustainable World by Nancy Jack Todd: The Promise of Ecological Design. John Todd is the inventor of Living Machines and Artificial Wetlands. His site Ocean Arks International is very interesting http://www.oceanarks.org/

Currently, The Clean Tech Revolution: The Next Big Growth and Investment Opportunity by Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder is on reserve at the library for me. I also have Freedom From Oil: How The Next President Can End The United States Oil Addiction by David Sandalow on reserve.

Two books which talk about natural capitalism, or green business practices which I can recommend are Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution by Amory R. Lovins and Paul Hawken, and Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage. The article which the book Natural Capitalism came from is here,
http://www.engineering.ucsb.edu/~ewb-ucsb/documents/articles/natcap.pdf



There is not a whole lot written on this material. I am taking home Green Gold Japan, Germany, and the United States Race For Environmental Technologies by Curtis Moore and Alan Miller. I read this but it was not that good. The information was very dated. It was written in 1994 and much of what was being talked about has changed considerably. I would suggest reading something more recent.

Getting back on topic. Recently, I had mentioned a failure by Finavera to commercialize their wave energy buoy. They wrote the technology down to zero value. Something unusual has happened. After they wrote the value of their wave energy buoy technology down to zero, they are opening a wave energy project with PG&E http://www.energy-businessreview.com/article_news.asp?guid=135144DB-4CD2-4116-9987-1425D809CAF7

It is an utterly odd experience going from thinking a company is worthless and will never do any wave energy projects to the first commercializer in the United States of wave energy.