“Cool It” Redux

It is worth seeing the commercial version of “Cool It.”  Hurry, though, since I don’t think 4 people in an audience at each showing will be commercially viable.  Ondi Timoner must have gotten more control over the final product than I thought she would.  The commercial version is quite balanced.  There are some fairly sharp digs at Al Gore and “An Inconvenient Truth,” but a recognition that Gore brought the topic of Global Warming to the forefront. Let me get some of the critiques out of the way:  There’s a little too much of “We’ve only seen a one foot rise in sea levels in the last century,” “… life is good with standards of living having risen substantially,” etc. In other words,  “We’ve jumped off the 50-story building and as we pass the 25^th floor things actually look okay.”  Bjorn Lomborg points out that there is a bell curve of potential global warming outcomes and the alarmists only use the low odds extreme possibilities to make their case for immediate action and large expenditures.  However, he turns around and uses the least possible impact of the current actions on temperature change and sea level rise to make his case for diverting resources away from climate change toward other pressing needs.  He is right regarding the need to address other issues, poverty, health, housing, etc., but, as Ned Babbitt points out in a comment below, Lomborg doesn’t provide a lot of documentation for the expenditure levels he calls for.  Those may exist in his book of the same name.  I could go on, but these are all just nits. Go see the movie!

Lomborg goes out of his way to affirm that he is a true believer in global warming, that man is the big contributor to the path we are on, and that we need to do something about it. However, he believes that the solutions being implemented, cap and trade, electric vehicles, windmills, solar PV are just not adequate today to deal with the problem and much of the dollars being invested could be put to better use. I have to agree except in the case of the transportation industry, where I believe the solutions are there—they just haven’t been implemented. Elsewhere, the technologies we are using today are just not adequate to solve the problems in an economic fashion without an explicit price on carbon. The documentary spends a fair amount of time on geo-engineering, which Lomborg thinks may be necessary as stop gaps because we won’t have developed the economic solutions that can move us away from a carbon-based energy system in the right time frame.  His call is for spending more of the money on new technologies and innovation and less on today’s implementation, and in the process freeing up capital to deal with the other needs of the global society. The documentary supports the case by taking us on a whirlwind tour of some of the new technologies in the developed world that could get us to the right solutions. Whether it is Nathan Myhrvold’s work on 4^th generation nuclear technologies, Stephen Salter’s work on wave energy or cloud whitening, or Hashem Akbari’s work on mitigating the urban heat effect, the journey through the new technologies is exciting and encouraging.  The solutions are there, in the lab, in prototypes or in a scientist’s head.

Unfortunately, most of the solutions don’t fit today’s venture capital model of low investment and quick return, which is still available in various aspects of the internet space.  The work that is being done is occurring in university labs based on government grants and other non-profit funding with the exception of the Myhrvolds of the world who are recycling the capital from earlier software/internet ventures into this new and exciting field. The other small exception is in those few cases where adaptation, primarily to rising water levels is already a requirement. The Dutch cannot really afford to take the chance that the low end of the distribution curve of climate change will be the end result. I don’t think the rest of the world can either.

We have to create the financing models that allow these innovations to progress to the next levels. Whoever does will own these technologies and the fruits of their implementation for their own geographies and certainly for the benefit of their own economies.  Lomborg’s whirlwind tour doesn’t get outside the developed world, but the innovation and implementation are occurring in the developing world at a startling pace as well. Go get excited by the view of what can happen as presented in “Cool It,”  and put some thought as to what needs to be done to move these innovations and others toward practical reality.

Cool It

At the Hamptons International Film Festival, I saw “Cool It,” the new documentary directed by Sundance two-time Grand Jury Prize winner, Ondi Timoner (“Dig!,” “We Live in Public”).  It features Bjorn Lomborg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” and a pariah in many climate change and environmental circles. I thought it would be good to “know one’s enemy,” and went armed with facts and data to refute what I expected to be hyperbole and assertions in the documentary. This was the first US showing of the film. It was very poorly attended as one might expect, given the environmental views of many of the Hamptons’ weekend residents. A mistake.

The documentary actually presents a quite balanced view of climate change.  Balanced in the sense of putting Climate Change into perspective along with all the other global problems we face today. Lomborg is actually a strong believer in the likelihood of climate change.  He also believes that the polarization on the topic brought about by some of the hyperbole coming from the climate change zealots has been a detriment to progress on solving the problems. I think he does understate the risks in an attempt to present a “balanced” view, using some of the same techniques that he accuses the zealots of using.  However, his conclusions are valid—the primary one being that more of the dollars that are going toward today’s solutions would be better spent on research and development at this stage, to come up with true economic innovations that would speed the shift away from carbon based energy. This version of the film doesn’t talk about the need for a higher price on carbon, although it is my understanding that earlier cuts did.

I suspect that by the time this film hits the commercial theaters the final producers’ cut will be more of a polemic against Al Gore and others who have been a big part of raising awareness on this issue. I hope to see it when it becomes commercial, and I would urge others to do the same. I also hope that an earlier cut makes it to the Internet so one can compare the director’s apparent intent with the final product. Timoner’s responses to questions after the screening portrayed an intelligence and understanding that is already not showing up in each cut as it makes its way from the film festivals to the multi-cinemas for mass consumption. Lomborg will likely continue to be viewed as a pariah in certain circles, when his thoughts should be broadly incorporated into our efforts to deal with this and other serious global problems.  Read the book. See the movie. And get your hands on a director’s cut, if you can.

600 Million Points of Light—Thinking Outside the Grid

I just returned from two weeks in India, one week with a start-up company providing a low-cost lighting solution for the 600 million individuals with homes and shops that are off-grid. The other week involved a variety of meetings, mostly concerning NGOs in India, a visit to the Salt Pans in Gujarat and three interesting days in the Bandhavgarh National Park looking for tigers and learning more about the role the Parks play in India’s future. While we were in India, the last votes were being cast for members of Parliament, which in turn would determine the nature of leadership in a very critical period for India and the world.  For the first time in many years the voters, 400 million of them, kept the incumbent party, the Congress party, in power with a larger mandate than it had before. The Indian stock market had the biggest percentage gain, ever, of any major stock market in the world the first day of trading after the results were announced.

Many observations came out of this trip, some of which relate directly to the supposed focus of this blog and others less so.

Let’s start with one that does relate, Distributed World Power (DWP), the start-up company. Full disclosure: I am on the board of DWP, which is a portfolio company of Idealab. We recently relocated the headquarters from Pasadena to Ahmedabad where the first product is being manufactured.  It is a solar-charged power pack, with three LED lights and a cell phone charger. It sells for around $100 (~5000 Rupees).  It is currently being sold through a variety of distribution systems and financing schemes to a mixture of demographics in various parts of rural India. In India, the immaturity of distribution, financing and marketing to low-income rural customers presents a problem and an opportunity.  The problem is there is no standard model in which to slot a product.  The opportunity is if one can figure out the right model(s) for the right demographics—whatever they may be—the market is huge. The need is certainly huge: 600 million off-grid with the rest on unreliable grid. This was brought home traveling through different villages, on-grid and off, in Uttar Pradesh, one of the most densely populated and least developed states of India.

At night, in an off-grid neighborhood of 70 homes, it is dark, with 4 points of light visible as one looks over the setting. Three are compact fluorescents  (cfl) hooked to small automobile batteries.  At each cfl house the light is hanging in a sheltered dirt floor area, outside the home, which one could call a “patio.” There are 9 to 11 women seated around a table doing embroidery to be sold in the local markets. The houses themselves are dark. An occasional kerosene lamp provides a small glow in an alcove inside a home. Every two days someone must carry each of these batteries 4 kilometers to be charged by a diesel generator at a cost of 11 or 12 rupees. In some villages the walk is to a point connected to the grid for recharging, although there is no guarantee that the grid will be carrying electricity at the time one arrives. In either case there is the walk to, the wait while charging and the walk back with the battery.  The fourth point of light in this village is a  “Duron,” the brand name of the DWP system.  A LED light is mounted at the entrance, lighting up the patio. Another is mounted in the main room, and a third in a bedroom or, more accurately, a dormitory.  A six to eight hour solar charge provides 4 hours of bright illumination from the three lights or 8 hours of partial illumination, or some combination thereof. Bright illumination from these three LED lights is about 570 lumens, equivalent to a 50 watt bulb, but with greater lux or intensity.

As we traipsed around the village, asking questions of the various light owners, a crowd gathered, followed us and carried on a community discussion including questions to our distributor in that area. He closed another sale that night. The system was delivered and installed the next day. I suspect there will be other sales there until about 20% of the neighborhood has lights. If the right financing scheme can be found, maybe all the homes will have light. And then, maybe all the 30 neighborhoods in the village. And then, maybe all the 70,000 villages in Uttar Pradesh.

There are calculations that justify purchases, but little value is put on time, labor or periodic outlays. The shopkeepers can make an easy calculation: more light, more people, more hours open, more sales. For a homeowner, it is not yet easy. There is a value put on education. In another village we talked with the younger brother of the owner of a Duron about how his life had changed since the purchase. He said he now studied two to three times as long as before, three hours in the pre-dawn morning and three in the late evening under one of the LEDs. Previously, he had studied under a kerosene lamp until the wind blew it out or his eyes were burning—usually about two hours.  We know there was some truth to what he told us as he had called the distributor the morning before at 6 am saying he was having trouble charging his cell phone, something he did every few days while studying. It turns out he simply hadn’t pushed the plug in far enough this time. He said he was doing better in school and now liked school–an ambitious young man with a better chance to achieve his ambitions.

These stories and others as we traveled around were quite heartening.  The quality of life improvement, the educational element, the individual economic gains made one feel good about being in the business. Maybe, as importantly, the potential to build economic value at DWP, or other companies like it, was so apparent. Not an easy task, but very likely achievable.

There was also the reinforcement and exposition of an observation made by a young friend as we were walking around the streets of Mumbai, picking our way past torn-up pavement and demolished front yards. He said, “India must skip the classic infrastructure build expected of them. They have to find another way.  Otherwise they will never bring all the country up to developed world standards and achieve true participation in the 21^st century. They did it with cellular phones. Why not with other basic systems?” At the time, I felt it was a nice thought but one without an implementable set of solutions. In retrospect, having spent time in various parts of the country, I thought maybe it could be done—at least in power.  The capital and operating expenses of most alternative energy systems, ex nuclear, are approaching the point where scale is less necessary to achieve cost-of-power parity with fossil fuels. Why not skip the build-out of the grid and the behemoth power plants and install specific-point power facilities.  This can range from a Duron to a solar, wind or hydro facility, or some combination thereof, for a single home, a plant, a village or a town. Power storage is still an issue, but being solved.  Think about the emissions improvement from such an approach. Think about the shortened time frames if private enterprise provides the solutions into a local bureaucracy as opposed to a state or national one.

I haven’t spelled out a complete answer here.  That may best be left to the entrepreneurs.