Innovation Pipeline

Ask any tech investor about speed and scale and you’ll no doubt be greeted with a head nodding affirmation about its fundamental importance. Speed and scale are especially critical to the flywheel of disruptive energy innovations. But in order to get that flywheel to kick out game-changing technologies, it’s going to require a strong infusion of R&D investment. And right now the U.S. is failing that mission.

The paltry U.S. investment in R&D is barely moving the needle. John Doerr, the well-known Silicon Valley VC partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, made this point in an impassioned speech last week at the Berkeley Energy & Resources Collaborative Symposium, a student-led organization at UC Berkeley whose mission is to connect and educate the Cal energy and resources community.

UCB professor Richard Halstead, president and chairman of Empire Magnetics, echoed Doerr. “We will need to build the equivalent of 1,000 megwatts per day of energy-generation capacity for the next 10 years to keep pace with the growing demand for electricity,” he said.

The investment in R&D from the federal government is less than one day of revenues for Exxon, added Doerr. The budget for renewables is only $1 billion.

So it’s going to take a lot of rallying cries to get the White House to invest in the next-generation technologies that will help drive the economy and reduce the carbon load on the planet. As Doerr said, the economic opportunity and importance of curbing climate change is the largest opportunity in the 21st century.

For starters, there’s the electrical grid. It’s not designed as a distributed system. And it’s an aged infrastructure that needs to get smarter and more versatile. Then there are the energy costs associated with pumping water. Experts estimate 20 percent of electricity consumed is used for pumping water and 30 percent of natural gas is likewise used to pump water. And the cost of desalination is dominated by energy – some 50 percent to 80 percent is from energy.

In the world of startups, one hears a lot about speed and scale. Let’s hope there’s enough speed and scale in the attitudes of policymakers and innovators to drive the next generation of much-needed energy technologies to supply our needs. –Lee Bruno