March 29, 2024

GRIDLINES
Innovation - Not Longer Cords!

by Michael A. Marullo, Editor in Chief

When the telephone industry needed to address the rising sense of fashion in post-WWII America in the late 1950s, their initial response was epitomized by Ma Bell’s introduction of the Princess and Slimline telephones – available in alluring pink and other pastels for the very first time as an alternative to basic black. Some years later, however, growing consumer demand for greater mobility was becoming increasingly problematic for an industry struggling to move telephones from their practical-and-reliable but clunky-and-boring image to something more hip and appealing. Their answer to that challenge was more colors, more shapes and sizes – and longer cords.

So after decades of being tethered to a 6-foot radius of the handset, now you could actually walk into another room without having to hang up and call from another phone or switch to a different extension. Aha, freedom at last, right? Well, not exactly, but at the time it was a refreshing change and one that was widely embraced as a huge technological breakthrough by consumers that had grown accustomed to an ugly, black and relatively stationary instrument.

Fast forward about 30 years or so, and we found ourselves still fairly limited in our ability to communicate, despite a surging need for better, faster and more efficient methods and media across a rapidly increasing calling circle. People moved around more, businesses globalized and communications moved from convenience to necessity, all in a few short decades. But this time the response was something that almost no one could have imagined 40 years earlier: Cellular Telephones. And as good as longer cords were in their day, cell phones created a whole new genre for communicating. Whereas fax machines were cool, cell phones went far beyond just being cool... to being crucial.

The point here is that we can’t solve the energy crisis – or even most of the surrounding issues – by thinking in traditional terms and putting a new color or a different flavor of frosting on the cake. Indeed, most of what we read and hear today about “solutions” like clean coal, hybrid cars, renewables and so forth is stuck on old ideas masquerading as new ones. They seem to all be asking, “Is it my turn yet?” Is it time for solar to be economical? Is it time for fuel cells to be scalable? Is it time for electric cars to be viable? Is it time for wind to be taken seriously? Is it time for nuclear to be acceptable?

Can you name one of the above (or scores of other) technologies that you haven’t heard something about for at least 25 years or more? I really doubt it. They’re all old news in a shiny new package, but inside there’s really very little, if anything, that’s truly new. And in my opinion, NEW is what we need. New thin­king, new ideas, new innovations and new solutions – not just retreads of arcane ideo­logies, many of which have already run their course yet somehow simply refuse to die.

For example, ethanol comes to mind. It has been rather thoroughly proven that despite having a marginally viable role as a fuel supplement, there simply isn’t enough real estate anywhere – except perhaps in Brazil – for ethanol to serve as a replacement for our still growing dependence on fossil fuels. And when all of the costs (i.e., including production, environmental impact, etc.) are taken into account, in most cases ethanol isn’t a financially sound proposition either.

I don’t mean to beat up on ethanol here, however; that misses the point. The point is that we need to stop thinking small and traditional and start thinking big and creative. If the problem is transmission congestion – which is certainly a big one – then let’s stop thinking about how to build bigger, better more reliable transmission lines (which, by the way, you might have heard no one wants in their backyard, in their neighborhood, in their cities or in their wilderness areas!), and let’s start thinking about how we eliminate the NEED for transmission lines altogether. Sound far-fetched? Well, not really...

There are now several companies with products at various stages of development that do not rely on transmission lines at all. Sometimes called “nuclear batteries,” these devices are the ultimate distributed energy resource with the capacity to power hundreds – or even thousands – of homes and businesses with a generation module the size of a hot tub. Some are scalable and can be made even smaller, using a modular building block form factor to scale up or down to meet load requirements. Companies like Hyperion Power Generation, NuScale Power Generation and Bloom Energy (the latter being creator of the “Bloom Box”) are just a few examples of really thinking outside the box – way outside the box! Using various forms of high-powered sealed battery units, some of which operate on a new kind of nuclear fuel called uranium hydride, these companies have developed power cells that actually do their thing inside the box.

Let’s call it an iReactor (Gee, I hope Apple hasn’t trademarked that yet!), a small (personal?) nuclear reactor that you can bury in your backyard. Or, in the case of the Bloom Box, plunk it down in your front yard and plant a few bushes around it! And guess what? You don’t need a complicated, expensive transmission system to wheel bulk power around. You just put more or bigger units at the existing distribution substations or at the individual customer premise and voilá – no transmission lines required!

I’m not suggesting that nuclear batteries are the panacea to the energy crisis, but they do represent a new way of looking at things that is radically different from traditional thinking. And I really feel like that’s not only what we need but it’s the kind of thinking that will eventually get us out of the mess we’re in. As the old saying goes, “Desperate times call for desperate measures.” But while I wouldn’t classify nuclear batteries as desperate, I do believe that solving the energy crisis will require something very different – and making longer cords won’t cut it. – Ed.