Energy 2.0

Another post on yet another topic ... this time, energy. There's been a lot of discussion lately about energy policy in the U.S., especially centering around independence from foreign oil. Also, Obama seems to be focusing on spending some federal money on upgrading the national infrastructure and building alternative energy sources. All of these discussions got me thinking about how we currently obtain and use energy, and about how this should, and hopefully will, evolve in the next decade.

Currently, we have a very monolithic approach to energy. By monolithic, I mean that we overwhelmingly use fossil fuels for energy, and we just move the fossil fuels to wherever we need them. The Middle East has a lot of oil, so energy consuming nations like the U.S., India and China spend a lot of money to ship the oil to them.

We even do this within the U.S. The northern plains and Appalachia have a lot of coal, so we haul thousands of tons of it on trains to power plants in more populated areas in the northeast and south. Basically, we just always assume that energy is produced by fossil fuels, so geographic areas which need more energy must import more fossil fuels.

The direction which I think energy production needs to take is to produce much more energy locally by taking advantage of the characteristics of the environment and climate in which the energy is needed. Wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, wave, nuclear, clean coal and oil all can be used in areas in which they make sense, rather than shipping fossil fuels all over the globe.

Let's look at my hometown of Phoenix, AZ. This place has a lot of sunshine. The sun causes higher than average instances of sunburn and skin cancer here, but it can also generate a lot of energy. Why don't we make use of that energy, instead of just letting it fry us? We have a lot of open desert which could be turned into fields of solar panels or reflectors for focusing sunlight on steam pipes for running generators. We have a zillion buildings and parking lots which do nothing with the sunlight that falls on them, except get really hot. How difficult would it be to put solar panels on building roofs or to add covers to parking lots, then put solar panels on top of those? We'd get shade to park our cars in and electricity to use. We could use the energy generated to keep buildings cool, keep the lights on, etc.

We could even go one step further and start using electric cars. While you're at work, you plug your electric car in to the solar array on top of the covered parking. After work, your car is cooler and you don't have to pay for gas.

Some of you are probably saying, "That's great, but what about places that get cloudy all winter?" True, solar probably won't work, but we can use other types of energy generation that do make sense. Most of the Great Plains of America have a lot of wind, so we can build wind farms that can harness the wind for power generation. Some parts of the American West have a lot of geologic activity, so geothermal generation would makes sense. Iceland is already taking advantage of their natural geothermal activity to meet most of the island's power needs.

Even some of the dirtier power generation methods could still be used. Clean coal still produces some emissions, but in areas which have a lot of coal, why not use it to meet energy needs for the next couple of decades? Sure, it would be nice to completely eliminate the use of hydrocarbons and be green, but continuing to use domestic coal and oil would help meet the shorter-term goal of energy independence. Also, if we were using coal and oil closer to their sources, we'd save the energy used to ship them all over the country.

Generating energy from local sources is a big departure from our current model of energy distribution and use. Since I'm a technogeek sort of guy, I call this Energy 2.0. It really requires a different way of thinking about energy and requires a large federal investment in order to build the new infrastructure required to make it work.

First, we need to shore up our electrical grid. It's pretty obvious that it's built on older technology and is starting to show signs of deteriorating. Just doing this will help with the grid's reliability and create a lot of jobs in the short term.

Second, we need to do what Obama has been talking about for a while, and that's build the projects which will generate energy from alternative sources. However, this requires careful planning, so that the right projects are built in the places in which they will be the most beneficial.

Ultimately, this will produce more jobs and put America at the forefront of the Energy 2.0 evolution.

Technogeek talk

I have this totally technogeeky idea running around in my head, so I have to put it somewhere.

A while ago, I read Adam Pash's article at Lifehacker about The Self-Sustaining iPod. Basically, it outlined how to use freely available software to rip CDs to MP3s, load the MP3s to your iPod's library and play music off of your iPod, all without iTunes. The additional benefit of all of the software used was that the programs were standalone apps which could be run off of your iPod when it's plugged in to a Windows system. So, your iPod could be free of iTunes or any other software which needed to be installed on a desktop.

Yes, I realize there's some downsides to this. You wouldn't get new iPod firmware updates, you couldn't buy music via the iTunes store, etc. But, if you didn't care about these things so much (which I don't), you could be unbound from needing to plug your iPod into one particular PC in order to get new music.

This recently got me thinking ... why can't someone build a music player which incorporates these ideas from the ground up? It wouldn't be difficult to build a music management app into the flash memory of a music player. Set it up to autoplay when the player is plugged in and build in all of the usual music management functions: rip CDs, manage podcasts, edit tags on music files, etc. But, instead of having to sync music from the desktop to the player, it can just work on the music files on the player. Seriously, this saves that whole synchronization step anyway.

At this point, Mac and Linux users are screaming, "What about our OSes, you Windows-centric hack?" Yeah, that's important, and it wouldn't be particularly difficult to build Mac and Linux versions of a music management app and include all of them in the player. Observe YamiPod: versions for all three major OSes and can be run standalone from an iPod.

Now, let's go one step further. If a smart company builds this music player and they publish the structure of the music library on the player or if they publish APIs for managing the library, third parties (read "open source developers") could build apps which interact with the music library. This could allow users to swap out the default music management app and install the open source app of their choice.

This is very much like the Google model of innovation ... create a platform and a way to interact with it, then let the vast community of developers innovate all kinds of things. Look at Google Maps. Google provides the platform (map data, satellite photos, street view photos) and APIs for web developers to use for interacting with the data and for embedding maps in their pages. The page known as Google Maps is just one app built on top of their mapping platform.

In the same way, this music player could be the platform (the physical hardware which plays the music) and the APIs for interacting with it. The music management app which is bundled with the player would be just one app on top of the platform, but developers could build many more.

Maybe Google will actually be the company to do this ... I think I get credit for being the first blog to discuss rumors of the secret Gplayer.

Maybe they'll build a player on top of Android. That doesn't sound like a too-far-out idea. And while I'm on the topic of Android, I wouldn't be totally surprised to see a developer somewhere create an app like this which can run on an Android phone and manage music on a microSD card in the phone.

Moving past racism

Time for a short retrospective thought on the presidential election.

We elected an African-American to the highest office. It doesn't mean that racism is gone from America, nor mean that he won the election because of some sort of national feeling of Affirmative Action. Barack Obama won because we felt that he was the candidate who could lead this nation in the direction we want it to go.

So now, we can say that we, as a nation, have finally achieved a small part of Dr. King's dream. We looked at the candidates and we judged them not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Republican party making a right turn?

I was reading this article from Paul Krugman of the New York Times. It makes a logical argument as to how the Republican party may move even farther right after this election. What worries me more than a Republican party which is borderline crazy-right is a Democratic party which has the White House and both houses of Congress.

No matter how good their rhetoric or how noble their intentions, the temptation to use and abuse power will prove to be too much for Washington Democrats. Maybe Obama wouldn't pursue the expansion and use of presidential powers anywhere near as much as Bush, but a House and Senate full of a Democratic majority will do something(s) stupid sooner or later. Especially with the federal government having an ownership stake in a good portion of the financial industry of this country, I'd really like a balance of power in charge of that.

A government like ours works best when the party in charge has a loyal opposition to contend with. Having one ideology in charge without a counterbalance to force compromise causes the government to swing too far left or right. The first six years of the Bush administration showed us what can happen with the Republicans in charge. I don't want to see what happens after six years with Democrats running roughshod over the Republicans and the rest of America.

Thoughts on the long campaign

I was thinking about what a pain the ass our presidential campaigns have become. It takes 21 months for us to figure out who we want as our next president? Really?

It seems ridiculous that anyone should have to campaign that long to convince us that he or she should be president. It wastes a huge amount of time and money to run a primary and a general election campaign for that long. It drives most Americans crazy to have to hear about the election for that long. Personally, it makes me tired by this point ... I just want the election over with.

I thought that instead of reforming campaign finance laws, we should just institute a legally mandated campaign time frame, like some other countries have. Say, six weeks for the primary and six weeks for the general election. Any campaign-like activities outside of that time frame gets you fined, tossed in jail or both.

But, I just had a contrary thought. Maybe it's good that it takes this much time to choose our president. Not only do we get a lot of time to become familiar with a candidate's positions and policies, but we get a lot of time to see what they really are like. A 21-month campaign is probably the most difficult experience in American politics, outside of actually being president for four years. If we're choosing someone to lead our nation, I want to see how they can handle the pressure for month after month of hard campaigning.

Not only do candidates have to travel across the nation over and over again, gaining the trust and confidence of the electorate, they have to make a million different decisions as to how to manage their campaigns, what strategies to pursue and how to pursue them, and how to raise the money to pay for all of it. I think this really tests the leadership abilities of a candidate and gives us an excellent view into how they will lead in office.

Maybe the long election cycle isn't such a bad thing after all.