If You Know Where You Are Going You Must Know How To Get There

All manners of technologies are employed in creating inventions. For example building the cell phone employed activities and sciences unrelated to insulin. However their respective journeys to success had commonality.

One example…the invention of the printing press had nothing in common with the invention of margarine. However their respective routes to completion followed similar paths.

The evolution of the printing press was a very long, expensive and tortuous process. Technology, legal, financial and cultural barriers slowed the process to market acceptance. Margarine encountered similar difficulties.

Common to both was encountering similar road blocks. Margarine needed to overcome resistance by a well-organized dairy industry, claiming outrageous health risks, unemployment and disadvantaged dairies.

The printing press was seen as a disruption to religious groups using traditional methods of communication provided by paintings and employment for scribes who labored with ink and parchment. Wide availability of information was seen as a loss of control. The common resistance to both ventures was from existing providers threatened by new and more efficient methods.

Under different conditions a new product will be quickly embraced when providing a new solution to a long standing problem, Penicillin is a significant example of a product that was immediately embraced with no barriers.

Communication provides an interesting example of rapid acceptance of new methods with little resistance from existing products. In the first instance sound was sent over long distance by cable. Little if any objection was tabled by the pony express. Then it was telephones, followed by wireless as in the radio, then visual with television and now by WiFi both with cable and without. The telephone moved from hard contact to the ever present cell phone and was just too good to be true.

Some products will gain acceptance rapidly, only to be abandoned because of unintended consequences. Examples include tetraethyl lead, specific herbicides and thalidomide all of which proved to be very harmful and ultimately abandoned. Common to all three were extreme efforts to continue their production by the providers. Smoking is a relative only able to have the actively to be sustained. This demonstrates the power of the proponents.

We are well into the world of energy facing an era of changes well beyond today’s practices. One element that will continue to complicate an already complicated industry is resistance to change.

Barriers surface at every turn. Resistances are blossoming politically, economically, environmentally and competitively. An avalanche of energy related initiatives continue. The tried and true generating methods of hydro power, nuclear, fossil fuels, biomass and geothermal make their mark. New to the field are solar, wind, hydrogen small nuclear reactors and fuel cells. Fusion attracts great interest and major capital. Reduced energy to do the same work lowers consumption. Carbon capture and sequestering are dedicated to carbon removal.

Energy in the form of electricity to charge batteries is replacing fossil fuels. The capacity for energy self-sufficiency is upon us as hydrogen is everywhere. All that is needed are water and wind. Transmission of energy presents some major problems. Bringing the source closer to the consumer is one alternative.

In summary new energy generators, new locations of origin new transmitting systems and efficiency are combining to multiply the permutations and combination available to deliver renewable energy across the globe.

An unexpected barrier surfaced with the actions in the United States to encourage growth using the traditional fossil fuels and eliminating support for renewables. This is a new barrier added to already busy spectrum which politically favor one system over another, opposition by entrenched providers, by very profitable companies and by countries that accumulate very significant amounts of investment capital.
Standby…..this is a fast changing work in process.