Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [111]
Today, the rough economic times have led to a shakeout in green industry. The winners are being separated from the losers. In some cases, this is because the technologies aren’t working or aren’t scaling up. But the losses are not always engineering issues. Business problems, exacerbated by the financial crisis, are foreclosing technological possibilities before they have a chance to play out. A bad economy combined with a glut of companies devastated the green-tech industry in the mid-80s. As we’ll see in later chapters, whole types of engineering knowledge and data were lost. Recent green-tech supporters have had to reinvent a lot of wheels.
Given the likelihood that the vast majority of today’s green-tech companies will fail, even if some wildly succeed, that data sharing remains rare is troubling. What will happen to the data from failed wind and solar companies? Unlike the Smith-Putnam turbine, they might take the key to the next breakthrough to their corporate graves. Gregory Nemet, innovation researcher at the University of Wisconsin, argues that we need a “countercyclical” program in the United States to capture knowledge during busts to save for the booms.27 Furthermore, DOE funding could come with some information-preservation strings attached.
Putnam, for his part, returned to wind energy at the end of his life. He moved to Atascadero, California, a few hours south of San Francisco, and attended DOE conferences on wind power, where he spoke to the newcomers in the field. With the wind industry’s success, Putnam’s initial hopes for his own turbine, inscribed in the headline of an article in Power magazine—“Wind-Turbine Power Plant Will Be Rebuilt”—came true: Tens of thousands of large wind turbines have been built since his pioneering work, even though nearly all of them followed a slightly different design.
His own turbine was never rebuilt, nor any more on its exact model. Within six months of the catastrophic blade failure, the S. Morgan Smith Company shut down its wind program. They had run out of money for investigating wind turbines with no guarantee of a return. They pulled the plug instead of plunking down the $300,000 that Putnam needed to build a new prototype.
The blade was carted off, the turbine torn down. A cell phone tower now adorns Grandpa’s Knob.
But the foundation of the great wind machine remains.
chapter 23
What Green Tech Can Learn from Nuclear Power’s Rise and Fall
ON JUNE 10, 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson rode through the streets of Worcester, Massachusetts, cheered by 175,000 well-wishers as he was on his way to give a commencement speech at Holy Cross. Looking out over the football stadium’s cheering masses, dressed in the traditional scholar’s robe, the Texan lawyer delivered a paean to science and technology’s power to transform the lot of the world’s poor for the better.1
Spattered with bits of Christianity, he identified three “ominous obstacles to man’s effort to build a great world society—a place where every man can find a life free from hunger and disease—a life offering the chance to seek spiritual fulfillment unhampered by the degradation of bodily misery.”2
While paying lip service to disease, he concentrated on two other problems for which he had the same solution: poverty and “diminishing natural resources.” The way forward against both these menaces was nuclear power. Johnson stated,
There is no simple solution to these problems. In the past there would have been no solution at all. Today, the constantly unfolding conquests of science give man the power over his world and nature which brings the prospect of success within the purview of hope. To commemorate the United Nations 20th birthday, 1965 has been designated International Cooperation Year. I propose to dedicate this year to finding new techniques for making man’s knowledge serve man’s welfare. Let this be the year of science. Let it be a turning point in the struggle—not of man against man, but of man against