Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [136]
Ceder’s team isn’t necessarily blazing a new scientific path. Scientists have long been able to predict some properties about materials from the principles of quantum theory. By solving the equations of quantum mechanics, they can know how a material is likely to behave. “What’s new is that we have automated that,” Ceder said, “and automation allows you to scale.” Going back to his Internet experience, he said that it wasn’t the Web, per se, that brought us the wonder of the Web. Rather, it was the automation of information collection by Web crawlers that has made the universe of data accessible to human designs.27
The difference in materials science is that someone has to make the stuff once they’ve found it. Synthesizing a new material is difficult. No matter what, there is a lot of trial and error involved as we try different chemical treatments to find the right pathway to transform a set of parts into a new material. The worst part is that if we make something and it doesn’t work the way we thought it might, what happened is not always clear. “You don’t know if it doesn’t work because it’s not supposed to work or because you did something wrong,” Ceder said. But computation will help there, too. Ceder’s team knows what the material is supposed to do in an ideal world, so if it’s not behaving right, they can look at their synthesis for the problem.28
The Materials Genome Project focused first on new energy storage materials. Some of Ceder’s teams’ first results were a better lithium-ion battery that made its way to the pages of Nature.29 They launched a photovoltaics program in early 2010 and may devote some time to thermoelectric devices, too. “People should realize that we are on the cusp of this scaling revolution,” Ceder concluded. “Discovery is going to be done in a very different way.”
And it’s all thanks to the combination of huge amounts of computational power paired with the data mining knowledge to take advantage of it.
SENSING THE ENVIRONMENT
Consider the dam. A dam transforms a river into a water battery. An ephemeral energy flow becomes a liquid building ready to be channeled to turbines or fields to aid human energy production. Scholars have seen dams as symbols of the modernist project to “tame, control, and discipline nature by converting natural environments into manmade systems.30
The Bureau of Reclamation, which runs dams that were built in the twentieth century, stands as one of the most incredible land alteration projects the world has ever seen. The fifty-eight hydroelectric facilities generate fourteen gigawatts of power and irrigate the land on which 75 percent of the nation’s vegetables are grown. The most impressive, almost dumbfounding, statistic about the reclamation projects, however, is that they flooded almost sixty-five million acres of land to create reservoirs that allowed for the control of water flowing toward the oceans.31
The dams changed the entire geography of the West, affecting where cities could be and where animals could not, what farms made sense and what other activities did not. The Bureau of Reclamation dams are the most sublime examples of the deeper, Promethean truth about energy production in the twentieth century: Creative destruction has ruled. The more complex and astounding the human mechanism, the greater the destruction of natural environments has been necessary to build it.
In fact, it may be the wind and sun’s very imperviousness to human control and denaturing that has made them the little-used energy sources. They do not fit into the modern project. At best, they will be a half-tamed naturalized power source. But information technology may be able to flip that disadvantage into a powerful positive. Understanding how to use the wind (without controlling it) may both improve power production from renewable energy flows and also provide a new model for how we can live in our human reconstructed world without destroying it.
Human beings don’t have a good natural sense for the three-dimensionality and streakiness of air masses moving