Showing posts with label Massachusetts Enertech Cluster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Massachusetts Enertech Cluster. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Robert Metcalfe on MIT Video

As I've mentioned in this blog before, Robert Metcalfe is someone that I find to be great interest to this energy problem. The introduction of Metcalfe in the Video provides a good summary of his background, and I would note that even despite his accomplishments his attitude remains fresh, and challenging to the status quo. The energy industry needs to be shaken and Metcalfe does a bit of shaking in this video.

Another aspect that Metcalfe was involved in was in participating in the MIT's founding of the Massachusetts Enertech Cluster. I held out high hopes that this was the necessary direction of the academic community, only to find soon after its forming it was hi-jacked by the climate and alternative fuels red herrings. I expressed my disappointment of this in this blog post here. Metcalfe is single handedly criticizing the Massachusetts Enertech Cluster in this one hour talk and returning the hope that I expressed of the MEC. Early on in the presentation @ approximately 9 minutes he states a few interesting points:

"Here are these trillion dollar markets (energy) that are poorly served."
"The people who have been doing energy investing for 50 years are annoyed with people like me, Internet people, invading the energy space." Stating, "look you guys have had your chance, and haven't solved it, move aside, here come the Internet people." (Here, here)

"In energy there are some particularly nasty people out there that are not going to welcome your technological developments."
Stating the goal should be that we pursue "clean" and "cheap" energy, Metcalfe summarily attacks the founding premises and objectives of the Massachusetts Enertech Cluster (MEC). Stating that;
  • Climate change is a "motivational bubble" that may be solved quickly.
  • Conservation should not be an objective of this project (MEC), we need abundant energy not conservation. Our economies need to grow, not be stifled by energy conservation.
  • No Nukes (MEC), which meets the clean and cheap energy objective. Technology can and will mitigate the effects of nuclear energy production.
  • Corn ethanol is a fraud.
  • The government needs to adopt a Manhattan styled project for energy. The government will have no solutions outside of taxes.
  • Only scale projects are needed, which of course is very foolhardy. Innovation will come from everywhere.
  • And lastly there are no silver bullets. Metcalfe suggests we spend more time finding the silver bullets instead of opposing their development.
Which leads me to this project. How is it that the energy industry can ignore the People, Ideas & Objects application as a solution?

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Saturday, December 30, 2006

One year summary.

It was December 29 last year that I started writing this blog. It was at the prompting from a friend that I write about the things that I was researching. Write about the things I was passionate about, to write about innovation in the oil and gas industry. I thank him for pointing out this opportunity to me. I started this blog with several specific objectives in mind;

  1. Discuss the methods of (re)-organization of oil and gas firms, and specifically, replace the hierarchy or bureaucracy with the industry standard Joint Operating Committee (JOC).
  2. Debate and discuss the attributes and elements of innovation within the oil and gas industry.
  3. Explore the impact of today's information technologies, and their role in making energy firms more innovative and accountable.
  4. Discover what is possible and how things could be better.
I am pleased to report that these objectives are being, and will continue to be, met. I am also pleased to report that I have no shortage of material to write about. The basis of this website is my Master's Thesis that proved the joint operating committee is the optimal organization for innovative oil and gas producers. The scale of this revised organizational structure is not small. The re-organization, re-configuration, and re-everything of every element of activity, process, data and approach in oil and gas is affected. I've certainly landed in the middle of a fire storm of controversy, conflict and best of all, value for all concerned.

Reviewing the material that I posted this past year, I noticed a theme that I thought was rather valuable for the industry. That these concepts and material, particularly the new organizations supported by the new information technologies, was being accepted in the larger academic arena. Explicit support was being built for these concepts. I was able to spin these concepts out of this weblog and publish the "Final Research Report." This support alone has significant tangible value for the energy industry. Value in that it documents the many calls to action that are being stated throughout the world for both the energy industry and business community in general.

There is something else I want to point out. That is the value that this weblog represents. I think the oil and gas worker has a central location for discussion and presentation of material that is consistent with the innovative employee / worker, and the technologies impact. These are the main focus of the recent revisions that I've done to the website. I am therefore making this an unexpected, and much valued objective of my writings.

Another area that I am particularly enthusiastic about is the Massachusetts EnerTech Cluster that was recently announced by Dr. Robert Metcalfe. This is based on the desperate need for something of this nature, and is building on the works done by the recent efforts of MIT's. This is necessary, and I would assert should have been done many years ago. I also foresee similar, however more limited, clusters of Energy Information Technologies in both Silicon Valley and Houston. These three locations will be the brain trust of how the energy needs of the future are met.

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Friday, December 22, 2006

MIT President Emeritus on MIT Video

Dr. Charles M. Vest provides an interesting discussion regarding the teaching and developmental challenges that the engineering disciplines will go through in the next 14 years.

At around the 35 minute point, Dr. Vest states their is a parallel to the current issues the energy industry faces, with the issues the auto industry faced in the 1970's. An interesting and accurate analogy.

During the Q and A Dr. Vest makes the point that at a diner with Secretary Rice, regarding the changes at the State Department, Newt Gingrich made it very clear, we have something that was built for a different era, that science and technology in industry have to re-organize to meet the challenges of today.

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Monday, December 18, 2006

Metcalfe's declaration of the Massachusetts Enertech Cluster

Dr. Robert Metcalfe is a major force in the technology world. He is the inventor of Ethernet which is the basic underlying infrastructure of the Internet. Based on Ethernet, Metcalfe founded 3Com which was an integral part of the building of the Internet. A man of great ideas, and a man who has the ability to make those ideas operate in the real world.

Dr. Metcalfe has been affiliated with MIT through out the years, and works with Polaris Partnerships, a venture capital firm he owns, and has recently guest blogged on VCMike's Blog, a silicon valley early stage venture capitalist. Click on the title of this entry to review Metcalfe's ideas.

Metcalfe's ideas are that the greater Boston area holds 10 first class research universities and over 100 universities in total. This is the place that he proposes to house the "Massachusetts Enertech Cluster"(MEC). He proposes the MEC to be modeled on the Silicon Valley Cluster, the area of MEC's focus will be on innovation in oil and gas, and I can not agree with him more.

Metcalfe's interest from a venture capital perspective are listed in this blog entry and include: Ember, Scicortex, and Greenfuel.

"Ember is a networking company that delivers tiny radio semiconductors and protocol software. Ember’s aim is to network all the world’s embedded micro-controllers, of which, according to IDC (another Massachusetts company) there will be 10 billion new ones shipped next year. Ember’s go-to-market focus is home and building control. And what do you think the principal benefits of home and building control are? By wirelessly controlling lights, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, many of Ember’s early customers are conserving energy. By wirelessly reading meters, many of Ember’s early customers better measure the energy they are saving"
"SiCortex is a computer systems company, so why is it an example of Massachusetts enertech? First, SiCortex has just launched open-source software Linux superclusters that improve by factors of 10 delivered computational performance per dollar, per foot, and, yes, per watt. Because they each consume two factors of 10 fewer watts than the PC microprocessors on our desks, SiCortex fits six 64-bit microprocessors on a chip and therefore 5,832 in a single cabinet, cooled by air, saving energy on running the computers and even more on cooling them. That’s enertech. And second, SiCortex is enertech because its superclusters are designed for high-performance computing applications, prominent among which are seismic data analysis for oil exploration, climate modeling, fluid dynamics, reactor simulations, quantum chromo dynamics — enertech. No wonder the lead in SiCortex’s recent $21M venture financing was Chevron."
"GreenFuel is now working with huge electric power plants in the Arizona desert to scale up its enertech. GreenFuel pipes CO2-laden flue gases through algae slurries circulating in solar bioreactors. GreenFuel algae use photosynthesis in enertech greenhouses to remove greenhouse gases (CO2 and NOx) from the flue gases before release into the atmosphere. And then, get this, the rapidly thickening algal slurry is harvested several times per day to produce lipids, starches, and proteins for extraction into substantial quantities of, respectively, biodiesel, ethanol, and feed. GreenFuel algae-solar bioreactors do require acreage, water, and electricity, but junk land, dirty water, and single-digit percentages of parasitic power. GreenFuel treats CO2 as a valuable plant food and, rather than try to sequester it expensively, GreenFuel recycles CO2, cleaning the atmosphere while producing cheap and clean energy"
Out of these I would particularly like to point out the business of Ember. Building the network for all the worlds embedded network microcontrollers. Metcalfe defines the market as being 10 billion devices that will be shipped in 2007. IPv6 will provide the unique addressing of each of these devices, wirelessly. This is exactly the reason why IPv6 and WiMax reside in my Technical Vision.

This is evidence to me we are entering a world where things are changing quickly. Companies that continue to hold on to old ways of business risk everything. Now is the time for change.

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