Good question!

Technology Review, besides being a great magazine edited by Jason Pontin, who I have known since the heyday of Red Herring, also puts on some great conferences. So I was excited and honoured to be invited to EmTech Spain, a two day conference in Malaga focussing on emerging technologies.

Along with my World Economic Forum colleague Javier García Martínez of Rive Technology and the University of Alicante,  we were discussing what nanotechnology is, how to build a business out of it, and where it will take us.

Normally at these kind of conferences, discussing everything from the future of cities to social media, nanotech is one of the most futuristic and least understood technologies on the agenda – making me feel like a cuckoo in the nest when most peoples idea of emerging technology is something that they can have on their iPhone next week. However the “imagine a world where…” speech was given by Richard Kivel this time, discussing regenerative medicine, while Javier and I discussed existing and future applications of nanotechnologies.

So what use is nanotechnology? Simple, I think is makes a key contribution to addressing issues such as energy and health, allowing us to support today’s 7 billion and tomorrow’s 10 billion people in an increasingly sustainable manner. You can read my thoughts in the original Spanish, or as a rougher and less polished Q&A in English below.

While working on our report on Using Emerging Technologies to Address Global Risks, one of my favourite SciFi authors, Neal Stephenson, popped up with an essay on Innovation Starvation.

It echoes Tyler Cowen‘s arguments that all the easy big stuff has been done,  and that all we have left to look forward to are incremental improvements rather than world changing technologies.

Stephenson, being a science fiction writer, looks at space as an example where a culture of risk avoidance, cost cutting and politics combine to stifle innovation. As he points out, even China’s space program is merely copying what the USA and Soviet Union were doing 50 years ago rather than doing anything innovative.

It is undoubtedly a problem that plagues the world.  Whether it is large ambitious space programs, or providing a government stimulus for technology companies, the emphasis is always on avoiding failure, which involves avoiding anything innovative.  The million lost by a failed company always generates more headlines for governments than the hundred million successfully leveraged as we can see with the furore over Solyndra – although governments have a poor track record of picking winners.

So how can we kick start global innovation? As I argue in Using Emerging Technologies to Address Global Risks we need to focus on the big issues that we can all agree on. Water might be a good start.

Over the past five years I have come across numerous innovative approaches to water scarcity, from desalination plants that double as greenhouses to nanostructured membranes that dramatically cut the energy needed for desalination, but I cant remember a single one of them attracting significant investment. That wasn’t because the technology is poor, it is simply because of the costs involved in getting it to market put it outside the risk which any early stage investor would be comfortable with. Raising $50 million for social networking is relatively simple, but for water remediation it is a stretch too far. Development times in excess of 3 years and uncertainty about who will pay for the technology combine to make it almost unfundable.

For a small fraction of the current cost of dealing with drought – something that will only increase in the future – we could develop a suite of technologies to mitigate the shortage of potable water. But we won’t.

I’m not convinced by the innovation starvation argument, I think we have plenty of innovation but we lack the political will to deploy them.  The challenge isn’t so much stimulating innovation as effectively making the case for governments and international institutions to use it.

According to JP Morgan, flying to 21186 miles to Melbourne and back for a clean tech conference generated 5.63 tonnes of carbon dioxide, but unlike most conferences on this subject the hot air emissions were negligible.

The Sir Mark Oliphant Cleantech: Mainstream and at the Edge conference was refreshing for the positive outlook on cleantech rather than the self flagellation that usually goes along with this kind of event. While there were a few graphs showing frightening population statistics, with dire predictions of resource and energy use, they were mostly used to illustrate how a combination of human ingenuity and technology could be used to solve problems. None of the speakers even suggested smashing the corrupt capitalist system as happens so often at green events.

Megatrends

From my perspective, as hopefully a purveyor or at least enabler of technology based sustainability, the advantage of this kind of event is to see what the real drivers are, the market for the technology, and then try to find the science and engineering to solve the problem. This probably explains my rapt attention to talks like Stefan Hajkowicz’s excellent overview of Megatrends (the full report is available here), which looked at the “trends, patterns of economic, social or environmental activity that will change the way people live and the science and technology products they demand.”

I wasn’t too happy about the use of data from a rather flawed WEF risk report which identified nanotechnology as a risk on a par with an asset price collapse, a slowing Chinese economy, oil and gas price spikes, extreme climate change related weather, pandemic, biodiversity loss and terrorism. We seem to keep finding echoes of the grey goo fears of ten years ago in these kind of documents, something for the science communication experts to ponder.

Also fascinating was Ellen Sandell’s talk on her work with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, a mobilisation of 50,000 young people who just couldn’t wait for Copenhagen, Davos or Canberra to reach an agreement, or for the Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace to stop politicking and decided to get things moving themselves.

So given that we know what to expect, and we have no lack of youthful enthusiasm to push us along, there’s no real excuse not to act.  We should be demanding of our politicians that we develop new technologies not new taxes, and that we use our scientific knowledge of the natural world to make it a better place.

The news gets even better, as many of the speakers mentioned, in that you can make the world a better place and make money.

No worries!

The Sir Mark Olifant Cleantech conference has been a lot of fun so far, from Eric Isaac’s opening overview of the the issues (and solutions) to Stefan Hajkowicz’s analysis of megatrends that will shape our future technology development.

I’m still struck by how much cleantech seems to be focused in a few rather obvious areas, something which effectively prices a lot of technologies out of the market, and the excessive valuations thus generated tend to make it almost impossible to get a return for most investors. Sometimes meeting the problem head on isn’t the best strategy, and it is better to wait until a problem has been cracked and then capitalise on the myriad opportunities that spin out – as with mobile phones you don’t have to invent the device to make money from it.

My focus is more on how nanotechnology, by its nature is more akin to what nature does. As Eric Isaacs mentioned this morning, we are almost at the stage where we can create materials by design, or in his his words ‘we can almost taste it’ – something that opens up a whole new world of sustainable everything.

A preview of my presentation is available here – with the caveat that it works better if you hear me tell the story behind it!

I have always been sceptical about investing in solar companies on the basis that the market is artificially distorted by government subsidises which can work with you, or against you.

Germany’s Sunfilm which manufactures amorphous silicon modules (a-Si), has today filed for insolvency claiming its business plans have been crippled by Germany’s plans to sharply reduce its solar feed-in tariff by July 1st.

A golden rule is to treat government subsidises as a bonus rather than an income stream, then you can keep the doors open when they evaporate.

In my predictions over the last year I mentioned that Clean Tech would have a rocky time in 2009 for four reasons

1. Renewable energy interest tends to lag oil prices by 6-12 months and with oil almost back to 2006 levels a lot of transient interest will evaporate
2. Lot’s of clean tech companies based their business models on sustained high oil and commodity prices – so a recalculation will reveal that they don’t stand a cats chance in hell of being profitable
3. The stampede by Venture Capital into every clean tech deal going for the last two years has inflated valuations to levels that will never return any cash to investors – and that was before anyone took into account  recessions & pestilence
4. As a result, VCs would find themselves locked into very expensive deals and have trouble shaking down their limited partners for the funds necessary to keep in the hunt

Don’t say you weren’t warned. It must be getting serious when even VCs are getting contrite – according to the New York Times:

David J. Prend, managing general partner at RockPort Capital in Boston and Menlo Park, Calif., said that the promise of big returns prompted too much “me-too investing,” when venture capitalists put money into start-ups that do the same work as other companies.

“There was probably some stuff that shouldn’t have been funded,” he said. “It’s kind of good for some of that to get washed out.” For clean tech to be a viable industry, investment should not return to recent highs, he said.

Mr. Vassallo blamed the credit crunch for the decline in clean-tech investing. More than half of clean-tech investments have been in alternative energy like solar and biofuels, which typically require building big factories. These projects depend on capital like project finance loans as well as tax equity investments, whereby corporations back green energy projects and reap the tax credits. These have been “frozen or completely disintegrated,” he said.

This is weird & spooky. Didn’t the same folks say the same thing about dot com investing, about nanotech and now clean tech? Are these the people we see rooted to spot, continually banging their heads against a wall crying “I know there was an exit here somewhere!”

Mark G. Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, prefers to call the clean-tech investment cycle “an education curve.”
Still, he said, “if the industry has gotten one criticism year after year, it’s that we have a lemming mentality, and solar probably represents that in the clean-tech space.”

A number of people asked about the possibility of re-recording the podcast of the talk I gave at Green Futures at the weekend as the quality is a bit patchy. It’s something I have been meaning to do for some time, as I can talk several orders of magnitude faster than I can type. I should also point out that this was a talk given to an audience with no knowledge of (or prior interest in) nanotechnologies so the more sophisticated among you may already know most of this.

Here’s my first attempt, not word for word but using the same notes so it may be the same thing in a slightly different order, so now you can do something more useful while listening to my mellifluous tones with a bit of added hiss. If I do this again I promise to buy a proper microphone!

Yesterday’s meeting started me thinking about why, despite some NGO finding another potential climate related catastrophe almost every day, there is a feeling of frustration and a lack of progress. It looks to be the fault of the Green movement itself.

If we take a look at the history of the environmental movement, most if it sprang from the anti establishment movement of the early seventies, when people were fighting against corporate greed and government inaction. This was inexorably linked with left of centre politics, and into this rainbow coalition were drawn all of the other popular movements demanding an end to war, liberation for Palestine, legalisation of LSD and a whole variety of other causes. As a result, it is hard to get any rational discussion of environmental issues without running into some rather naive anti capitalist rhetoric, and this probabl;y goes some way to explaining the Green movements confrontational stance. In a nutshell, they are a bunch of old hippies, still fighting the battles of 1975 in 2009 because a) that is all they know how to do and b) there is a natural human instinct to try to preserve the status quo even if you started off fighting to overturn it.

If we look at the green leaders we see people such as Lord Jonathon Porrit and George Monbiot, sitting pontificating about how people should live their lives from a position of unimaginable privilege when viewed from most of the developing world. I have been in plenty of meetings with this strata of the green movement where people have had the arrogance to try to deny developing nations the very technology which would allow them to start improving standards of living. “We’d rather let them starve than risk using GMOs” seems to be the rather depressing view, which completely missed the point that while we in the west are rich enough to waffle on about downshifting, and slacking for the several billion other people living in grinding poverty would result in an early death.

Let’s face it, cycling to work or trading tomatoes for lettuces with your neighbour might make you feel better, but  isn’t going to save the world, so what is?

Well it has to start with economic growth. Population will continue to rise anyway, and contrasting the living standards in London and Lagos illustrates why money is important. So demanding that x% of GDP be spent on mitigating climate changes isn’t really going to work because that money is being raised through green taxes which just takes more money out of the economy and leaves less of a margin to do good works with. But stimulating economic growth doesn’t necessarily mean pollution, as I mentioned yesterday the environment in the UK is actually getting cleaner and greener while at the same time we have got considerably richer.

It seems that the established Green movement knows only how to use the stick – taxes and scare stories – and not the carrot to change peoples behaviour. Nudge by Richard Thaler would be a good place to start looking for ideas. In addition this obsession with technology being bad is really holding back progress. technology isn’t all bad, as you’ll find out if you ever need to go into hospital.

The other thing that we can do to make a real difference is to encourage the development of, and if safe, the deployment of the whole range of new and emerging technologies that can address climate change. Should we be bothered that an entrepreneur or a company that comes up with a way to make a major difference to carbon dioxide emissions gets rich on the back of it? Of course not, we should applaud it and hope that it it will encourage others to try. There are a huge range of technologies, from nanotechnologies in thin film solar cells, through to engineering carbon capturing microbes using synthetic biology to solar shaded and geoengineering that we need to develop.

Groups such as Friends of the Earth and ETC have fought tooth and claw, and in the dirtiest possible way to encourage the wholesale rejection of technologies. It’s these old hippies with their 1975 mindsets that need to be rejected, not technology. Let’s forget the politics and see some action. If their approach is not appropriate for the 21st century then wither replace them or start a movement that is.

IEEE Spectrum picked up on my observations about, erm,  observatoryNANO and thankfully someone involved with the project must have finally read the stuff as the page is now “under construction.”

Running a sample of the text through our shiny new online plagiarism checker reveals that the article about solar cells was filched from a four year old article in National Geographic. The extract quoted about flexible displays was cut and pasted from this blog although it is rather more recent coming from April 2008.

Joking aside, this is a worrying subject. Why is the European Commission paying people to swipe ancient bits of other people’s work, turn it into garbage and publish it as their own in the interest of providing “objective information?” I’ve racked my brains and I can’t think of any good reason unless the project has some unstated secondary aims of massaging unemployment figures or providing fulfilling work for the inhabitants of lunatic asylums. It’s quite bad enough us all having to bail out the banks, but I’m not sure why European taxpayers should be encouraging this sort of thing.

Perhaps someone should ask these people?

The new US administration seems to be moving quickly, allowing the use of embryonic stem cells and Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu addressed all the national labs yesterday. A couple of the heartening points reported at CosmicVariance are

• The DOE is the principal supporter of physical sciences in the US, and the physical sciences are the conernstone of prosperity for the US future.
• Restimulation (is that a word?) of the economy is #1 on the priority list. DOE will get considerable funds in the stimulus package, not just to get the economy going but to provide a long term path for the US.

The grand challenge that the DoE is setting in terms of sustainable energy is certainly laudable. Whether or not you believe in anthropogenic global warming or have any faith in the measures taken to date is irrelevant in the face of the absurdity of over reliance on a single form of energy.It certainly seems to have inspired and excited plenty of people…

I am truly awed by the vision presented by Chu here, and so hopeful that we can get our country back on a path to long term prosperity by supporting research in the physical sciences. At least half of our present economy relies on the knowledge gained in the 20th century about our physical world…one can only imagine the revolutions to come.

New president Obama’s speech was an oratorial tour de force, if somewhat grim in it’s outlook, but it was good to hear that he understands what many politicians don’t – that to get out of the current mess we find ourselves in, it all starts with great science (although this may take longer than from now to the next election).

Without the technological foundations upon which to base ideas all we have is, well,  dot.coms and whatever we just lost in the current crisis.

It’s been long known, although not in the clean tech community, that there are several major problems to be overcome before organic photovoltaics can get to market. One of the most pressing issues has been lifetime – it doesn’t matter how cheaply you can produce things if the major cost ends up being a tea crazed workman clambering up a ladder to rip out the dead solar calls and replace them with working ones every few years. 

The German government has just announced a new project aiming to address the lifetime issue.

The project, called “OPV stability” targets to significantly increase the lifespan of organic solar cells (OSC) with the goal of yielding competitive organic photovoltaics (OPV) for potential commercial use. 

Konarka felt it significant enough to pop out a press release that they are involved in the three year project, which is odd as they have been 18 months from market since 2002 or so. Perhaps they will now be 54 months away from market?

Anyone considering jumping onto the clean-tech bandwagon would do well to take a look at just how woefully inefficient current renewable energy sources are. The table below is adapted from information published in the Sunday Times this weekend. 

 Assuming that in the next thirty years you will move house, or that some part of the installation may require fixing,  then using current technology you will not see any economic benefit ever. It might make you feel good, until you calculate that all that extra carbon produced by the manufacture of the system, its transport and the various bits of plumbing required have resulted in a net increase in your carbon emissions and a hole in your wallet. 

Ah-ha, you may say, but can’t nanotechnology bring down the cost of solar panels and improve their efficiency and completely change the economics? Well the answer is yes, and no. 

While there have been a number of breakthroughs in roll to roll processing of flexible photovoltaics, actually making them commercially viable seems to be a herculean task. Companies such as Konarka have been trying to produce flexible “power plastic” since life first emerged from the oceans, and given the current rate of progress we’ll have the boffins at CERN harnessing dark matter and nano black holes long before we see anything with a lifetime measured in tens of years. 

The other idea often touted is to bring down the cost of the silicon or other material used for photovoltaics. Well that may have some effect, but when you consider that all the cheap Polish plumbers have gone back to Poland, and that fuel costs have risen by 60% over the last year, then the saving on the silicon has been more than outweighed by the hugely increased costs of having a bloke pop around with a ladder to install the system.

As an illustration, the cost of buying a 1kW wind turbine is around £700, which means the production cost must be in the region of £300. Assuming cost of materials to be around half that total, a 50% reduction in materials cost would result in a grand saving of £75 from a total of £3,000 – some 2.5%. 

So, the bottom line is the bottom line, and without generous subsidies current renewable technologies work out much more expensive than simply burning fossil fuels.  The last study I commissioned indicated that there was plenty of opportunities in nanotechnology applications for sustainability, but very few in power generation.