Translator: Ilze Garda Reviewer: Maricene Crus
I have a dream of a world
where we have clean air, clean water, and all the energy we need.
My house and electronics are powered by wind and solar,
and I drive my hydrogen car to work.
But as a scientist,
I have a confession to make about renewable energy:
we are not there yet.
The painful truth is
even if we have the money to replace all of our coal and gas plants tomorrow,
we wouldn't be able to make it work.
And to explain why, I want to tell you about a friend of mine.
Steve is a meteorologist,
and he comes to work everyday at 4:30 am.
Within two hours,
he needs to have accurate weather predictions for every service area.
With these predictions, he can predict how much energy we will use
and how much wind and solar power we will produce for every hour in the day.
But for the way that the grid is set up now,
if he is wrong even by a little bit, it can cost the utility hard money
as they scramble to ramp up their gas plants to compensate.
Unless we get smart about how we deploy renewables in the future,
this problem will only get worse.
We need a way to store renewable energy so that we can use it anytime.
We need a way to transport this new kind of power
so that we can use it anywhere.
And we need a way to convert it into fuel
so that we can power our planes, trains, and automobiles.
What we really need is an energy revolution.
Thomas Edison was successful at just such a revolution.
Can you imagine him walking into downtown Vegas or Times Square?
The world we have today would be unrecognizable to him.
"Hey, Tommy, you know that light bulb you invented?
Yeah, there are now billions of those around the world."
But what we often don't think about is just how difficult that was
because before the light bulb,
there was no reason for you to have electricity in your house.
So in order for him to sell his light bulb,
he also needed to create the infrastructure
to get power to those lights.
But he wasn't all that successful on his own.
For his first demonstration project, he'd lit up his lead investor's mansion
with 385 lights
to become the first electrically lit home in New York.
What a spectacle that must have been!
Until, you know, he got the library on fire.
After a few years, he lit up 82 houses
with the nation's first electric power plant.
Unfortunately, after a few years, that burned down as well.
Over decades, science and engineering completely transformed our world.
And so was born the lighting revolution.
This is the scale of the problem
that we are dealing with for renewable energy.
These are not just new products to plug in,
but ones that require a vastly different infrastructure
than what we have today
because today, our infrastructure is built around burning things.
We burn coal, we burn oil, we burn gas.
We've become really, really good at burning things.
We've become so good at burning things
that our world has essentially become a furnace, and it's changing the climate.
All ten of the warmest years in recorded history
have taken place in the last 20 years.
Last year was the warmest year ever.
And we are already doing damage control.
We are currently in the process of resettling
our nation's first climate refugees from an island in Louisiana.
Due to rising sea levels, an entire town is being moved off the island.
This is just the beginning.
On a global scale, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
stated that in order to avoid the truly devastating affects of climate change,
global temperatures should not rise by more than two degrees Celsius
above pre-industrial levels.
We are currently one degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
In order to meet this ambitious goal, a global carbon budget was set,
and if we go business-as-usual,
we are expected to exceed this global carbon budget
by the year 2040.
Our Earth as we know it depends on us to rapidly diverse from fossil fuels.
But society as we know it depends on reliable access to affordable power.
These two requirements are at odds, and the only solution lies in innovation.
So how do we get there? How do we make sure our species survives?
How do we make sure that our planet is still habitable in 100 years?
I believe the answer lies in a class
that many of you probably found very boring:
statistics.
In 1991, a scientist named John Gillman
made an observation that came to be known as "the rule of 10."
The rule of 10 states that 10,000 ideas
usually lead to about 1,000 experiments worth writing home about;
which results in 100 patents;
of these, 10 make to a store near you, and one is the game changer.
Just one is even close to light bulb caliber.
Industry makes products from patents,
but universities and national labs make patents from ideas.
We can't just sit around and wait for the next game changer, that's crazy.
We need to statistically ensure
that these game changers come to market by funding as many ideas as possible.
In short, the progression of science
is not just a series of independent and unpredictable breakthroughs.
The game-changing technologies that we are speaking of
are built on decades of foundational research
at universities and national labs.
Thomas Edison didn't just come in one day and changed the world.
The first lamp was invented
almost 100 years before he came into the picture,
and lights weren't commonplace in homes until decades later.
So, right about now you might be saying to yourself,
"Wow, this all seems really important.
I bet we're doing everything we can to make sure that this all happens."
Well, I have some bad news for you.
Here's a picture
showing the government's commitment to scientific advancement over time.
You see that spike there?
That shows commitment.
I look at that,
and I see that we were really trying to solve a problem
because the space race wasn't just another science project.
It was a unifying mission for all Americans.
As a nation, we came together to heavily invest in the new frontier.
That is why we were able to achieve
such an engineering marvel on such a short timeline.
You see this depressing down-slope here in our decade?
It kind of reminds me of the game KerPlunk.
Did you ever play this game?
It was one of my favorite games as a kid.
The premise of the game
is you have a collection of marbles lying on a web of straws.
The players then remove the straws one by one
until eventually the marbles fall through.
I am picturing these straws as the resources that we give scientists,
whether it's money for equipment and experiments,
labor, support services, etc.
And the marbles,
they are the foundational research which supports society as we know it.
Compared to all of the other KerPlunk games that our government plays,
we are essentially getting the straws pulled out from under us.
Because we're scientists,
we're really good at looking at depressing graphs
and making conclusions about the Universe.
(Laughter)
Here's the conclusion we made about this graph.
The government isn't going to solve this problem on its own, so it's up to us.
That's why I teamed up with other clean energy experts
to build a mechanism for concerned scientists
to fund clean-energy research directly.
We are building the first and only grassroots funding source
for clean-energy research.
We call it the Alt-E Fund.
As a collection of clean-energy scientists and experts,
we are uniquely qualified to make sure that your donations
go to the most promising projects
at universities and national labs around the U.S.
Rather than spending time
on lobbying Congress to amend their tight federal budget,
we are empowering concerned citizens to fund clean-energy research directly.
Because one person with 10 dollars is limited,
but a million people with 10 dollars can change the world.
You see, each small contribution
is another straw to put back in the KerPlunk game.
Together, we can built up the foundational web of knowledge
needed for the next Thomas Edison to come and transform our world.
And we can do it in a way so that Steve can make sure
that you can turn on your lights whenever you need to.
If we invest in that world today, one day we'll live in it.
Thank you.
(Applause)