The future of personal energy use | Scott Sklar | TEDxHerndon

so I'm here to talk about energy but I called it convergence and I want to start by saying it's a blend of ideas and technology so first the extraction conversion and use of energy is the single largest cause of air and water pollution in the world as well as emissions that affect our global climate the amount of water used in the United States for energy the entire cycle electricity and fuels is equal or more than we use to grow our food and together both use most of our water it affects our national security you know that and of course our single largest component of our trade debt so what energy is very important but in fact what is happening right now is technology innovation is converging to change the way we will use energy that will not require hardly any water and will become personal as transportation and communications has come and I wanted to talk to you about that so we look at an electric grid and we think of Central Station power plants on the left and that's where we spend trillions of dollars to build plants using coal natural gas nuclear a tiny bit of oil now and they run on transmission lines and then to distribute to substations and then to distribution lines and then to buildings and infrastructure and manufacturing plants and that's starting in the 1850s that's sort of what evolved and it made not a sense and that's pretty much what we did with telecom telephones we had one telephone company when I was a child when I had hair on my head and we had a Central Station and then it went to substations and then it went into buildings wires so what happened is 32 years ago or 33 years ago that it was a picture of my first fall people thought I was crazy it was the size of a wine bottle it had horrible communication because there are very few cell towers and there was only in five cities the United States of America the head of our only telephone company said cellular was a wimp who would spend 15 times more for a unit of communication in a country with 99.9% quality service well guess what I think everybody would correct so here's this telephone and then guess what happened it's we moved it from a phone to the first smart phone 23 years ago that's what it looked like pretty chunky monochrome not very fun but to think of this convergence the folks talking about portable communication and now some portable you know portable thinking it's portable data and then look what we have here this is the first built-in camera 15 years ago so now we see the cell phone for communication with thinking and now has a camera now independently was going on some more thinking and miniaturization when I grew up I had long-playing records then I went to 8-track tapes then I went to cassette tapes then I went to CDs then I went to DVD and now I'm doing mp3 players my smartphone now has that mp3 player in it as well so now I have communications data of some sort I have pictures and I have music not done yet now we have the phone with the first GPS in 2001 so now I can go and go to MapQuest and on my phone now it's merged in not in a separate entity and have what I want and so finally we are to the modern context of smart phones of iPhones so the goal here is that what we've seen in communications is a convergence of ideas and technology and frankly we could have eight of those five of those things or eight of those things depending on how many things you have how much convergence in eight different devices of course now we think that would be silly why would we do that so the the great thing comes over time I'm using McKinsey here because it's a great pretty colorful chart said you know we have some trends that are happening they're gonna transform our society and you know I want you to take a look at these trends and see how wonderful I mean there's renewable energy there's advanced materials the reason we can put wind turbines in the water and now we're having tidal and wave technology in the water is because of the material science revolution okay water is a very unforgiving medium it has salt and acid and animals that stick to it pit it it's tough it's 700 times more dense than air so we are in a material revolution energy storage you call them batteries but this whole idea there are I work right in my field I work with 38 different kinds of batteries totally different chemistry's materials and so and in fact I brought one to show you this is one kind of battery this happens to be a lithium ion battery that we're putting in walls of buildings now to store the solar energy okay not the big batteries you're thinking of this is more powerful than a big square battery by the way so it can fit between the studs of a building so there's a material science revolution going on the mobile internet Internet of Things cloud technology all of that is the way we communicate think and visualize with technology though all of this is integrating into energy as we speak so there's my office building in Arlington Virginia it has solar roofing shingles it has the most insulating glass in the world it has a wind turbine it has a fuel cell in the back all commercial by the way it has a smart battery bank which we'll talk about it has LED lights that building is a convergence of technology it takes no electricity from the grid it doesn't need to and by the way I have more gadgets I bet than you have in your home in that building I'm a big gadget person but the fact is the reason I can do that is this material convergence this energy convergence it's building materials insulation smart windows to keep the hot air in during the winter and the cool air in the summer and allows me to use a very met a little bit of electricity to heat or cool the building between my home and that office building is an awning and that material the lights you see are powered by this this is thin-film photovoltaic but no way you've never seen it it's commercial it is light produce sensitive ink this comes off of Fuji industrial inkjet printers and the ink produces the electricity the ink so I have that in between two panes of plastic and we're using them for awnings around the United States to covered walkways and bus stops to produce power for lighting well this ink can be on this not now but soon will be on the sides of the south side of buildings and of course on the rooftop of buildings and by the way I can print it in any color and any pattern so we can really get artistic with our electric production by the way no water no moving parts all right so material science there's a change of what's going on so convergence let's talk again this College had lighting that that would glare out the library the the Morning Sun would come up they built it on a hill and they didn't want to put blinds and so what they ultimately used was electrochromic glass with 12 volts of current and a little rheostat I can turn this glass to crystal-clear or actually pure black this is just a shade down and so I have a glass running on 12 volts of electricity so solar panels and batteries easy to keep glare out actually keep heat out give you some privacy there on buildings now all over the world material science saves energy plus other things that is the battery bank in my office building there are 30 companies now making Stan knives modular web-enabled battery banks so this interfaces with my phone system I can go on the internet every day and see how much solar and wind I've gotten how full the batteries are how much has gone to the building how much money I've saved how much pollution I've saved 2 a.m. in the morning it dials out and does a diagnostic protocol and two years ago I got a call from the company battery number for twice as hot as the other batteries have to charge let's change it out before there's a problem how neat is that a smart thinking battery I never thought of it wonderful convergence by the way just this is a convergence of material science of information technology of Internet and cloud technology in a unit which is a convergence into the energy side okay now we have all these monitoring systems we have solar battery monitoring but all these technologies I could go on the internet now with an app and see what's going on in pretty colored pictures I don't need to be an engineer I can see how everything if it's all green guess what it all works if it's yellow some of those components are working outside of the operational parameters which mean over time I should expect problems with them and if they're red I better call that service contractor real quick and get it repaired and all that is web enabled with smart sensors thin film technologies and again it is all internet driven now remember internet driven isn't and does necessarily mean a cybersecurity problem internet driven here is just meaning I can see what's going on so it's not like Osama bin Laden's cousin can come in and shut me down it just means that I have a window on how its operating that I can understand I do projects all over the world I need to have it so that a person in any language in any culture with any level of education can look at what's going on and intuitively understand what this means to the world to their world and we are beginning now to integrate these smart buildings and these smart technologies with security systems wireless cams but also most of your traditional security systems what are they sensors batteries wires what's all this on-site clean energy systems sensors batteries wires on-site generator so in the end they all interface with each other and so the buildings of this decade and next decade are integrating energy telecom security more convergence and most of the projects I do keep telephone and Internet Wi-Fi systems going on because we need more than phones we need to have intercept internet and data and then of course the big companies in the internet field are saying we want to be in the building and home of the user we want to be in energy and you're seeing in the market as with this nest thermostat that you can on your smartphone sense put your temperature up put your temperature down they now have Wi-Fi enabled fire alarms and carbon monoxide alarms and natural gas alarms so you can get a little text message that you have smoke in your basement or you have water in your basement or you have a natural gas leak in your basement and it's all in the market happening now and then we have these batteries and electric vehicles you already know hybrid vehicles and now we're getting into electric vehicles we're starting even to get into electric bicycles China has 6 million electric bicycles we have about a hundred thousand here in the United States but that it's going to be tenfold in a handful of years so the whole idea of how we impact transportation communications security our own energy are all converging together just like that cellphone I talked to you about but we are not done because we are also in a renaissance on how we use data when you have supercomputers now that can be tied together and we can analyze things in intuitive ways that again heretofore have been impossible I can go in on any building in the world and with a host of companies look at the top of that building okay and that you know with you know Google Maps or equivalent and I can overlay on top of that building where the best places on that roof is to put the solar energy and I can plot it over seasons and time of day I can look what else is on the roof happens to be a lot of stuff on the roof we have communication systems security systems skylights a lot of stuff on roofs so now I can get 20% more energy out of a system by having the capability to plot data on that roof and we can do that now all over the world with solar wind hydro this company that has 40 PhD hydrologist oceanographers meter the supercomputers can show anywhere on earth latitude and longitude where the wind is and how high the wind turbine has to be to maximize that wind I have very funny stories on that in Africa telling the locals we're gonna put a wind turbine up and they're looking at me saying there's no wind and I go well you know 120 feet up there there's a ton of wind and they look at you like you are crazy I am happy I am crazy but I'm happy to tell you that those wind turbines blow like crazy as well so what is happening I still have people's charts I love that lovingly I mean they allow me to but because this is a colorful one but the the point of the chart is interoperability when you think of that smartphone we started with the modern one with all those things data the telephone itself the mp3 player the camera the GPS it works pretty seamlessly yeah we have glitches but pretty much it's pretty seamless what we're trying to do in the buildings and in our in our grids is we are on a move right now to do the exact thing same thing it's called the smart grid but it's really what we've been doing all along it's bringing a range of technologies that relate to each other that are converging around different sites and systems and make them seamless make them more than the sum of their parts so the grids of the future will have a lot more that's local you will have in your community and in your buildings solar and wind combined heat power waste heat small hydro free flow hydro little turbines in the tidal and wave if you're on the shore your waste will be anaerobically digested use for heating and in your stove same kind of methane gas you will have battery storage of all types and other kinds of storage like flywheels and you will have a whole range of these technologies all sizes between the big generation along the transmission lines at the substation along the distribution lines and in your building your home your school your business it's already happening it's very very exciting when I started in this field all these technologies probably about 200 million in sales worldwide in the early 1980s now it's half a trillion dollars so it's amazing so we're on this little nest we're on this little planet I got to be good friends with Senator John Glenn I worked in the Senate for nine years in 70s and I asked him coming from a coal State Ohio why he was so supportive of all these new technologies and he said you know when I was an astronaut he says I would peer out in space and he was our first astronaut and he said you know you would see darkness and I said I believe there's life on other planets but they don't look anything like us that could be good but anyway I digress so he says and then I would look at earth and I realized for the first time my life that that is our nest that is it and we better do something to protect that nest that this is really it so I leave this thought with you that we are on the verge of a whole range of new technology convergence we have to make sure the rules allow it to happen because the old folk who have the old ways the dial phones you know don't didn't want cellular to happen and I can surely say that those in the traditional energy delivery field are not anxious for this to happen there's actually no stopping it no technology stagnates technology evolves along with human beings even that first fork looks extremely different of what it had today so I have I want to leave you with a couple of things I'm talking about convergence so window glass for commercial buildings the solar is in the glass produces electricity solar electric panels that also heat water at the same time convergence of two technologies so rather a lot than I have on my house or ever solar water heater and then solar electric panels here's a company that puts them all together convergence use of solar for roofing shingles why I have a shingle when your shingle can produce electricity at the same time and that's what I have on my office building but more importantly I feel like Soupy Sales today we have 7.2 billion people on this planet when I was young again with hair there were less than 3 billion so in one lifetime in one lifetime we've gotten four billion more people 1.6 billion of them have no electricity 1.7 billion of them have electricity less than 10 hours a day and usually when they don't need it all right they live off of dung and kerosene all right which is by the way when you're burning it and you're a little hot let me tell you is not great for you so here's one technology one company that is dressing this problem convergence of technology they had developed a first of all a plastic light it's like a beach ball it's actually sophisticated technology it is plastic we all know plastic we're a long time but can be really durable and against ultraviolet rays heat sand so it will last they have a solar cell OTO they have LED lights underneath they have thin film battery between the two one hour of charging 10 hours of light thousands and thousands being sold in Africa and South Asia in the US market they use it for que cela for camping but you can even have colored lights for your home the convergence of technology plat smart plastic laminates thin photovoltaic cells LED lighting chips thin film batteries affordable by the poorest people on the planet and let me tell you to see and work with people that for the first time have electric lighting it's it's astounding to be able to use that these technologies for the first time to have clean water is spiritual to see them be able to have refrigeration for the first time stunning to see them be able to set up micro businesses and actually create well it's as close as you can be to God so the point being it's not the technology technology is just an enabler but everything we do requires energy everything we do whatever we eat whatever we do including here today so I leave you with this thought we are in a sea change and it requires an understanding of our planet and understanding that the rules of the game need to change and nurture this innovation and that the future the future will be as exciting and dramatic as the internet and the cellular is brought to us today thank you for hearing me out you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 36,684

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Keywords: Energy, tedx talk, Security, Climate Change, ted x, TEDxTalks, ted, Electricity, Solar energy, Design, tedx, ted talk, United States, ted talks, Communication, tedx talks, English, Technology

Id: 5H6AOBWNmrY

Length: 27min 2sec (1622 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2015