Technology Futures

In yet another interesting development of the Energy Economy, BMW has unveiled a hybrid gas/steam automobile. In a normal internal combustion engine, much of the energy goes right out of the tailpipe as heat. The BMW design captures up to 80% of the wasted energy, uses it to generate steam, which in turn helps drive the engine.

The fuel improvement is 15%, which is huge. Even better, the system is small enough that BMW says it can retrofit it to the entire existing line of BMW automobiles. Now, if you added the hydrogen on demand bolt-on equipment, which boosts gas mileage by 10%, you'd have something on the order of a 25% improvement in gas mileage on current cars and trucks.

Put another way, we'd see a 25% decrease in oil use for transportation, and similar reductions in emissions.

What's driving this? In part, high fuel prices. And these developments illustrate why trying to control the price of fuel is foolish. If the government imposes price controls that keep the price of fuel artificially low, there is less incentive for companies to develop alternative systems like these.

At the risk of being tiresome, does your region's economic development plan have an Energy Economy strategy that leverages businesses and assets already in your region? There are money and jobs coming as the Energy Economy fuels up for a boom.

The last time I checked, there were four or five states (including my home state of Virginia) that were toying with the idea of a spaceport. But New Mexico may have won the first race (there will be more than one spaceport in the country).

Virgin Atlantic has signed a $225 million dollar deal with New Mexico to build a spaceport in southern New Mexico. The spaceport is expected to attract hundreds of millions of dollars of additional private investment and to bring thousands of jobs to what may be the poorest part of one of the poorest states in the U.S.

New Mexico drove a stake in the ground several years ago in this area. Instead of wringing its hands and complaining about how bad things were, the state looked around, identified its assets (in this case, a government research facility and a lot of flat, sandy land), and said, in effect, "We've got lemons. Let's make some lemonade."

I will venture to say few took the effort seriously, but New Mexico stuck to its plan, worked hard to attract aerospace companies, and kept its eye on the ball. This is probably the biggest thing to happen to the state since it became a state. And it will transform the economy of the entire state.

Boldness and vision, managed correctly, can have a big payoff. How about economic developers in your region? Is there boldness and vision in your region's economic development strategy?

BellSouth has somewhat humorously agreed that network neutrality is important in principle but the company then went on to say that no legislation is needed to ensure that because, "We're a big telecom company and would never do anything bad."

Okay, I made that last quote up--BellSouth did not actually say that in exactly that way, but read the article [link no longer available] and see what you think.

Network neutrality is the concept that your Internet access provider (i.e. your DSL or cable modem provider) cannot block services coming from other vendors. This issue is rapidly coming to a boil because the telephone and cable companies want to block third party VoIP providers. The telephone and cable companies want to sell that service to you themselves.

But there is something bigger at work in all this than clumsy efforts to preserve old-style monopolies. Our current system of charging for a broadband connection is badly broken. There is very little relationship between the fees we pay for broadband and the amount of bandwidth we actually use. And new services like VoIP and IP TV have turned the heat up. The current system is unsustainable.

Network neutrality is important, but it's awfully hard to make it work when some service providers get a free ride on part of the Internet, which is what happens now.

The solution is to make broadband connections free, but to charge for services, and to split those fees among the several entities that are involved in both providing the service and providing the infrastructure that the service uses. By doing so, the market forces prices to rise or fall based on demand for the service, rather than the made up cost of an empty or partially full "pipe."

SBC's Midwest Networking President, Kirk Brannock (currently serving on the Illinois Governor's Broadband Deployment Council) is getting his fifteen minutes of fame. He was captured on video at a public hearing stating that "fiber is an unproven technology."

It is an interesting assertion since SBC's networks would collapse without the tens of thousands of miles of fiber the company uses to run their entire phone and data system.

In the same video, Brannock arrogantly states that, "...what are you going to do with 20 megabits?" Um, the same things the Japanese, the Australians, the Chinese, the Candadians, and the Irish are doing with 100 megabit connections--just five times more slowly.

He keeps going though, and says that of their trial of 3 meg fiber in Milwaukee, "...most users won't use that."

The condescension of this guy is almost beyond belief. At one point, he talks about the "Dr. Suess" answer to upload/download speeds. So SBC believes their customers are small children that need simplistic answers to the economic future of their communities, and that SBC customers deserve nothing more than a pat on the head and a "We know better than you what your needs are" as a reply to legitimate questions about the company's service offerings.

The video clip (it's very short) is here, thanks to the Tri-City Broadband Citizens Group.