The intersection of information and energy technologies
April 30, 2012 | Source: Technology Review
Using computation to drive down solar energy costs (credit: eSolar)
Idealab‘s Bill Gross thinks computational power will solve the world’s energy problems in this century.
Everything is getting more expensive because billions of people are trying creatively to repackage and consume limited, expensive materials, he says. But there is one resource whose price has consistently has gone down: computation — atoms are going up in price while bits are going down.
“The power, cost, and energy use involved in one unit of computation is declining at a more consistent, dependable rate than we have seen with any other commodity in human history. That declining cost curve must be tapped to lower energy prices—and I believe it will be.”
Examples:
- Computational fluid dynamics now allow a designer to accurately design a new shape of car, put it in a computer wind tunnel instead of a physical one, and test 1,000,000 body designs to improve fuel mileage by significant amounts. This was never before possible for those constructing vehicles.
- In solar energy, large fields of mirrors or photovoltaic panels can be optimized to be lighter, more reliable, and more power-efficient by putting a $2 microprocessor in every panel. At eSolar, one of our companies, we designed and built a utility-scale solar-thermal power plant with a huge amount of computation embedded into the field of mirrors. We reduced the size of the components, cut the installation expense, and drove the cost of the system down to nearly half what had been achieved before.
Comments (4)
by Dan Robinson
The real question is, can any or all developing technology advance fast enough to continually supply the needs of an ever growing world population? Will we reach a point when enough people realize that humans evolve faster by cultural and technological evolution, memes, than by genes, that we don’t need to make more people in order to be immortalized?
by Ultarthalas
Sandbox games for a simple answer. They seem to be the best way to weed out nearly every type of computer professional. I once worked on an online game game that was run by a smaller company, that company of course managed the servers and hosting and acted as a rarely seen ruling body to keep the players satisfied but did little-to-no development.
They had it set up in a way that players would actually pay to manage their own server (if it becomes good enough they no longer have to pay to keep it up,) then the managers would organize other players to be their own programmers, graphic designers, animators, particle effects engineers, level designers, story writers, policing team, Q&A team, events coordination team, etc. The servers each then evolved from the same base in vastly different directions because of the limitless ability to modify the game, some went 3D, some stayed 2D, some went shooter, some went turn-based RPG.
The reason something like that is so useful, it helps tune kids on things they like at a very early age, I started programming for it at 8, animating and doing sound effects at 12, dabbled in level design throughout, was part of the policing team for a short period, went to head the Q&A team on a server, redesigned our server’s job assignments and later on founded the first special effects department focusing on particles (can be some real nasty math in there) and sound effects while at the same time still doing all of the previous together. I worked with a friend on there and we came up with an interactive hypercube on a 2D game out of boredom.
It is things like these that really teach you what you can do and surround you with people who can really help you learn how. As someone who just finished college life, I can say that the educational system is doing a terrible job at keeping up with technology, let alone caring about it at all. Specialization should occur at much earlier points in life than college (not at a full this is what you will be doing stage, but a degree of choice of courses of course.) It is inexcusable to put students who are likely to have a huge career in a computer field with a computer teacher that orders a new computer because the mouse is unplugged.
by Jonathan Cole
Thanks. I will use this with my nephew.
by Jonathan Cole
How can we determine if a young child has aptitude and interest in coding? It is not a path for most people and we are clearly going to need an vast number of excellent programmers to make all this tech work without disaster.