Today, there are roughly 6.5 billion humans on our planet. Just within the past few years, we passed the point at which over half of us live in cities. By 2050, unless current trends change, there will be about 9 billion of us and two thirds of us will live in cities. The significant challenges this trend poses are limitless: infrastructure, power, water, food, education, health, crime, jobs—each issue merits a shelf of books all to itself.
People have been moving from the countryside to cities for 9,000 years. This migration has been central to the rise of civilization. We humans better ensure we fully understand how this trend will play out, and stay ahead of it so we can shape it so it works for us, not against us. Some researchers have written that, from a global warming and green environment standpoint, urbanization may be a good thing; perhaps that may be so. However, it’s hard not to imagine the model which gave rise to civilization may, once past a critical tipping point, lead to the demise of civilization (i.e., if we cannot effectively resolve, in a timely fashion, the myriad issues mentioned above). Hollywood has certainly provided us with numerous dark, apocalyptic visions of life in megacities of the future. I’m not necessarily arguing that is the natural outcome of the current trend; however, I offer that randomness is what will result if we do not infuse enough energy (that is, thought and money) into the system to create and preserve order.
People head for the cities to seek opportunities for a better life: better paying jobs, better education, better access to medicine and services, better odds for their children. With better understanding, coupled with effective public policy, technology, and wise investment, we can create opportunity in rural areas. We can, as Thomas Friedman says, “flatten” the world, level the playing field so that people will not feel compelled to migrate to cities to improve, or simply preserve, their lives.
We need to find ways to cost-effectively get power, water, food, education, medicine and other basic services to small cities, towns and villages in the rural areas of our planet. If we can create the right set of basic conditions for people in rural areas, there is no reason they cannot fully participate on a level playing field in the global marketplace, no reason they cannot achieve and enjoy a quality of life equal to, if not superior to, that of their peers living in megacities. There is no reason an educated and trained person living in a remote village cannot, with basic Internet access, handle accounting, inventory control, records management, etc, for a Fortune 500 company. If we create the right conditions, we can change the economic paradigm which is driving urbanization.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Saturday, December 26, 2009
We Need 21st Century Public Policy for 21st Century Electrical Power
We urgently need to revamp our public policy regarding electrical power generation and distribution. We are saddled with both anachronistic policy and archaic infrastructure. This must change to enable the US to become energy independent and to take a leadership role in advancing global power technology into the 21st Century.
Our electrical power generation and distribution infrastructure is decades old, and falls completely short of supporting the demands of our digital information age, which relies on cheap, reliable power. Estimates I’ve read place our annual, domestic “reliability penalty,” the opportunity cost associated with power outages, at about $100B.
Our entire system is built upon a model which calls for centralized generation and distribution over an increasingly integrated power grid. A key tenet of this model is that it must be capable of generating and distributing enough power to meet peak demand, even though these peaks represent a small fraction of our overall usage (that is, waste). Another key tenet has been that electric power utilities have operated in accordance with an outdated economic model in which they serve as common carriers (largely regulated by the states) and are allowed to recoup, through billings and rates, the cost to produce such power—largely in a monopolistic fashion. The status quo provides scant incentive for investment and innovation; note the still-common practice of managing power supply shortfalls through “rolling” brown-outs and black-outs. That is a 19th Century solution, not befitting our capacity to achieve something much better, and certainly not conducive to thriving in the information age.
We must upend these fundamentally flawed underpinnings of our electric power industry, putting in place policies to incentivize competition, which will lead to creativity, innovation, reduced waste and lower energy costs. We already have the technology; we simply need to unleash it with more effective public policy. Today’s smart grid and micro grid technology will enable much more efficient, agile, responsive, robust, precise and reliable electrical power.
This issue transcends our own borders, and directly affects our national security. By taking the lead in modernizing our own electrical power infrastructure and associated policy, we will unleash America’s technology to close the growing gap between the world’s “haves” and “have nots,” certainly a root cause of regional instability and threats to the US. Today, two billion humans do not have access to basic electrical power. Unless we do something different, that number will double by 2050. We can and should position ourselves to drive global electrification over the coming decades, giving everyone on the planet access to basic electricity. This will pay huge dividends at home and abroad.
Resolving this problem is absolutely critical to achieving energy independence, energy security and sustained economic vitality.
Our electrical power generation and distribution infrastructure is decades old, and falls completely short of supporting the demands of our digital information age, which relies on cheap, reliable power. Estimates I’ve read place our annual, domestic “reliability penalty,” the opportunity cost associated with power outages, at about $100B.
Our entire system is built upon a model which calls for centralized generation and distribution over an increasingly integrated power grid. A key tenet of this model is that it must be capable of generating and distributing enough power to meet peak demand, even though these peaks represent a small fraction of our overall usage (that is, waste). Another key tenet has been that electric power utilities have operated in accordance with an outdated economic model in which they serve as common carriers (largely regulated by the states) and are allowed to recoup, through billings and rates, the cost to produce such power—largely in a monopolistic fashion. The status quo provides scant incentive for investment and innovation; note the still-common practice of managing power supply shortfalls through “rolling” brown-outs and black-outs. That is a 19th Century solution, not befitting our capacity to achieve something much better, and certainly not conducive to thriving in the information age.
We must upend these fundamentally flawed underpinnings of our electric power industry, putting in place policies to incentivize competition, which will lead to creativity, innovation, reduced waste and lower energy costs. We already have the technology; we simply need to unleash it with more effective public policy. Today’s smart grid and micro grid technology will enable much more efficient, agile, responsive, robust, precise and reliable electrical power.
This issue transcends our own borders, and directly affects our national security. By taking the lead in modernizing our own electrical power infrastructure and associated policy, we will unleash America’s technology to close the growing gap between the world’s “haves” and “have nots,” certainly a root cause of regional instability and threats to the US. Today, two billion humans do not have access to basic electrical power. Unless we do something different, that number will double by 2050. We can and should position ourselves to drive global electrification over the coming decades, giving everyone on the planet access to basic electricity. This will pay huge dividends at home and abroad.
Resolving this problem is absolutely critical to achieving energy independence, energy security and sustained economic vitality.
Incomplete Musings on Machiavelli, Failure to Honor History’s Lessons, and Hubris…
About 500 years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli compiled a little treatise on the business of acquiring and governing principalities. In Chapter IV, he specifically warned of the difficulties—impossibilities, really—of holding onto a state in which barons, influential and with loyal constituencies, compete for power with a relatively weak central government. Machiavelli advised one can easily enter such a state “by gaining over some baron of the kingdom, for one always finds malcontents and such as desire a change. Such men, for the reasons given, can open the way into the state and render the victory easy; but if you wish to hold it afterwards, you meet with infinite difficulties, both from those who have assisted you and those you have crushed…because the lords that remain make themselves the heads of fresh movements against you, …and that state is lost whenever time brings the opportunity.” He concluded it was “impossible to hold with such tranquility states constituted [thusly],” and that the capacity to hold on to a state was “not occasioned by the little or abundance of ability in the conqueror, but by the want of uniformity in the subject state.”
We are burdened today by choices borne of the hubris of men who believed they could accelerate (within the span of an administration, no less) the very tides of history, circumventing centuries of social and political evolution.
We are burdened today by choices borne of the hubris of men who believed they could accelerate (within the span of an administration, no less) the very tides of history, circumventing centuries of social and political evolution.
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