Missing Moonshots

I've been wanting an energy moonshot for years, so it was a real pleasure to see Tom Friedman using his New York Times column this morning to say that other people have moonshots so why don't we?  Of course it's China he's referring to (that's Tianjin's high-speed rail station at left, sometime next year).  Friedman identifies the electric car industry as a moonshot the US needs to have.  The twist is that it would be a joint moonshot between the US and China.  This would involve levels of cooperation and information sharing that the world hasn't seen before. It would include the sharing of intellectual property at early stages of development.

The U.S. is internally divided about intellectual property.  The business community generally wants uncrackable IP, in large part because empires have been built on secret formula that can't be imitated and made more cheaply in a process that undermines the originator's market. Think Microsoft DOS and Windows, Google's page rank algorithms, Apple, Coca-Cola, and so on. These companies support limited forms of "open innovation," largely where they help build their own product ecosystem.  On the other hand, everyone knows that various firms competing for control of the best (and uninfringable) IP isn't nearly enough.  Bill Gates, leading venture capitalist John Doerr, and others recently called for a tripling in federal funding for energy research.  And yet Doerr sees development largely as a Darwinist competition for the fittest technology among a large number of firms, and in a competitive environment firms naturally rely on trade secrets, undisclosed licenses of patents, and every kind of leveraging of their IP. Top officials sometimes call for the suspension of IP in strategic or early-stage areas, as Energy Secretary Steven Chu did early in his term.  How does this square with maximum commercial competition that generally seeks exclusive rights?

China now has a huge advantage over the U.S. in the sheer scale of public funding. I would argue it has also an imagination advantage as well -- the scale of its vision for new infrastructure and public devices outstrips anything now seen in the West. I believe it has a third advantage as well: the creation of massive de facto patent pools for the sake of collective goals that are simultaneously social and economic. The sheer scale of this coordination is necessary given the size of the challenge, and yet it is currently unimaginable in the United States. In spite of our faltering recovery, and the simply uncompetitive state of much of our infrastructure, American leaders seem to feel little urgency.  The U.S. is not now leading the energy revolution, and unless we face reality and adapt our IP practices to support massively multi-user collaboration systems, we may soon not qualify as partners.

For concrete examples of next generation IP and technology transfer practices, see in particular the Gerald Barnett and Carol Mimura presentations posted on our Lyon Workshop page.

Moonshot Sentiments

Most people have thought I am a little nuts for wanting a moonshot on renewable energy research and development in the U.S. Nuts or not, the idea is for a flood of money on the scale created by John F. Kennedy's ten-year goal of a moon landing by the end of the 1960s. The current version could be an order-of-magnitude increase over a 2-3 year period for the full range of renewable energy research -- from say $300 million for photovoltaics in the current year, according to our forthcoming report, to $3 billion by 2013. By comparison, the full cost of the Apollo mission was recently estimated to be $170 billion (in 2005 dollars), or about $10-15 billion per year - around 50 times greater than photovoltaic research today.

The moonshot concept means much more money, and also more than money. It means infrastructural development, government procurement, patent pooling, and strong anti-trust enforcement to assure multiple sources for various energy components.

The energy moonshot would need to do many things that the Apollo moonshot did not. It would need to imagine multiple technology pathways, interact constantly with social demand, imagine future needs in an enriched sociocultural context, and be constructed bottom-up rather than top down.  In these ways, it would need to be radically different from the Apollo mission.

A moonshot is the opposite of the incrementalism that is plaguing renewable energy research.  We have long been getting small annual increases that neither accelerate research breakthroughs nor create interest among private investors.  Energy R&D has also been plagued by political instability, as can be seen in this graphic from the Dooley DOE report linked above.

Oil price spikes in the 1970s lead to a spike in energy R&D, which then collapsed almost as quickly.  Direct energy research has been a pitiful also-ran ever since.

Happily, commentators are increasingly fed up with this pattern.  They are explicitly targeting instability and incrementalism as huge problems for energy progress. An organization of technology heavyweights, led by Microsoft's Bill Gates, has called for an immediate tripling of energy research to $16 billion per year (over all energy categories).  In the introductory video clip for their American Innovation Energy Council, John Doerr notes that Americans spend more money on potato chips than they spend on energy research.  In his own clip, he goes on to note that only 4 of the 30 leading companies in a few key energy sectors are in the U.S.  The clip is pitched to scare policymakers into better funding with the prospect of U.S. economic decline in what Doerr calls the most important market of the 21st century.

And Bill Gates: "we're missing the basic innovation that would give us this whole new way of making energy."

Gates also stresses the need to draw in about ten times more bright minds into the research, which is "fun work."

In a similar vein, Andrew Revkin's Dot Earth blog recently had a particularly good post on the funding problem. It caught my attention because it linked energy breakthroughs back to quantum dots, a science domain dear to my heart. But Revkin carries on with a series of links and comments from various analysts on this theme:

One key to a sustained national  energy quest, is greatly boosting direct federal support for basic research in relevant sciences. For decades, there’s been  bipartisan disinterest in such a push. Current investment in this area is so modest that just  a 2 cent rise in the federal gas tax would triple the activity.

 Many useful arguments follow on the dangers of instability and incrementalism alike.

It's good that these arguments for moonshot funding are increasingly visible. Real funding change is going to take an outside catalyst greater than even the BP Gulf oil disaster has been so far - some major triggering event.  The history is clear on this: Apollo is the son of Sputnik.  The Soviet's satellite success spawned NASA as an agency and then its moonshot out of a sense of a Cold War military urgency. Sputnik had a similarly dramatic effect on US education.  What kind of 2x4 upside the head will focus our attention this time?

The top picture is of Buzz Aldrin setting up a Solar Wind Collector on the moon.   It's time for the follow up.