Conservation is a sham; Smart Consumption isn't

Energy conservation is a sham, we were told at the Lux Executive Summit on Monday in Cambridge, Mass. The speaker was consulting company Lux Research president Matthew Nordan, an able and provocative presenter, who also charged that the financing model to back energy startups is broken (what in finance isn’t broken?).

“We’re chromosomally incapable of consuming less. [Consuming more] is essential to what it means to be human. The experience of more is written into our DNA. {I want] to get more than I had yesterday,” he said, adding the idea of “doing without” just doesn’t click. And what the hell? There’s 1.8 trillion barrels of heavy crude lying under Venezuela AND we only use 10% of the water that falls as rain from sky, according to Nordan.

“As long as we have water, we have infinite energy,” he claimed.

The view sounds like it could be written into the platform of the republican party, doesn’t it? But Nordan moderated it a bit by saying we must “consumer better’ and achieve a level of sustainable consumption. It was a clever way of urging consumers to energy more efficiently, an eons-worn concept engineers think about every day.

And don’t think that cars powered by lithium batteries are necessary sustainable. By Nordan’s calculations, 42% of the world’s lithium carbonate (it’s a salt) will be used up if just 6.4% of the world’s car are powered by lithium ion batteries.

Nordan’s notion of sustainable consumption is wholly based on development of new technologies. In fact, our energy future rests on coming up with new solutions. As an example, Nordan held up a screen coated with a nano-powder from nGimat that lets breezes through, but stops water. The idea is to cool your porch in the summer without letting in rain. Combined Heat and Power is another promising technology.

He also urged the energy companies who came to this conference to “out compete on customer experience” and “engineer system level efficiency.”

As for financing, he makes a good point. The angel, VC and private equity model that worked so successfully for software companies is completely inadequate.

“The  model breaks when you feed it materials, energy and environmental technologies because they need 2.5 time as much,” he said, noting that Google required $25 million in startup capital compared to Bloom Energy which will have to spend 10 times to see if its idea is feasible.

“You need big plants to find out if the idea is viable at scale,” he said. He proposes a 10-year financing cycles that includes incubators, corporate partners staggered exits which are partial deployments.