Charles Petit

Some Bets Pay Off, Some Don’t

December 2011 / January 2012 By: Charles Petit Volume 9 Number 6

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Here are two good bets in coming years for investors and venture capitalists: Solyndra, and carbon as a fix for climate change.  I have a third sure fire bet to enumerate too.
Perhaps that sounds idiotic and at some level it is, but give me a moment.  I am a reporter. I cover science. It came as a surprise to be asked what new technologies are on the horizon and that smart investors and research-oriented companies might watch and perhaps embrace. How would I know? I specialize in finding out what other people think, and usually spend my time with basic science researchers, not applied R&D people taking new discoveries to market. Don’t ask me which way industry is headed. I don’t even cover business. That’s a game that above all requires confidence. I cover science, and what drives science above all is DOUBT.
Plus, most new-technology ventures sound good going in but don’t pay off. That’s why entrepreneurs are such an admirable breed—against the odds, these plucky people put in sweat and money to create new industries and products. Most fail, but enough of them succeed, perhaps on their third or thirtieth try, to keep the U.S. economy the most innovative on the planet. And the successes inspire a steady stream of daredevil, envious people to give it their own go.
But if this is just a guessing game I’m in. I read, after all, scads of science papers and science-related press releases and I spend part of five mornings every week filling a blog (ksjtracker.mit.edu) with my impressions of how other science journalists have handled the day’s news. I can convince myself I am on to some things as easily as can the next guy down on the bar stool. I regularly get brainstorms about what’s on the way, and that make perfect sense to me.
Fair warning: I am also a fellow who in the 1990s  decided in sublime confidence  to put a small amount (print journalists only have small amounts) in Motorola. It in turn was investing in something called Iridium, a fleet of low-orbiting communication satellites that could provide global cell phone coverage. It seemed a lock to make a fortune. It went bust is what it and its costly, clunky handsets did. Following bankruptcy Iridium’s remains today provide a niche product popular with journalists in scary parts of the world filing jumpy satellite-phone TV dispatches while bullets fly.  It provides free entertainment to amateur astronomers who predict Iridium flares: the reflective glints of sunlight  off the satellites’ faceted casings and visible near dusk and dawn. It’s still in business but has made no fortune.
Onward:

Number one:  Solyndra. Not the company, the general business model. The former fell apart and embarrassed federal agencies that provided it with loan guarantees and other assistance. Its venture capital investors seem to have taken a bath, too. The default rate for government clean-energy loans is actually less than the White House expected. But duds are never fun.  It tanked mainly, say people who know about such things, because the price plummeted for conventional silicon-based solar panels. In this case, panels that more and more are made in huge, state-aided factories in China. But the company’s strategy surely retains merit. Standard silicon solar panels can’t drop to zero cost.
Sooner or later a more efficient technology, one that gets more kilowatt-hours of energy per acre, will succeed. If a rooftop can pump out twice as much electricity with better panels, there has to be a cost point where installing them makes sense. They won’t be Solyndra’s cylindrical solar cells, marvelous as they are on paper, taking sunlight from any direction and turning it into electricity with  copper indium gallium diselenide thin film. For now, with many investors spooked by Solyndra’s example, the enhanced solar panel field is wide open.

 Number Two: This is a hunch but I have reason for it. Carbon may well be a key to super-duper solar cells. That would be satisfying. Fossil fuels with all their carbon got us into our climate pickle, and perhaps clever use of carbon will help us get out of that as well as ease dependence on imported energy. Element No. 6 is displaying wizardly properties in labs. Consider these recent revelations from U.S. and a few other research institutions:
• At Michigan Technological University, researchers announced that carbon foam, providing a sort of scaffolding for nickel hydroxydroxide, appears to be a “marriage made in heaven.” The researchers said it is perfect as  an energy-storage material in an “asymmetrical capacitor,” a sort of high-power battery that is half capacitor and can be cycled thousands of times.
• About a year ago, a University of Southern California engineering team reported that inexpensive solar cells dependent on graphene—sheets of interlinked carbon atoms resembling graphite but far more free of defects. It is a nearly perfect electrical conductor. While cheap it was less efficient than standard photovoltaic material.
• Also last year Indiana University–Bloomington scientists learned how to get electricity from such material.
• In November in the U.K., scientists including two recent Nobelists  at Manchester and Cambridge universities reported coating graphene with metallic nanostructures that in turn support electron waves called plasmons. The result ramped up their ability to capture sunlight for conversion to electricity by a factor of 20 and they expect it to get better.
Even the ultimate carbon material, diamond, is turning out to be full of tricks. It is not only a terrific conductor of heat, a fact well known, but can manipulate photons as well as steer and modulate electrons. Solar panels turn photons into electrons, so somehow diamond—artificial, not the pricy gem-quality stones—is ripe to find a job in them. Recently, Harvard researchers manufactured tiny arrays of diamond pillars, visible only with a microscope, that can capture photons and release them at a controllable rate. At Vanderbilt University, a team reported crafting diamond circuit elements that might someday form the basis of high-speed computing. If diamonds can compute, they can move current around.
The DeBeers Group agrees that big things may be in store for synthetic diamonds, and recently opened a venture capital fund and office in Silicon Valley called Element Six Ventures Group.
To be sure, none of this adds up yet. But perhaps  carbon will be essential in storing solar energy, turning it into a source available around the clock. Carbon may help cut cost and raise efficiency of the cells. Or not. Recall that the assignment here is to imagine the best places for money to flow in coming years to get a payoff. I could have grabbed press releases and recent papers on organic dyes, or on plasmonics broadly, or molecular circuits, or synthetic mimics of photosynthesis, and imagined how they can help to take solar to where many leading analysts say is its ultimate industrial use: the primary power source for the late 21st-century economy, one that won’t propel the planet toward inhabitability. We Americans have a lot of smart people working for us, coming up with ideas. Some of them will stick.
    
Number Three:   There is an investment bet, a sure thing, behind this exercise. Those research samplings just above, picked more or less at random from my email inbox for research announcements and press releases, do not arise much from private industry.  The bulk of funding comes from the likes of the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NASA, the Department of Energy, and other government institutions. The U.K. work rode grants from such equivalent agencies as the Royal Society and European Research Council. That is the fundamental investment that Americans must continue to make and to increase.
Most government research, to be sure, does not produce big economic winners. That’s not necessarily the reason grant-making program officers back each one individually. But from such expenditures come vital ingredients of a prosperous, clean tomorrow. With its collective capital America’s been making and winning bets  on technological vitality for the better part of the last century. Government research money’s been getting tighter later, with talk of job-killing taxes reaching a shrill level and inclinations in some quarters to stop government efforts to “pick winners.” That’s a shame.

Charlie Petit has covered science for more than 38 years.  This includes 26 years at the San Francisco Chronicle and 6 at U.S. News & World Report. Awards include the AAAS prizes in both newspaper and magazine categories. Since early 2006 he has gathered and commented on the day’s mass media science news stories for the Knight Science Journalism Tracker website. He is a former president of both the National Association of Science Writers and the Northern California Science Writers Association  and is vice president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. He has a degree in astronomy from UC Berkeley.