The World Cup and the Wringing of Hands

As the world's people gather around television sets to watch the World Cup, let us acknowledge that even more popular game now being played throughout the industrialized nations of Europe and North America. 

It is the wringing of hands.  Will the recession ever end?  Which will collapse first: the banks or the governments that bailed them?  Will the folks on the US Gulf Coast drown in oil?  And most galling of all: why are we in this position?  Why aren't we more innovative?  How do we accelerate our ability to create and bring to market the amazing new things we so desperately need if we are to save our jobs, give our children a future and, oh yes, preserve the planet at the same time? 

Well, all of you hand-wringers out there - and I count myself among them - can take a time out.  I'm raising the yellow card.  Courtesy of The Economist, here are three mind-blowing technology innovations - all related to energy - that are coming down the pike now and may shape the economy in your community in the next few years. 

Free Power from Radio Waves.  In the industrialized nations, we are constantly surrounded by electromagnetic energy in the form of radio waves from TV, radio and mobile phones.  A number of young American tech companies are developing technologies to capture this energy, which otherwise goes to waste, in order to power devices.  Sounds like magic, but it is already possible to power tiny sensors this way.  You may have read that we are in the early stages of a sensor revolution, in which tiny devices embedded in materials and machines will vastly improve safety and performance.  The limiting factor until now has been batteries, but it may turn out that all the power these devices need is already there for the taking.

Turning Car Bodies into Batteries.  Speaking of batteries, they are also the Achilles heel of hybrid and electric automobiles.  The problem is that the things weight a lot.  In the 1,200 kg electric Tesla sports car, the batteries make up 38% of the weight.  Which means that a lot of power is consumed just lugging the power source around.  Now, researchers in London and Stockholm are working, with funding from the European Union's STORAGE project, on a means to make the body of the car store energy.  The body in this case is made up of carbon composites instead of old-fashioned sheet steel.  The challenge is to boost the efficiency ("energy density") of this new kind of battery to the levels found in existing technology.  There's a long way to go but progress is swift.  Researchers expect to boost last year's energy density record by 4,000 times before the end of this year.

Making Wind Power More Reliable.  What's the biggest challenge to the growth of wind power as a meaningful supplier of our energy needs?  The unpredictability of the wind compared with the need for investors to earn a return on their investment and of utility managers to manage their loads.  In Denmark, which gets 20% of its electricity from wind, a change of wind speed of just one meter per second adds or subtracts 450 MW of power on the national grid, equal to the capacity of a coal-fired power station.  Try managing that, as an investor or an operator.  Yet our current methods are not even very accurate when it comes to measuring the wind speed at the top of a windmill tower and even less so when it comes to predicting what a turbine on that tower will experience in the next hour, the next day or the next decade. So entrepreneurs and scientists in the UK and US are developing methods to measure wind speed using pulsed laser beams and upgrading computer models of wind over terrain.  They are creating the tools that will make it possible to generate more power more profitably more of the time from moving air, which will make big difference in the willingness of investors to back wind power projects. 

It was the late management guru Peter Drucker who said that "today's business is the enemy of tomorrow's."  He meant that people in business fail to spend enough time thinking about what their businesses should become, because they are so immersed in managing the problems the business is facing now.  The same is true of communities.  According to a recent video from Sony, the top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004.  The young people growing up in your community today need to be prepared for jobs that don't yet exist.  And your community's economic future will be determined by its ability to create those jobs, even though you don't know what they are.  Exciting times lie ahead if we are just have the strength and faith to get there.  Do we?  I don't know.  It's hard to be certain...  Uh-oh.  There I go, wringing my hands again...?