Chile's Threat to Obama

Right off the bat, I sensed a pervasive sentiment about the need for more scientifically literate generalists. One panel told the audience that there are “…too many MBAs and not enough engineers…” to meet the current energy and transportation challenges. Interestingly, the exact opposite was stated in the next session.

My biased conclusion: we need more MEMs.

Now for some bizarre findings. The electric car has been around for more than 100 years. In fact, it was so prevalent back in the day that President William Taft had a Baker Electric car in the White House. Coincidentally, he was the first president to upgrade from a horse to a car.

Another interesting finding, at least if you are a sucker for big numbers, is that we can already plug a 100 million electric cars into the grid using only existing capacity. Though this number is certainly a bit hard to pin down, the point seems to be that so-called smart grids could utilize off-peak capacity to use our grid more effectively. Karl Lewis, chief strategic officer of Gridpoint, summed it up well by saying, “We have enough capacity but we need to make the grid car-aware to use it cost effectively.” For more on this, check out work done by the Pacific Northwestern National Laboratory.

So what’s the deal with Chile? Well, the biggest technological challenge seems to be energy capacity, and since that right now translates into batteries, the challenge is to find the best batteries. Today, those batteries appear to be lithium-ion batteries, which, as you guessed, contain lithium.

Some people have therefore warned against possible “peak lithium” and since Chile, and South America, have potentially the biggest reserves, might we one day be under the thumb of “lithocracies”?

Personally, I think that in a sense we already are and that there probably are not any real national security issues in terms of Chile and lithium supply. Having said that, it is interesting that lithium is a crucial element in President-Elect Obama’s energy independence plan, which seems to be contradictory since we would be switching our energy reliance from one supplier to another.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the issue. For now, I leave you with these parting words by panelist Mark Perry, director of product planning at Nissan North America: “Sustainability is how you keep the company profitable.”