Winds of Change

My friend Frédéric will soon leave Zurich. He’s giving up his post-doctoral research in building autonomous robots in the comfortable, protective city of Zurich to go live his dream. He accepted a job at a start-up in California where he will develop innovative means of extracting energy from the wind, a technique so powerful and cheap that it could replace current energy sources. The disruptive potential of this technology is absolutely mind-blowing. I think in the next few years we may be the spectators of unprecedented world changes.


“What do you worry about?”

I once asked Frédéric this question, as we were sitting in a café, about one year ago.
I feel the answer to this question provides a great deal of insight into someone. They say “You can tell how big people are by how big things are that cause them to worry.” The idea behind this saying is reasonable: we should stop worrying about the basic things in life and instead engage our efforts towards helping many people.
His answer surprised me and lingered in my thoughts. Frédéric spoke at length about the world energy crisis, the incipient explosion of petrol prices, and the potentially irreversible environmental effects on the planet. His biggest concern was our species’ inability to find commercially viable, alternative energy sources, and how this will imminently affect the planet and our lives. Environmental effects could soon increase exponentially. Things might change sooner than we expect and the world is in dire need of a solution.

He is right.


The End of Oil

Currently, the geopolitics of oil greatly impacts the world order. The pursuit of oil continues to dominate international policies, shapes economic and military strategies, creates wars, and corrupts governments. The great world powers are strategically playing on a grand chessboard to secure their influence over the oil reserves of the world, may it be through financial strategies like in Ecuador and Indonesia (Perkins, 2004), or through military influence like in the oil reserve of West Africa (Torvell, 2009). As oil resources become scarcer the game is bound to get fiercer.

Unfortunately, today, the quest for oil and the need to secure energy go before protecting human rights1 and fighting against world hunger.2 The US resistance to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol is just a consequence of the world’s biggest power dependence on fossil fuels.

According to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, in 2008 oil provided for 35% of the world energy consumption, 29% still came from coal, 24% from natural gas, and 5% was nuclear based. Less than 7% was hydroelectricity (BP, 2009, pg. 41). According to the 2009 International Energy Outlook of the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), from 2006 to 2030 the world is estimated to increase its energy usage by 44% (EIA, 2009, pg. 17).

In his book “The End of Oil”, Paul Roberts describes the problem with exquisite clarity. The demand for oil, natural gas and coal will increase, while the natural resources of the planet will deplete, with countless oil extraction sites empty or almost empty. By the author’s most generous estimations, summing up the discovered and estimated undiscovered reserves and assuming a 2% world consumption growth rate per year, we would be “reaching the peak somewhere around 2030” (Roberts, 2004, pg. 67).
Concurrently, global warming emissions from fossil fuel burning are increasing. The US Energy Information Administration estimates that, in the absence of national policies and binding international agreements, global emissions of carbon dioxide will increase by 39% from 2006 to 2030 (EIA, 2009, pg. 121). According to Paul Roberts, if greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reach a concentration three times higher than today’s (which by his estimations will happen by the end of the century), “even sceptical climate scientists concede that all hell will break loose” (Roberts, 2004, pg. 174).

What’s now clear is that we need a viable, cost-effective strategy for moving the world’s economy beyond oil. Unfortunately, renewable energy is currently insignificant. In 2008, in the US, wind energy constituted only 0.5% and solar energy 0.1% of the total (EIA, 2008). Solar panels are extremely expensive due to the cost of the photovoltaic cells they contain. Furthermore, both solar panels and wind turbines require large deployment spaces and, because they are dependant on climatic conditions, they function intermittently, achieving perhaps as low as 10% of their capacity throughout the year. The challenge facing the world is not just to provide renewable energy, but also to provide it with competing low cost and high reliability.


The Power of Wind

Hopefully, wind energy is far from having said its last word. According to Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist from Stanford University, even 1% of the energy in high-altitude winds “would be enough to continuously power all civilization” (Blackman, 2009). Winds in high-altitude jet streams hold roughly 100 times more energy than all the electricity being consumed on Earth.

This is what Frédéric will work: the bold, revolutionary idea of harvesting high altitude winds. The idea is brilliant. Close to Earth, winds are intermittent and their intensity is low, but the higher up we go into the atmosphere, the more intense and constant winds we encounter. Consequently, while ground-based wind turbines stay idle, powerful and consistent winds blow somewhere far above their reach. For example, a wind collector flying only 900 meters above the ground could theoretically gather 125 times as much energy as a turbine on the ground (Vance, 2009). So instead of placing wind turbines on Earth, why not fly them high in the sky, to tap into a powerful, continuous energy source?

The idea is not new, but only recently have lightweight materials and computer guidance systems matured enough to make it feasible. Furthermore, exploding oil prices creates a favorable environment. This recently attracted even big players like Google into the race (Rubins, 2008). High-altitude wind proponents plan to raise turbines 1,000 meters high. But the wind is at its outmost potential at around 10,000 meters, where it often blows at a constant 200km per hour, an altitude that, however, is considered… impossible. This doesn’t stop Frédéric and his new team from trying.

The high-altitude wind power technology will prove viable on an industrial scale only if it manages to produce 1 megawatt, roughly enough to supply 1,000 homes. Until now, companies have created prototypes that generate only up to 10 kilowatts of electricity. Figure 1 shows a computer model of a high-altitude airborne wind turbine and Figure 2 depicts an early prototype in flight. Plenty of challenges remain: complicated, accurate algorithms for estimating the state of the flying vehicle and controlling the flight in real-time, extremely light materials to be able to reach such high altitudes, deployment only in airplane-free zones, strict safety precautions and efficient ways of bringing the energy back to the ground. There is still a long way to go, but Frédéric and his future colleagues are very enthusiastic.


The Power of Heart

Yesterday I saw how Frédéric’s eyes lit up, just like he does with any of his passionate ideas. He talked for the rest of the lunch with an eager passion, barely ending a sentence before starting to describe another powerful innovative idea, which entangled his being completely. People like him, researchers with great ideas and visions, have an extraordinary potential to act as agents of change, if capable of applying their knowledge in the world. It is a common trend within my academic peers to create start-ups. Since 1996, 197 spin-off companies were founded by employees or graduate students from my university only. “You just have to start building something real” a bold start-up entrepreneur once told me. That’s where the real adventure begins. Being able to take your ideas and deliver them to the marketplace is the crucial point.

Frédéric is all about the power of winds: from his immeasurable/immense passion for paragliding which got him, in just two years of living in Switzerland, to become part of the B-league national team, to flying robots and using the wind energy to create a better world. Some time ago I had the pleasure of seeing one of his lab projects: an autonomous flying robot. The demo site was a huge barn, and the area was enclosed by safety nets. The funny robot started lifting up in the air and flew around a while before getting wrapped in the nets. The potential of the project raised my attention: Frédéric wanted to give the robot a ping-pong ball to play. The robot would hit the ball, then fly faster than it to the other side of the enclosed area, hit it back again, and so on, thus never letting the ball fall, and all without a human intervention!

It’s his knowledge of building flying robots and autonomous systems that will help Frédéric raise wind turbines 10,000 meters high. “I feel that everything I’ve done until now, my interests in flight and paragliding, aeronautics and aerospace engineering, my research in sensors and estimation, and autonomous robots, has been to prepare me for this project.” He could barely contain his excitement: “I think I feel like the young Bill Gates or Steve Jobs might have felt: about to embark on a great adventure!”

Clearly, even if he or others succeed, high-altitude wind turbines will not, by themselves, end the world crisis. We would still need a combination of well-crafted international policies and energy saving programs, and, like history has shown, the shift to a new energy source would be painful. But the powerful drive of having proven the impossible will have unleashed a set of events that will change the way we think of the world and shift the energy paradigm to a new level.

This reminds me of the bold Swiss balloonist Bertrand Piccard who plans to fly non-stop around the world using only solar energy. Even if he succeeds in building his light plane, antagonists will rightfully argue that the same battery system will be not be powerful enough to take the Boeing’s newest 787 Dreamliner and its 300 passengers to Kyoto. But as Bertrand says: “this is not an airplane, it is a symbol”, and then “nobody ever could say in the future that it's impossible to do [solar energy] for cars, for heating systems, for computers” (TED Talk, 2009). The energy game would have been raised to a whole new level. That is what makes an entrepreneur an agent of change. The long-term impact of such an enterprise should not be underestimated. Maybe through a domino effect, years from now, the world will be able to stop worrying about energy sources and instead engage more efforts in helping the poor and the abused.


Dare to Try: Be Bold and Aim Sky High

We need two things: more scientists aware of global issues and of the beneficial or malefic impacts of their research, and more scientists filled with the passion and vision necessary to implement their ideas for the benefit of the world. But if you do a venture do one that is bold. Go for 10,000 meters, not just 1,000. If you occupy your mind with something, may it be a problem or a worry, make it big. Be brave enough to aim for things that matter. Do something important. Your boldness will come from confidence in your team and your vision, your passion will keep you fuelled, and knowing the risks will keep you humble. That’s what I keep telling myself everyday.
“So you will miss out on your flying robot playing with the ball project”, I told Frédéric.
He smiled and answered: “What’s juggling balls in the lab when you can go save the world?”

Bibliography:
Black, Robert, Saul Morris, Jennifer Bryce, “Where and why are 10 million children dying every year?”, The Lancet, Volume 361, Issue 9376, Pages 2226 - 2234, 28 June 2003.

BP, “Statistical Review of World Energy”, June 2009, available at http://www.bp.com/statisticalreview.

US Energy Information Administration, Independent Statistics and Analysis, “Renewable Energy Consumption and Electricity Preliminary Statistics 2008”, July 2009, available from:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/alternate/page/renew_energy_consump/rea_prereport.h...

US Energy Information Administration (EIA), Office of Integrated Analysis and Forecasting, “International Energy Outlook 2009”, May 2009,
available from www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/index.html.

Perkins, John, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, Penguin Group, New York, 2004.

Roberts, Paul, “The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World”, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2004.

Rubens, Craig, “Google Blows $5M More Into Makani’s High Altitude Wind”, Earth2Tech, August 25, 2008, available from:
http://earth2tech.com/2008/08/25/google-blows-5m-more-into-makanis-high-altitude...

TED Talk, “Bertrand Piccard's solar-powered adventure”, June 2009, available from: http://www.ted.com/talks/bertrand_piccard_s_solar_powered_adventure.html.

Torvell, Bethany, “Oil, Security and US involvement in West Africa”, International Relations, July 12, 2009, available from http://www.e-ir.info/?p=1843.

Vance, Erik, “High Hopes - A Vast Supply of Energy is Racing Around the Planet Far Above the Surface”, Nature Magazine, Vol 460, June 30, 2009.

United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), “Facts and Figures on VAW”, available from:
http://www.unifem.org/gender_issues/violence_against_women/facts_figures.php.

Footnotes
1  The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that one out of three women is subject to violence worldwide. Furthermore, for women, violence is a bigger death factor than cancer and car accidents, war and malaria; it leads to poverty and reduces a nation’s economic development (UNIFEM, 2009).
2  Over 10 million children die each year, most from preventable causes and almost all in poor countries (Black, 2003).