The Green Technology Boom  

MIT's annual energy conference was on last weekend with John Doerr talking about a clean energy boom 10 times as large as the internet boom. Geothermal energy and energy efficiency seemed to be the highest profile options being discusssed.

While there has been rapidly growing enthusiasm in recent years about a variety of approaches to improving the world's energy systems, "no matter how bright many of these new technologies seem, most of them wither around questions of scale," Hockfield said. The magnitude of the world's dependence on fossil fuels, and of the problems associated with those fuels, makes it difficult for any new approach to make a significant impact.

Thus, the conference's title, "Solutions that scale to meet the energy challenge," addressed the often-overlooked heart of the matter. And while the dozens of talks, panel discussions and exhibits in the two-day conference and exhibit acknowledged the daunting nature of the challenge, a sense of shining but realistic optimism pervaded the event.

The sheer magnitude of the problems can translate into an equally vast opportunity, said John Doerr, a pioneer venture capitalist whose firm bankrolled some of the biggest winners in the computer and Internet booms including Sun, Google, Compaq and Symantec. In his opening keynote address, Doerr predicted that "the market for energy technology is larger, maybe 10 times larger," than the Internet boom that preceded it. "We're at the beginning of a green technology boom."

In order to kick-start that process, there is a need for much greater investment in research, he said. Today, the total annual research and development budget for new energy technology is about equal to just one day's profits from a single fossil energy company, Exxon Mobil. And last year, the U.S. government slashed spending on one of the most promising energy technologies, geothermal power, to just $5 million, despite the fact that geothermal may have the largest-scale possibilities of all, with "the potential to equal our total energy use," Doerr said.

That emphasis was echoed by MIT Professor of Chemical Engineering Jefferson Tester, whose studies of geothermal resources showed the vast scale of this resource--which, unlike many forms of sustainable energy, is available virtually everywhere, and all the time. "The numbers are staggering" for the amount of geothermal energy that could ultimately be harnessed, he said, and developing the technology to enable widespread deployment could be accomplished for about the price of a single new coal-fired power plant.

Another area with enormous potential is energy efficiency, as several speakers emphasized. J. Michael McQuade, a senior vice president at United Technologies, cited an example of a single manufacturing plant his company built in China for elevator manufacturing. In the design of the million-square-foot facility, planners were asked to spend up to an additional 10 percent of the building's cost, in order to achieve up to 15 percent reduction in energy costs. In fact, they were able to achieve a 28 percent energy improvement, at a cost increase of just 4 percent. That's typical, McQuade said: Surveys showed that managers overestimate the costs of efficiency, and underestimate the benefits.