Earth

Is Chevron committing an act of treason?

July 6, 2009 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

foxbattery Saw this tweet this morning from tech visionary, pundit and publisher Tim O’Reilly, which brought me to this article on “NiMH Batteries, Chevron Patents and the Future of Plug-in Hybrid Cars” and a sudden onset of disbelief and dismay, though after eight years with the Bush/Cheney oil-centric administration, nothing energy related that has favored an oil company (or been allowed to continue unchallenged) should come as much of a surprise.

The next thought was that this country not only needs patent reform desperately, but in the case of a fox (an oil company) guarding the hen house (NiMH battery use which could easily accelerate the building of hybrid cars) we need to find ways to have some form of intellectual property eminent domain so the foxes (like Chevron) can’t control our metaphorical food supply in the form of stored electrical energy.

It says in part, “If NiMH batteries are being used so successfully, why are American manufacturers fixated on Li Ion batteries? Part of the reason is that petroleum company Chevron owns the patent for the Ovonics NiMH traction battery. Under the ruse of saying they have not had sufficiently convincing proposals brought to them, Chevron continues to deny licenses to any company proposing to manufacture new NiMH traction batteries.“

As is usually the case in matters of intellectual property, markets and trade, there are undoubtedly complexities involved in this patent and the use of it. It’s altogether possible I’m not seeing some subtlety or nuance that goes beyond what seems obvious on the surface. But come on…can this restraint of NiMH battery use by Chevron be any more obvious?

Where would be be today, right now, with delivering robust and powerful hybrid cars if there weren’t barriers to manufacturing NiMH batteries? It’s one thing for a company to strategically leverage technologies that pose a threat to an incumbents business, and quite another to bury it or place too many obstacles and barriers in front of its use. But when all of us have so much at stake with climate change, national security with oil, and an economy so dependent upon that oil, a disloyal act like this — working at cross-purposes to the imperatives of our nation — can only be described with one word: treason.

Filed Under: Featured, GreenTech Tagged With: battery tech, hybrid cars

Save $125 Billion With Solid State Light Bulbs

April 27, 2009 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb (and 1,000's of other things!)

All of us need to get rid of our incandescent light bulbs.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has projected that our nation could save 29% of our national lighting energy consumption by 2025 — $125B in energy costs — if all of us converted to solid state lighting (SSL’s which mainly are LED‘s and OLED‘s).

The DOE has this site devoted to SSL technology and even an “L Prize” for innovation and breakthroughs in SSL.

Ever since I purchased a Toyota Prius and a Neuton rechargeable lawnmower, I’ve been both delighted and stunned with the compromises one has to make today to be more energy efficient: the Prius averages 47mpg but is less substantial (and luxurious) than what I’m used to in a car and the Neuton batteries (lead acid’s) and its engine is inefficient enough that I have to cut my lawn every five days or the mower bogs down.

I’ve been on the hunt for LED lights for my home — and 40w, 60w and 100w bulbs seemed to be scarce and certainly NOT available at retailers like Home Depot or Target — but they’re now beginning to appear from companies like EarthLED (and their 100w bulb replacement with a tiny fan in it to keep it cool and ensure the life is long) to companies with initiatives like those at GE and at Philips.

The kicker is that these bulbs are still quite expensive. [Read more...]

Filed Under: GreenTech

A Different Perspective on Earth Day

April 22, 2009 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

When I saw Steve Martin live at a bar outside Minneapolis in the mid-1970's, he'd always close with this message which made me realize the importance of conservation…and I've never forgotten that lesson:

SteveMartin-Littering

Roll your mouse over the gray box to invoke the audio player

("Always take a litter bag in your car. It doesn't take up much
room and if it gets full, you can just toss it out the window!")

Filed Under: Earth

Keeping Your Eye on the “Peak Oil Ball”

October 24, 2008 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

While walking the dog early in the morning, I usually look at news headlines, primarily using the New York Times free iPhone app.

One article caught my eye early today, OPEC Orders Cut in Oil Production. It started out with, “The OPEC cartel said Friday that it would reduce its oil production by at least 1.5 million barrels a day to stem what it called â€œa dramatic collapseâ€ in oil prices as the world economy slows down and oil demand shrinks” and then continues to point out how many countries have set social program and other country revenue-based spending on much higher per-barrel prices, and so there is a tremendous incentive to cut production in order to increase prices.

Though it’s clear OPEC members are trying to find a way to get prices back up, it’ll probably take quite awhile. Can’t we just revel in the good news that demand is shrinking and that gas prices are falling at the pump, airfares are already dropping, shipping costs will probably go down, and that we can breathe a sigh of relief?

Then a fleeting thought ran through my mind, one that I fear many might have and will fall back into old behaviors and go ahead and buy that new gas-guzzling SUV or low mileage car (or make other short-term decisions), “Oh great…maybe I didn’t have to buy that Prius after all!” and then remembered this MinnPost article I’d read in August along with this tremendous Potential Energy podcast in September (both on peak oil), coupled with one of THE most comprehensive, objective and sobering programs I’ve watched in a long, long time: PBS’ Frontline show called “HEAT” (you can watch the entire show online and it’s worth the investment of your time).

In that MinnPost article, the writer explains the predicament we’re in with the help of energy expert Matthew Simmons:

Along with others, Simmons has been warning about peak oil for two decades, but he’s not the first. M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist with Shell Oil, accurately predicted in 1956 that U.S. oil would peak by 1970. That’s when the United States went from being a producing nation to being one that today imports 70 percent of the oil it consumes.

Unlike climate change theorists, who rely on data and modeling, “peak oil” advocates rely on known production data that in every case shows a bell-curve history of discovery to increasing production to decreasing production to exhaustion. Taken together, the data from all oil production sites, along with such other information as the ratio of dry-hole to successful-hole drilling and economic growth rates, have helped geoscientists develop “peak” scenarios that are broadly accepted.

So should we be more focused on peak oil (and running out of it) or climate change?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Current Affairs, GreenTech

TELâ€¢Aâ€¢VISION Launches

October 7, 2008 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Nothing happens without a vision. Nothing gets created, built, or moved forward without a vision of an end-state or an outcome. It’s been said that we create and achieve what we focus on — whether that focus is on the positive or on something negative — and if we invest our conscious hours in focusing on positive visions, we’d be healthier and, most importantly, far more likely to realize our dreams and live a life aligned with our strengths, purpose and passions.

In this time of economic upheaval rippling across the globe, fundamental political and systemic change in the US, and a struggle to find good news or positive information amongst the hundreds of TV stations and tens of thousands of websites and publications available to us all — including our kids — the world needs to see possibility, hope, and visions of the future that accentuate and focus on the positive.

Any leader will tell you that vision is the most important first step to take before anything else happens, whether it’s a startup, a product, project or initiative, or anything else we strive to accomplish. Leaders will also tell you that the next great leaps in creativity and innovation will come from those that see the possibilities instead of downside, risk or failure, and empowering kids to see possibility, feel hope, and create, communicate and absorb a vision for their lives, for humanity and the world, promises to be incredibly profound, world-changing and an imperative for our future…

…if only there was someone with a vision about what could help our next generation create and live their own vision stories and celebrate their dreams, hopes and goals for themselves and the world.

Large Hadron Collider: Should We Seek Knowledge or Just God?

September 10, 2008 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Started up just hours ago, the Large Hadron Collider has taken me into a contemplative state I never thought I’d be in or to have discussions I didn’t expect to have with people I admire, love and respect.

As it states in a Wikipedia article, the Collider initiative is focused on trying to "produce the elusive Higgs boson. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity."

It seems that all the geeks I follow who blog and Twitter like crazy are feeling the same level of excitement I am about this roughly â‚¬6-7 billion physics experiment starting up (and that the jokes about it generating a black hole and sucking the Earth into it luckily didn’t occur!).

What most intrigues me is this audacious search for knowledge that this investment and risk represents. Nothing we enjoy today — from our cars to iPods to extended life spans — would be possible without the constant and accelerating knowledge seeking (and building upon knowledge gained) which is occurring around the world in thousands and thousands of different disciplines. Read everything you could ever want to know about the Collider here.

What’s interesting and troubling about this Collider startup is how it’s sparked conversations I’ve been having in the last few days with really smart friends who also happen to be staunch Christians who take the bible literally (as apparently Governor and VP candidate Sarah Palin does). They do, in fact, join the 1/3rd of Americans who also believe in the word-for-word literal Bible, and many of these folks also believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old ("geology is just a theory" said one acquaintance), and that searching for the big bang or a Theory of Everything is somehow blasphemous. It saddens me as I observe their mental doors slamming shut as we talk.

I think it was Socrates that said, "the more I learn, the less I know" and I’ve felt that way all my life, which is one reason why my Catholic upbringing has morphed into a massively expansive view of "God" in my adult life that I strive valiantly to learn more about and to comprehend. What I do know is that in a world and universe where knowledge equals survival, I’d rather place my bets on the seekers of knowledge vs. those that seemingly rely solely on faith to guide a country, scientific policy and investments, the education of our youth, the competitiveness of our nation, and that we still need to find Waldo.

UPDATE: If you’re interested, here’s how the Large Haldron Collider works:

Filed Under: Earth

Virtualizing Your Organization as a Risk Management Strategy

September 8, 2008 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Depending on where you live or work, chances are natural disasters, avian flu pandemics, earthquakes or other catastrophic events won’t impact you, but have you done any planning for the possibility something could happen besides making certain you’re in good standing with your insurance company or that you can locate a copy of the organization call tree so you can notify others of a business or organization work stoppage?

Over two years ago, I had the privilege to be a leader of a session at the Collaborative Technologies Conference in Boston (now called Enterprise 2.0) on “Business Continuity and Collaboration” which focused on what are typically two discrete and separately funded initiatives in any company.

At the outset, I laid out my premise that business continuity investments are usually made to ensure that information technology and telephony systems have backup, failover and redundancy so the company isn’t suddenly out of business if disaster strikes. To a very limited degree, work processes (and the people that perform them) are detailed along with possible ways in which they could continue to function in the event of a disaster, all in an attempt to ensure the business keeps going.

Continuing on with an overview of collaboration investments, I briefly laid out how these are typically driven by the desire to make work processes more efficient and reduce cycle times, but also to find ways to drive more innovation with people that connect and work with each other.

The problem? In almost every single organization I’ve been a part of or involved with as a consultant, these two don’t intersect and leaders don’t seem to realize that unless the people in their organizations have the company, directory, work processes and information at-their-fingertips and are using these systems day-in and day-out, if there is a disaster there’s no way they’ll be learning it then!

The opportunity? That these systems should be ones that are funded together as both innovation infrastructure as well as business continuity systems, and that people should be using them all the time. If virtual collaboration systems such as VoIP, groupware, web conferencing, webcams, and other “2.0-like” communication methods are something that everyone uses and knows how to work with at home or within the organizations walls, then if disaster strikes they’ll simply find an internet connection, log on and do their work.

Schwans: Strategic Planning for the Long Term

July 8, 2008 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

Rarely do I watch local news, but a couple of weeks ago I happened to catch a story on our local CBS affiliate’s 10PM newscast about Marshall, MN-based Schwans and their amazing propane trucks. This is a lesson in strategic planning for the long term, and how gleeful they must be in a day when diesel fuel is approaching $5 a gallon!

Schwans is a company that got into the home delivery business when in 1952, Marvin Schwan packed his beat-up 1946 Dodge panel van with 14 gallons of his family’s signature ice cream and delivered it to rural families in western Minnesota. At the end of that historic trip, all 14 gallons were sold and the Schwan home-delivery business was born.

Now a multi-billion dollar private company with 22,000 employees and a dependence on trucks to deliver their goods — especially the sizeable home delivery portion of their business — they were admittedly stunned and taken aback during the oil crisis of the 1970′s and initiated a very long term strategic plan to ensure they weren’t in that position again.

This article (and the accompanying video there which I watched that night) says in part, “Our sales were based on the fact that we’re driving down the road and going to people’s houses, and so that’s really where the concern came in and said ‘We need to do something different,’” said Shannon Lens, Director of Fleet Acquisition at Schwan Foods.

What they did was take the mandate of Schwan Foods founder Marvin Schwan to find an alternative fuel. They discovered propane being used on a very small scale in Ohio. They eventually bought the propane technology and started converting their trucks. By the 1980s, most of the fleet was propane powered.”

This company is now paying $2 per gallon for propane fuel that runs the 5,200 trucks in their fleet nationwide.

Propane is no panacea since it’s a byproduct of oil refining. Still, as I’ve said before in many ways on this blog, there’s been a lack of leadership exhibited in the last eight years on finding any alternatives to oil, motivating we citizens to conserve, and going to war to ensure we get the last remaining oil resources vs. those emerging economies China and India.

Strategic planning, risk management and leadership are things one would hope for in our Federal government and not just with companies delivering pizza and ice cream.

Filed Under: GreenTech

How’d you like to have a 150mpg car?

May 20, 2008 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

Like most of us aware of global warming and an oil supply that’s not unlimited — and paying more for gasoline than ever before — I’m thinking about my next vehicle. My goal is a plugin hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), but my lease runs out in November and mainstream vendors (e.g., Toyota, GM) have said it’s likely they’ll ship PHEV’s in any sort of volume "around 2010-2012."

Though rolled out at the recent Detroit Auto Show, I began paying serious attention a month ago as I started to look for options. AFS Trinity boasts 150mpg with their innovative technology in their "Extreme Hybrid" (which is actually a gutted and outfitted Saturn VUE to prove that the tech works):

AFS Trinity Power has developed patent-pending technology that makes it possible for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles to achieve 150 MPG, go 40 miles in all-electric mode, and use gasoline for additional unlimited miles in hybrid mode.

They key to why their approach is "extreme" is the use of ultracapacitors, allowing fast charging of the Lithium Ion batteries and, most importantly, fast discharge (so you can smoke those tires from a dead stop!). Explanation of the tech here.

The bad news? This is a concept that is being pitched to automakers and they’re also disclosing that they are also 2010-ish before shipping. The good news? Maybe two more car cycles (for me, 4.5 years away) and there will be a multitude of PHEV choices.

I may have to buy a Prius in the interim.

Filed Under: GreenTech

Minnov8: Showcasing Minnesota Innovation in Internet & Web Technology

May 12, 2008 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

If you’re out in the Bay area or on the other coast in New York or Boston, it’s pretty easy to be smug about your culture of risk-taking, pool of top talent, and strings of successful, world-changing innovations. But as the world continues its acceleration to one that’s increasingly connected and ways of collaborating make distance irrelevant, smart people will pop up everywhere and I’m convinced we’ll see a flattening of the geographic advantages these pockets of innovation represent.

Six of us were bugged that there was so much going on in Internet and Web technology innovation right here in Minnesota, that when I suggested we start our own blog to showcase that innovation, there were nods of agreement and a willingness to dive in and make it real.

The biggest reason we were all interested in this blog is that these showcases and interviews are what we wanted to read and there wasn’t anything like it out there.

The result is Minnov8: Minnesota Innovation in Internet & Web Technology. This past weekend was the biggest Barcamp yet, Minnebar, and over 400 people showed up to present, learn and participate. Rather than recreate everything on this blog, why not take a peek at Minnov8? This and this post are ones that will recap what took place.

Wherever you live and whatever space you care about (e.g., technology, education, greentech, etc.) and where there are a critical mass of people willing to leap in and work together as multiple authors, I’d encourage you to start one of these…it’s pretty simple to do and fun to boot.