Green Tech

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Self-described "Internet tycoon" and venture capitalist Bob Metcalfe said that the world can solve global warming by transferring Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurship to the plodding energy field.

Metcalfe on Monday reprised his EnerNet talk where he draws on the history of the Internet to challenge today's thinking on energy. The co-inventor of Ethernet and current clean-tech investor at Polaris Ventures spoke at the Lux Research's Executive Summit here.

Bob Metcalfe

Overall, Metcalfe is optimistic that technology can solve the problem of global warming, either through through new technologies or geoengineering.

But he argues that many people are operating with the wrong assumptions of how the energy business works. Extrapolating today's energy technologies--the floor--on tomorrow's energy problems is the wrong way to look at the problem.

Instead, people should expect energy to change like the development of the Internet, where there were a number of disruptive technology introductions that were built on top of each other over time.

"If the Internet is any guide, it's going to take us decades to solve energy," Metcalfe said. "The fact that we are looking at long times suggests we should look at 'ceilings' (of technologies' potential) rather than floors (today's technology)."

Also, there are many business fields, or categories, that are now considered separate but do indeed overlap, the way that data, voice, and video eventually converged online.

In energy, government mandates favored the production of corn ethanol, which has created a food versus fuel debate that has brought criticism of biofuels. "When you muck with fuel markets, you are mucking with feeds and fuels also, we just found out," he said.

With the influx of venture capital going to fund clean, or green, tech start-ups, many people are concerned that there is an investment bubble.

Metcalfe sees a bubble forming around global warming, where there is a movement of consumers and businesses to address the problem. But bubbles are a good thing, Metcalfe said.

"From Internet history, we know that bubbles are normal. Bubbles are an accelerator of technology progress. Bubbles go against the status quo. We should encourage bubbles," he said.

Another against-the-grain view that Metcalfe likes to voice is that conservation, or efficiency, is not the best target when it comes to policy and investment.

The early scientists who worked on the precursor to the Internet decades ago designed networking protocols to operate on the existing copper-wire network. But technology advances and an infrastructure build-out proved that approach to be misguided. And the abundance of bandwidth and computing power led to more innovations like the World Wide Web, he said.

"Conservation should not be our goal," he said. "The goal should be to light up the whole world, not make the United States dark.

The topology of the Internet can also serve as a guide to the electricity distribution grid, Metcalfe said.

Much like workgroups formed in companies when local-area networks and PCs came about, the electricity distribution grid should develop to accommodate more distributed energy.

Several homes, for example, could share energy produced from a shared fuel cell. Energy should be exchanged along the "edge" of the network, rather than simply distributed from central stations. Energy storage, too, is essential to greater use of wind and solar energies, he said.

He suggests that research universities take the lead in energy innovation, where small teams of researchers and entrepreneurs compete against each other. As an example, he cited Web content-distribution network Akamai Technologies, which was created by people from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Some conference attendees challenged Metcalfe's parallels between the Internet and energy, noting that efficiency technologies cut waste and that solar, for example, has not had rapid innovation because government funding is very small compared with other technologies like nuclear.

Metcalfe's response was that getting Internet tycoons into the energy field will bring surprises, just the way they came to the Internet.

"It's easier to teach Silicon Valley innovation to energy than to accept energy's bad technology assumptions," he said.

BOSTON--Bob Metcalfe thinks we'll solve global warming if we take our cue from the Internet.

Metcalfe, best known as a co-inventor of the Ethernet and now a venture capitalist at Polaris Venture Partners, on Wednesday laid out his vision of the "EnerNet," the concept of applying the lessons of building the Internet to the energy business.

Speaking at the AlwaysOn East conference here, Metcalfe said that, despite concerns of overinvestment, the growing energy technology bubble is a good thing.

"There will be many decades of bubbles ahead," he said. "There are people out there trying to outlaw them, particularly the sore losers. But they are accelerators to technology innovation."

He argued that the history of technology is marked by bubbles of overinvestment, from the PC to the Internet, voice over IP, and others.

The same is happening in global warming. Concerns over global warming have spurred billions of dollars in investment from venture capitalists and government research to create low-polluting alternatives to fossil fuels.

"There is definitely a global warming bubble and one of the ways I know that is because the name Al Gore (is present)," Metcalfe joked. "Al Gore inflated the Internet bubble and now he's inflating the global warming bubble."

For the record, Metcalfe does not like to use the term "clean tech" because energy needs to be clean and cheap. Nor does he like the color green, as in "green tech," because political greens are anticapitalism and antitechnology, he said.

As a writer for CNET's Green Tech blog, I take issue with the idea that environmentalists can't be capitalists--we're seeing them every day. But Metcalfe has a point about extreme green politicos.

Metcalfe's EnerNet seeks to apply Internet principles to the energy business.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

Metcalfe's preferred colors for the EnerNet are black and blue. Black is the color of oil, coal, and silicon (the main ingredient in solar panels). And blue is the color of water, which covers most of the Earth.

In addition to touting the global warming bubble and the companies he has invested in--he is now interim CEO of algae fuel company GreenFuel Technologies--Metcalfe sought to dispel some myths, again taking his lessons from the Internet.

There's an oft-recited view that there is no silver bullet to mitigate climate change--there needs to be a "silver buckshot" approach by which many technologies are pursued.

But Metcalfe said that in the growth of the Internet, there were several silver bullets, from technologies to make bandwidth use more efficient to punch cards.

He also showed no sadness over the demise of Bell Labs and other monopoly corporation-funded research. Government-funded research is wasted because it rarely leaves the labs, he said.

Instead, the place to do research is in university labs. "The best vehicle for technology innovation is not patents, it's students," Metcalfe said.

He said the same cast of characters that built the Internet--scientists, students, businesspeople, and investors--are the ones to build the global warming bubbles on the way to solving the energy crisis.

Metcalfe has only been investing in the energy field for a few years--of course, he's learning a lot about the algae industry in his current role.

But his comparisons are instructive. Like the Internet, energy will be distributed; there will be a layered architecture that provides flexibility; and energy should be cheap and abundant like bandwidth is becoming.

As for the desirability of a global warming bubble, I'm less convinced. Business disasters could turn investors and entrepreneurs away from the energy field, when they are clearly needed. But then again, it sure makes for a good speech--and headline.