In the thrall of old ideas

This TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson on changing education to better suit the needs of today struck me because of its relevance to the thread of intrinsic motivation and discovering what each of our "things" are: what is my superpower?

The key ideas that I took away were:

• Dis-enthrallment: Recognizing the assumptions that we do not question and questioning them.
• Linear vs Organic processes: Go through education in this order ("University begins in Kindergarten") and you are set for life vs. organizing to meet the need for diversity in type and timing of talent.
• Conformity vs Uniqueness:  Fast food (McDonalds) vs customized food (Zagats and Michelin Star rated restaurants) and the "value" associated with each.
• The need to move from a mfg / industrial based model of education to one based on agriculture - "Human flourishing is not a mechanical process but an organic process.... [Like farmers, the goal is to] create the conditions under which they [students] will begin to flourish."

As the limits of the "old" economic model become clearer, the limits of the assumptions on which that model is based also become clearer.
I don't know what the "new" rules are or what they will become.
I do know that as the various systems in which we live crash and stumble towards a new (if temporary) equilibrium, dealing with this kind of chaotic rearrangement will require more flexibility than the old system allows.
Ideas like these speak some truth for me in dealing with the new condition.

Microgeneration (almost) meets Microconsumption - In Biotech

I gave an example of how microgeneration could be useful to power wireless networks and sensor devices to provide data for building automation control systems. Here is an example where microgeneration is applied to biotech devices.

In this story from MIT Tech Review:
A team has shown that they can generate power (~6.5uW) from a fuel cell embedded in the tissue of a rat. The fuel cell uses glucose from the bloodstream to generate power.
A pacemaker requires ~10uW of power to run so this is not quite ready for prime time but it suggests an approach that makes embedded medical devices much easier to live with (no external battery packs or replacement needed).

An Experiment with Virtual Daylighting

I'm not crazy after all!

I posted earlier about the idea of virtual daylighting and it looks like someone has gone and actually done something about it.
From Inhabitat:

  

"one innovative designer is experimenting with LED lights to create fake sunlight reflections on interior walls. Using over 3,000 LED lights, which give off the natural color of sunlight, Daniel Rybakken is designing lighting fixtures in the shapes of parallelograms, which give the impression of sunlight coming in through a window and reflecting off a surface.

Before, the entrance was a dark, dank, scary sort of place, and afterwards, with the white walls and reflecting light on the stairwell, you’d think they had added windows and a skylight. This light shift makes a huge difference on the psyche and even though all you see is a distorted rectangle light reflection, it looks exactly the way actual sunlight would reflect in through a window on a wall. "

Micro generation meets micro consumption - Energy Scavenging Wireless Networks

 In a previous post I wrote a bit about wireless mesh networks as a means to cost effectively retrofit sensors into a building to allow feedback control and continuous monitoring of environmental conditions to reduce energy usage.

One problem with wireless: batteries.
While they may last for years, they do need to be replaced eventually. If you have truly adopted a full building installation of sensors, that would be hundreds of nodes and batteries tucked into all kinds of hard to access locations where the HVAC, power distribution, and other systems are located or routed.
Replacing all those batteries in all those places: not trivial.

Energy scavenging to the rescue!
Using versions of the technology that power your kinetic watch (mechanical micro-generators) or that can be stuffed into a shoe (piezoelectric), enough power can be generated from ambient vibrations to power the sensors. It's not a lot of energy, but it's probably enough for low power network devices:

• MCU + Transceiver for ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4) draws somewhere between ~20mA and <200mA (say 50mA) (at ~3.3V) when transmitting with <1 uA in sleep mode
• Transmissions last a few tens of milliseconds (~15ms - 48ms) and sensors may transmit ~1/min.
• Energy required is, therefore ~7.9 mJ per minute (for 48ms transmissions).
• Micro-mechanical energy generators produce on the order of a few (1-5-ish... say 2) mW of power. This could yield up to ~120 mJ of energy per minute (depending on the consistency of vibrations).

So, even with a smaller or less efficient generator than I found in a few minutes of searching, with a small battery or capacitor to store the micro-generator's energy you're in business without battery changes.

image credit: inhabitat

The Spaghetti Sauce Tribes

In a previous post, I focused on what would influence me with regard to moving to full cost accounting. This focus suggested that there was, perhaps, a "right" answer for getting everyone to make this move.

As much as I'd love for that idea to be true: that there is some Platonic argument that would sway everyone, at least two minds greater than my own who have done much thinking on this topic would disagree:

• Malcolm Gladwell talking about the lessons of spaghetti sauce: "There is no best spaghetti sauce, only best spaghetti sauces."
• Seth Godin thinking about 
• the non-existence of the Tribe of Average: "Heretical thoughts, delivered in a way that capture the attention of the minority--that's the path that works."
• and marketing to the average: "Be picky. Make great stuff. Work with amazing people. Just don't expect everyone to love what you do."

Galdwell's advice is easy: Some people prefer sauce that is pragmatic, purely cost based and some prefer sauce that is high on ideals, justice and aspiration. Ok. Fair enough. Finding more ways to interpret the value of something the better.

So what do I do with Seth Godin's insight into niches and tribes when I need to motivate "everyone" to participate in the project?

• If I want to give up, I can say that only a few groups are capable of being mobilized in any meaningful way and target those groups.
• If I want to take the hard road, I can look for the thousand segmentations that pick off the non-average from any given grouping.

Somewhere in the middle probably lies the reasonable path: target a few with special messages, the more the better, and mass market to the rest.

I suppose that is basically the same conclusion as Gladwell and one that really shouldn't surprise anyone in marketing: know your audience and craft the value statement appropriately. If you have more than one audience, you should know that too.

The sad part is, maybe it doesn't work for saving the planet:

"There was no evidence, Bradshaw said, that rich nations — which have greater access to clean energy technologies — have a reduced environmental impact because of increased environmental awareness." 

Daylighting with "Alternative" Financing (PTO)

I tried to persuade my management to consider a daylighting experiment in our office. A small area covering around 18 workers' desks would require ten 21" solatubes to achieve a minimum 25 ft-candle illumination level. Total estimate ~$16.5k.
Among other reasons for not proceeding (e.g. it wouldn't be fair to everyone else, we've looked at ROI and electricity savings would be marginal, etc...) , no budget had been set aside for this kind of thing.

$16.5k is in the rounding error for the finances of a company the size of where I work, but assuming that it was not, is there another to pay for it? What about Paid Time Off (PTO) hours? Would employees be willing to give up a certain number of accrued hours to fund daylighting? It certainly seems more likely than asking them to give up cash to do it. Especially if you have a substantial  PTO balance and little prospect of using it all in the near future. PTO is a bit like funny money that way.

If I assume that those PTO hours are worth ~$48/ea ($200k/yr*employee with half as salary and half as benefits and taxes which must be paid), that means each employee would need to give up ~19 hours to fund the project.

Two and a half days in exchange for improved mood and productivity for years to come.
Sounds like a trade you could convince many people to make.

Necessity is a *Mother* ... oh... of invention

This is a short video of how one architect has used very limited space (344 sq. ft) to maximum effect (24 purposes built into that single space) in a city (Hong Kong) where space is at a premium.





I'm not saying this is how we should all strive to live or even how we'll end up living despite our ambitions, however, it does get one to thinking about what we'd do differently if we were faced with scarcity of this sort on more of our design problems.

• Not enough space to have 3000 sq ft. per home.
• Not enough fuel to drive 30 miles to work and back. To drive 10 miles for groceries. To ship groceries 1000s of miles to a supermarket.
• Not enough water to "waste" it on grass or even on washing clothes.
• Not enough chemical or electrical power to level mountains or keep our homes and workspace air conditioned or heated. Or lit for more than a few hours a day artificially.

I'm not a Luddite, but it seems like thinking as if we had these restrictions might actually result in some greener, more sustainable approaches.

Two Paths of Full Cost Accounting

If market based capitalism is to "succeed" in-so-far as it makes the world a more livable place for ourselves and other species (i.e. it is sustainable), then something like full cost accounting seems to be necessary. Capitalism is powerful at driving the "right" behavior given the right accounting / incentives.

There seem to be two ways of coming to this conclusion:

1) Pure pragmatism
As outlined in this Wired article "Betting on Climate Change" forward looking companies will make plans for dealing with climate change and the results of other externalized costs because, eventually, those things come back to become real costs (outlays). It doesn't matter why climate change occurred, responsible contingency planning requires dealing with it. If that means incurring costs now to avoid much larger costs later, so be it. That's good ROI.

2) Inspiration & appeal to our "better" nature
As put forward by Robert Kennedy at a speech in 1968 about Gross National Product:

"Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

It certainly makes me feel a bit prouder to be a member of the society that came up with the later reason for doing the "right" thing than it does to only be able to claim the former.

What (Other) Kind of Business Could I Build Around Energy Dashboards?

In my last post, I came up with a bad model for an energy dashboard business based on annuities paid by the utilities companies for energy saved. However, there did seem to be a bright spot for selling the dashboards to the utilities to install themselves. Looking at that a little more closely...

According to the US Energy Information Administration, CA electric utilities generated ~11.1M metric tons of CO2 in 2008. The three year average (2006-2008) was ~10.2M metric tons.
Using the same number of customers in CA and 10% savings factor as assumed before, implementing energy dashboards would save ~ 1.1M tons of CO2. Spread across the ~12.9M customers in CA at the current price for carbon (~$19/ton CO2e), that is about $1.68/customer.

If you add that to the ~$35.6/customer savings in direct generation costs, that is ~$37/customer*yr.
So if a utility is willing to accept a 3 year pay back period, then each installation could cost up to ~$111, for a TAM of around $1.4B for serving all of CA.
Not too bad as long as you have an alternative revenue stream planned for after the initial sale (e.g. s/w license fees for maintaining the dashboard customer feedback, data aggregation, reporting, etc).

The utilities' ROI increases the more effective the actual energy savings and the less expensive the installation. So to compete here you'd need to prove that your system will create and maintain better energy reduction outcomes per $ of installed equipment. If you could do it all in s/w leveraging customer's existing h/w or without any installed h/w, that would be the best.

What Kind of Business Could I Build Around Energy Dashboards?

In a previous post, I wrote a bit about why so many smart grid cleantech companies were focusing their efforts on utilities instead of consumers: the power of big numbers leverages small efficiencies into large $ amounts.

With that knowledge, what kind of business could I build around selling energy dashboards to the utilities?

A few assumptions, some of which are probably pretty optimistic just to simplify things without really changing the conclusion (I hope):

• I want to run a business based on annuities (utilities pay me a "subscription") rather than hardware and s/w services (utilities buy my h/w and s/w directly).
• I manage to get 100% of electric utilities in CA to put my product in 100% of customers' buildings [~12.9M customers]
• The utilities agree to pay me 50% of the saved costs of generation [~$17.82/customer*yr]
• A customer dashboard costs my business $35 installed.
• I take out 15% profit and have 10% overhead costs to run finance, HR, facilities, etc. 
• 35% of my workforce is engineering or other functions not directly customer facing / supporting.
• It costs $200k/yr to hire, compensate and retain each employee on average.

 Two key numbers come out of this:

• $453M - The cost to install the equipment at all the customers' locations. That's serious start up capital or a very slow ramp of the business. Starting isn't going to be easy.
• 23,000 - The number of customers per non-engineering employee that would have to be supported assuming I could start the company, pay off my debt and get to a steady state. If I'm paid actual savings, that means I need to get all the customers to actively use their dashboards and change behavior. The challenge of getting a diverse population (the state of CA) to sustainably change behavior over time with such a ratio is staggering.

As of that weren't enough, it would make sense for the power utility to shift their baseline over time rather than pay me for the same level of performance forever as it would be cheaper to address the problem themselves. This means that I'd not only have to get people to achieve good energy savings (target 10% on average - per the previous post), I'd have to increase this over time to avoid going out of business or avoid drastically shrinking the business.

I think I can throw this business plan out as a case where annuities are a bad business model.

However, that $453M number does suggest that selling h/w and analysis / customer feedback infrastructure to the utilities might be a better way to go. Maybe I could even write a game to make engagement fun.

Photo credit: Leften on Flickr ... not a picture of CA ...

A Couple of Examples

A couple of masterful examples of people really digging into the details of energy usage and what that MEANS in the context of things we can understand and visualize.

This, from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, CA, March 4, 2008, by Saul Griffith, is long but great:





This, by Catherine Mohr, is much shorter but very educational:

I like the plan but, uh, spare me the details please.

Green design and green building sound great.
Cleantech sounds great.
Sustainability sounds great.

But those terms hide a considerable amount of detail that, I think, makes the average American squirm. I wrote a bit about this at the end of this blog entry. Seth Godin also posted about this same idea here with the key message:

"This is a great opportunity for marketers and others that want to engage with the public. If you can figure out how to communicate, "it's not your fault," then people will be grateful, and they'll return. It might not be right, it might not be mature and it might not be the behavior society wants to advance, but it works.

Even better, figure out how to teach your customers to enjoy taking responsibility. It's the long term solution that builds a healthy relationship between customer and vendor... you coach them on good choices and they embrace what happens after they make them. "

 If I start talking about water conservation through composting toilets or about peak phosphorus and the implications that has for human waste recycling, like having urine separating toilets in your home or office, I think it's safe to say I'll turn off most people. I certainly wouldn't try to lead my marketing campaign with a picture of any of those things.

If I start talking about the details of sustainable agriculture and the cycle of waste to food, no matter how delicious or natural the results, I think I'll end up with the same problem: Most people will think it's gross and will be turned off.

So how do you reach a broad audience with cleantech aimed at addressing these kinds of sustainability problems?
Maybe it can made it into a game?


Or maybe it takes a few generations of bringing it up in classes and mainstream media for people in general to accept it.
Or maybe it just requires that everyone become European, where this kind of thing doesn't seem to be quite so disturbing to talk about.

 A marketing problem worth thinking about.

Certainly helps clarify why we hear so much about solar, wind and LED lighting anyway...

What if Tech Were a Fad?

This is an actual conversation I had:
- Buddhist scholar: "Tech is a fad."
- Engineer (me): "I think you may be right. But it's a fad that will last for the rest of my lifetime."

So what if I was wrong?
Not to say I believe that statement was wrong, but what might you get by thinking about things as if my Buddhist friend were right?

Wired Magazine posted an article about Lost Tribes of the Amazon using land that modern people consider unfarmable in order to grow crops. Here is an example of knowledge that was indeed lost about leveraging the natural system in which we live:

" “Human engineering, if we do it cleverly, can work together with natural ecosystem engineering,” said McKey.

The mounds appear to have been constructed from layers of surrounding topsoil, which was shoveled out and layered like cakes. That formed the basis of the mounds, which put crops above the flood line...

 

Species of ants and termites settled in the mounds, where their colonies wouldn’t flood. Their burrowing aerated the soil, and plant matter foraged from surrounding areas enriched it further. As a result, the mounds acted like sponges for rainfall, and outsourced insect labor made them rich in key fertilizer nutrients of nitrogen, potassium and calcium. The root systems of perennial plants kept the mound structures intact, and likely did so when mounds were rotated out of production.

 

As for the original inhabitants, little is known. They belonged to so-called Arauquinoid cultures, which emerged 1,500 years ago..."

What if we didn't have the starting assumption that the brute force available to us from cheap, abundant energy was available? It seems that we would be forced into more solutions like this one (and one's I've blogged about earlier), where we learn to follow the flow of nature and leverage it's strengths rather than fight with and try to level and break it.

 

I am not saying that "no-tech" is where we want to go or will end up.

I am saying that thinking about design problems differently, with no chemical or technological sledgehammer in the toolbox, might lead to more elegant solutions. Perhaps like the ones we've already lost.