Why A National Technology Policy Should Be The Keystone Of Our National Energy Policy
by
H. Kent Craig



Last night on The Charlie Rose talk/interview show on PBS , Charlie interviewed Lee Raymond who is Chairman and CEO of Exxon for the entire hour of his show. During the interview, Charlie asked Chariman Lee about how Exxon projected out future energy demands and how accurate their predictions from the past had been. Mr. Raymond justifiably bragged a little about how macro-accurate their five, ten and twenty year projections had been, but admitted that the one area that Exxon had consistently underestimated was the impact that technology had on increasing overall productivity of their industry and saving and making them many millions of dollars in unprojected revenue streams and cost savings.

The impact of our scientific, technical and engineering talent on improving the energy efficiencies of existing technologies and in creating new ones can not and should not be underestimated. Creation of a new national technology policy that will be the keystone of a new national energy policy should be of paramount importance and needs to happen now if not sooner.

Since the old system of giving research grants in the billions and billions of dollars for basic research to universities and quasi-governmental institutions while not exactly broken is in dire need of major overhauls since, once a given grant is given, there’s little if any incentive to take major risks and come up with something majorily rewarding, to take a hard swing and maybe hit a homerun, as a new main stake of the new paradigm of creating both a national technology policy primarily as driver to a realistic national energy policy, the Federal government needs to go back and steal something from the history books and create a system of “prizes” much like the recently claimed X-Prize for the first non-NASA totally-civilian-created manned space flight for a modern example or the prize originally offered by the British government back in the 1700’s for creating the world’s first true marine chronometer which enabled accurate calculation of longitude and gave British seapower and therefore British economic and world political power even more strength back in that day.

Create a quasi-government body of national technological development, spread the authority of governance of that body around various public, semi-autonomous non-governmental agencies and representatives on the board from the private sector, make the goals of various prizes realistic both in terms of technological advancement and monetary rewards for doing same, such as $25,000,000 for an internal combustion engine which could be retrofitted into a standard American-sized SUV for under $2,000 total cost and which would get a minimum of 55 MPG under the worst of conditionsm or $100,000,000 for a photovoltaic solar cell that could produce one millwatt of energy at 33% minimum efficiency conversion and have a working life of at least five years for a total production and sales cost of less than one dollar per said cell, for realistic examples.

For one-tenth the total of all current Federal monies now doled out for basic research grants moved over to this new national technological developmental agency, we would have an immediate payback of several times the initial cost of the first batch of achievement prizes awarded and in the end a net return of literally hundreds of times the cost of the program.

Think it couldn’t be done? I’m convinced that America being full of Americans as it is and almost all Americans being inveterate tinkerers and inventors that, Lord knows what kind of major technological improvements to increase energy efficiencies in existing systems and altogether new systems are just sitting there in who knows how many garages and workshops and labs, sitting there because their inventors feel, maybe somewhat justifiably maybe somewhat not, that the system is so stacked against them and that it would cost so much to try to bring their leapfrogged inventions into the marketplace and even if they did succeed in bringing it to market that the entrenched forces of the status quo would resist its introduction so as to make its failure probable if not inevitable, its potential benefits to us all through increased thrift of energy savings be damned.

Would there be tons of chaff in the form of half-baked half-idiotic inventions to sort through to get to the handful of truly authentic and promising major advances that would come forward once this system of prizes through a national technology board was created? You betcha! But that would be okay, would be worth the modest investment in initial technical and scientific personnel to sort through the wave of proposals that would hit them as soon as these multi-tens-of-millions-of-dollars prizes for not just major technological leaps but also for processes of “just” percentage incremental increases in efficiencies of improvements to existing technologies that when applied economy-wide across the board would not only save us millions of dollars of energy cost but also increase the true standard of living for every single American by adding to all our GDP bottom lines.

Still think it can’t be done? At the North Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer, N.C. , there’s a sports car from the 60’s that has a steam turbine engine designed, engineered and built by a shadetree garage mechanic and tinkerer that is no larger than a coffee can but which produces over 300 horsepower and which was/is installed in that sports car.

Let me repeat this: you can go to the NC Transportation Museum and see for yourself a 40-year-old external combustion steam turbine engine the size of a coffee can which produces more horsepower than a conventional internal combustion engine fifty times larger and heavier. So why isn’t this steam engine or its offspring in a huge percentage of passenger vehicles on the road in America in early 21st Century? Do you really have to ask such a rhetorical if not silly question?

Let us have the willpower now to help ensure our longer-term prosperity later to take on the existing powers-that-be and create not just a series of X-type-prizes to reward true technological innovations but also as a safe haven of ideas which might not be needed now or might have to wait a few years for field-level production-scale technologies to catch up but which we will need, actually more likely which our children and grandchildren will need so they can still have a decent standard of living so they can support us through their then-astronomical Social Security taxes they’ll have to pay then so we ourselves won’t be starving to death in our dotage, and which their own progeny will have use of after we and they are gone.

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