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NREL Collaboratory a Story

Contributed by: Francis Miller on 6/15/2006

The State of Colorado recently announced that it is going to take a couple of million dollars of our taxes and invest it in NREL so as to get grants that can be shared with the Universities. Whenever there is free dessert you can bet every College president, politician and grant writer was swatting flies to get a piece of the pie on the table. Beaming with pride, our Governor and his possee led the proceedings.

Now, unless you have been on another planet you know that reducing our dependence on fossil fuels is the number one issue confronting us. If you don't believe that, go see Al Gore's new movie "An Inconvenient Truth" or read Scientific American. Of course this is a talking points "issue" for our generation, but will be a "problem" for our children, so it stands the risk of not being addressed. We seem to be willing to plant land mines in the ground (Social security, Medicare, etc) knowing full well some poor dupe will be the one to step on it years from now.

But, for the time being assume it is a real problem about to happen and we would prefer dealing with it before we die so our grandchildren don't have to die fighting wars over oil or go back to a life of serfdom.

Now, when Roosevelt was presented with the prospect of a million men dying to invade Japan, he moved mountains and put a brain trust together down in Los Alamos, called the Manhattan Project. Five years later we dropped a couple of early Christmas gifts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and voila, the war was over.

Some would believe that NREL is our equivalent of the Manhattan Project when it comes to alternative energies. And they believe that by force feeding this system with money you will see solutions coming off the production line. Even better, turbo-charge the process by getting profs from the School of Mines, CU-Boulder and CSU-Ft Collins involved and we will make nine babies in one month. They believe this, even though history suggests otherwise.

First, NREL has been in business for nearly 30 years and almost every president since Jimmie Carter has tried to cut their budget. Even, Bill Clinton and Al Gore whacked at the money tree with a dull axe and they were the most alternative energy duo we have had in the White House in a long time.

NREL is a research-industrial-complex that dispenses billions of dollars amongst universities and corporate organizations. Most of the intellectual property, ie., patents that derive from the NREL meta-level purchasing agency are put into a stealth organization called Midwest Research. The nexus of organizations who fed off national defense contracts during the cold war turned their attention to devouring our tax dollars when energy shortages became the next big thing.

Now, I am the kind of guy who feels that government wastes so much money in so many ways that worrying about the folks at NREL risks making me out to be Anne Coulter. I like the researchers there. You could give each of them a MacArthur grant and it would be well spent. So my problem is NOT with the bench-lab basic science guys as much as it is with the entrenched bureaucracy, the Department of Energy, and the overall government overlord system.

History has shown time and time again that innovation and entrepreneurship is the lengthened shadow of a single man, not an institution. If I asked you who invented the light bulb and created General Electric you would think Edison. Who made affordable automobiles possible and led to the creation of the oil industry, interstate highway sytem, trucking and the 67 Mustang and the whole industrial economy? Henry Ford, that's who and he started in his garage. And, what about Burt Raton, the guy who, along with a team of six guys in a hangar in the Nevada desert. built a spaceship and won a ten million dollar prize to boot? Not NASA, their projects take billions and decades not to mention their tendency to blow up.

You can look at Hewlett-Packard, Apple Computers, Gore-Tex, Intel and many companies and you know they are the lengthened shadow of their founders. It is a phenomena that most large companies struggle to survive beyond the lifetime of a single human being and decline seems to begin the day of the founder's funeral. They end up becoming conglomerates like GE.

So what makes anyone think that force-feeding NREL and its far-flung medieval system or research castles is going to produce anything more than a series of retirement parties? It might and I don't bet against people any more than I bet on them, because at the individual level it is too hard to predict. But, NREL is not the Manhattan Project and alternative energy is not the A-Bomb. If NREL's outcome during the past 30 years are a predictor, we will be burning wood in our cars before they are solar-powered.

Alternative energy is a transition to a whole new way of life and a host of new technologies. Reducing our dependence on oil will affect everyone's job from the clerk at the gas-station to the mechanic at Med-Ved Chevrolet. The patents and basic science are a small part of the matter. The raising of capital,creating corporate entities, markets and distribution systems is the stuff beneath the tip of the iceberg. This will be a 25-to-40 year process and is being done to preserve a standard of living for our children and to prevent the need for our grandchildren to die over oil in the Middle East.

But, I don't think we should beat up on NREL because they haven't been able to solve this problem. We asked for a bureaucracy and we got one. We shouldn't also expect NREL to be anything it can't be. Just like we shouldn't expect a university like the CU, who can't seem to get rid of tar-baby's like Ward Churchill to be the turbo-charger on NREL's engine.

If I were 'King' here is what I would do. First, I would double NREL's funding for FY 2008 and then ensure it is increased by 15% per year thereafter, with the stipulation that 90% of the additional monies go to basic science research, not administration and not buildings. And, I would have an independent group oversee outsourcing and force all of the patents to be placed into the public domain, license-free if even $1 dollar of public money ever went to fund them.

Then, I would allocate $25 billion dollars, to provide for one thousand(1,000) $25 million dollar prizes to be awarded like Nobel Prizes to innovators, entrepreneurs, patent-makers, and start-ups who make really-big breakthroughs. I have pegged the amount to the bounty we seem to have to offer to entice Islamic terrorists to give up Osama bin Laden and his confederacy.

This would bifurcate the theoretical from the applied and focus NREL and the university guys on the theoretical basic science underpinning technology-driven applications. The innovator, entrepreneurial, fire-in-the belly guys would be able to get real companies off the ground and then you could count on the Wall Street investors to keep up the momentum as invested capital demands its rewards.

Right now we are throwing money down a rat hole waiting for a crisis to develop. If your son or daughter, nephew, grandson or next door neighbor kid gets killed in the Middle East defending your right to drive an SUV, you can tell St. Peter at the gate why you were so spineless. Quit criticizing George Bush, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and the politicians who are managing the defensive part of this ball game for us. We as citizens need to exert grassroots leadership to get an offensive game into play. Now is the time to get down off the bleachers and go onto the playing field. There is an election coming up and every politician who cannot speak directly and plainly to this important issue should be hit with a tomato.



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CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Francis Miller

Parker , CO

Francis Miller has posted 699 stories and 9 comments since joining on 11/17/2005. Francis Miller's average story rating is 4.19.
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