require careful assessment and attention in terms of design: to assure that a more complex system, which is more interactive and relies more on information technology and the Internet, does not open doors that make it vulnerable to hacking, cyber attacks, or outright cyber war. The threats are real. One study found that there was “little good news about cybersecurity in the electric grid and other crucial services that depend on information technology and industrial control systems. Security improvements are modest and overmatched by the threat.”21
Overall, new technologies and new practices can do much to improve the operations throughout the electricity system and to increase the efficiency with which buildings use energy. The full impact will only become clear over time. Surprising answers are likely to emerge out of the complex mix of technology, policy, economics, and how people live their lives—just as they did in Willis Carrier’s head on that fog-enshrouded platform in Pittsburgh in 1902.
PART SIX
Road to the Future
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CARBOHYDRATE MAN
The researcher was sitting in his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a sleepy May afternoon in 1978 when the phone rang. “Admiral Rickover is on the line,” said the assistant’s voice. In a moment the admiral himself came on. He had just read an article by the researcher, and he had a message he wanted to deliver.
“Wood—fuel of the future. Wood!” he declared in the manner of one not used to being contradicted. “Fuel of the future!”
And with not much more than that, the Father of the Nuclear Navy—and the progenitor of nuclear power—abruptly hung up.
What Rickover was pointing at that afternoon was the potential for biological energy and biomass: energy generated from plant matter and other sources, and not by fossil fuels or uranium. The nation had just gone through an oil crisis and was on the edge of another. Now the man who had created the nuclear navy in record time was announcing that the future was about “growing” fuels.
Today legions of scientists, farmers, entrepreneurs, agribusiness managers, and venture capitalists use words like “ethanol,” “cellulosic,” and “biomass” rather than “wood.” But they share Rickover’s vision of growing fuel.
The best-known agricultural fuel is ethanol: ethyl alcohol made, in the first instance, from corn or sugar. In terms of technology, it’s hardly different than brewing beer or making rum. Beyond this is the “holy grail”: cellulosic ethanol, ethanol fermented and distilled on a massive scale from agricultural or urban waste or specially designed crops. Another agricultural fuel is biodiesel, made from soybeans or palm oil or even from the leftover grease from fast-food restaurants. Some argue that the still-better choices would be other biofuels, such as butanol. And then there is algae, which functions like little natural refineries.
THE BIOFUEL VISION
Whatever approaches prevail, biofuels suggest the possibility of a new era, characterized by the application of biology and biotech and understanding of the genome—the full DNA sequence of an organism—to the production of energy. The rise of the biofuels brings a new entrant into energy: the life scientist. Only in the last decade has biology begun to be applied systematically to energy.
Over this same period biofuels have generated enormous political swell in the United States, starting of course with the traditional advocates: farmers and their political allies who have always looked to ethanol as a way to diversify agricultural markets, generate additional revenues, and contribute to farm income and rural development. But there are new supporters: environmentalists (at least some), automobile companies, Silicon Valley billionaires, Hollywood moguls, along with national security specialists, who want to reduce oil imports because of worries about the Middle East and the geopolitical power of oil. More recently, they have all been joined by formidable new players: the U.S. Navy and Air Force, which are promoting biofuels development to improve combat capabilities and increase flexibility—and to diversify away from oil. The air force is experimenting with green jet fuel. The navy has a goal that half of its liquid fuels be biofuels by 2020 and laid out a vision of the “Great Green Fleet.”
This broad-based political support has generated an impressive array of programs, subsidies, incentives, and federal and state mandates meant to jump-start the biofuels industry in the United States. The most compelling is the requirement that the amount of biofuels blended with transportation fuel must almost triple from about somewhere below 1 million barrels per day in 2011 to 2.35 mbd by 2022. This could be the equivalent of about 20 percent of all motor fuel in the United States. It is like