Über VC and clean tech thought leader Vinod Khosla dismissed much of the renewable energy industry as greenwashing during a talk he gave last Thursday at Palo Alto Research Center.
Khosla said photovoltaics and wind power won’t satisfy much of the world’s energy needs. He said well-off Westerners putting solar panels on their roofs and driving hybrid cars are doing little good: renewable energy technologies must be affordable to the masses in China and India to have a significant impact on carbon emissions. And he said we need to put our money where it has the best chance of making a difference.
Khosla’s broadside overreaches and comes off as an attempt to gin up controversy. How can you equate established renewable energy technologies (whatever their shortcomings) with the opportunistic deceptions of international conglomerates?
Nevertheless, Khosla has an important point about the dangers of thinking within the context of existing technologies. It’s important to aim for highly improbable goals, he said. Not surprisingly, he highlighted several companies — including some in his firm’s portfolio — as righteously audacious.
Out of the box
Khosla talked up the central idea of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan — our tendency to apply narrative meaning to random behavior and to extrapolate from the past in predicting the future. The black swans of the title are the unanticipated events that alter the course of history.
Khosla said our forecasts so often fail because they’re based on today’s technologies and those technologies will be replaced in the future we’re attempting to describe. Instead of forecasting we must create the future, and we need to produce black swans, he said. (I guess the term “disruptive technologies” is too ’90s.)
Back to basic research
Though different in tone, Khosla’s talk reminded me of Patricia Dehmer’s talk earlier this month at MIT (see previous post). She said that the cost-efficiency trajectories of today’s renewable energy technologies won’t bring them into mainstream use. She said we need breakthroughs in basic research to alter the fundamental economics of the technologies.
Several energy research heavyweights will have a chance to weigh in on the topic in a symposium, Basic Research for Global Energy Security: A Call to Action, at the AAAS annual meeting in February. Should be interesting, especially with Obama’s energy and research policies starting to take effect right about then.