Pentagon studying space-based solar power platforms to prevent energy wars

Space-based solar power has been studied since the 1970s but the U.S. Department of Defense is giving it a new look, according to an article at Space.com (19 September 2007).

The deployment of space platforms that capture sunlight for beaming down electrical power to Earth is under review by the Pentagon, as a way to offer global energy and security benefits – including the prospect of short-circuiting future resource wars between increasingly energy-starved nations.

A proposal is being vetted by U.S. military space strategists that 10% of the U.S. baseload of energy by 2050, perhaps sooner, could be produced by space-based solar power (SBSP). Furthermore, a demonstration of the concept is being eyed to occur within the next five to seven years.

A demo of the technology is a critical first step (to prove it can be done and to identify the remaining challenges), says the director of the SBSP study, Col. (Select) Michael “Coyote” Smith, chief of the Future Concepts Branch in the National Security Space Office. (Smith’s shop is known as the “Dream Works” of the National Security Space Office.)

Smith says he sees the Defense Department as a customer of the resulting clean energy — not as the deep-pocketed financial backer of the project.

The U.S. Department of Defense has an “absolute urgent need for energy,” Smith said, underscoring the concern that major powers around the world – not just the United States – could end up in a major war of attrition in the 21st century. “We’ve got to make sure that we alleviate the energy concerns around the globe,” he said.

Proponents of the technology are looking at this scenario:

[B]y 2050 the goal is to have forty or so concentrator-photovoltaic space-based solar power (SBSP) satellites in geostationary orbit, each broadcasting via microwave between 2-5 gigawatts of power to terrestrial electrical power grids, with 1-to-5 broadcast antennas that can beam power to as many locations.

Gigawatts! Reminds me of the great movie Back to the Future (1985), where wacky scientist Dr. Emmett Brown discovers — back in 1955 — that he needs 1.21 gigawatts to ignite his Flux Capacitor for time travel.

Brown: “1.21 gigawatts? 1.21 gigawatts? Great Scott!”
Marty McFly: “What the hell is a gigawatt?”

According to the movie, it requires either nuclear energy (via plutonium) or a bolt of lightning.

But I digress. Back to the future of solar power satellites…

On the positive side, there have been technical advances in “micro- and nano-electronics, lightweight inflatable composite structures, ultra-small power management devices, as well as laboratory demonstration of photovoltaic arrays that are close to 68% conversion efficiency.”

But, of course, there’s no shortage of challenges, such as:

• extreme complexity and scalability issues
• a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars
• the need for a long-term political commitment (i.e., budget)
• the need for technology breakthroughs, such as “wireless power beaming”
• the need to manufacture the satellites in space using lunar materials
• legal issues
• and did I mention the need to scrounge for hundreds of billions of dollars?

By the way, as one proponent acknowledged, “the microwave beams will heat the atmosphere slightly and the frequency must be chosen to avoid cooking birds.”

Personally, I put solar power satellites in the same category as the space elevator: Fascinating, ambitious, but ultimately so gigantic and expensive and fraught with complexity that it’s hard to imagine it really happening.

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Related:
The Space Frontier Foundation’s discussion blog on Space Solar Power

Actuarily speaking, global warming is a very real catastrophe

Whatever your views on the politics of global warming, well, they have to take a back seat to this business reality: The people who get paid to assess risk — the actuaries at insurance companies — are mighty worried. They don’t care about Al Gore or environmentalists or right-wing or left-wing politics. They do care about events that cost them billions of dollars. These are people who take an unemotional, ruthless, mathematical look at risk, and they don’t like what they’re seeing, according to this Op-Ed column in The Washington Post (27 September 2007):

Ten years ago, Peter Levene, chairman of Lloyds of London, was skeptical about global warming theories, but no longer. He believes carbon emissions caused by human activity are warming the Earth and causing severe weather-related events. “At Lloyds, we feel the effects of extreme weather more than most,” he said in a March speech. “We don’t just live with risk — we have to pick up the pieces afterwards.” Lloyds predicts that the United States will be hit by a hurricane causing $100 billion worth of damage, more than double that of Katrina. Industry analysts estimate that such an event would bankrupt as many as 40 insurers.

The insurance industry cites hard evidence:

• Wildfires have increased four-fold since the 1980s, and they are bigger and harder to contain because of earlier-arriving springs and hotter, bone-dry summers.
• Storms grow ever more intense: Since the 1970s, the number intensifying to Category 4 or 5 hurricanes has almost doubled, costing insurers tens of billions of dollars.
• Increasingly destructive weather — including heat waves, hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, hailstorms and drought — accounted for 88% of all property losses paid by insurers from 1980 through 2005. Seven of the 10 most expensive catastrophes for the U.S. property and casualty industry happened between 2001 and 2005.

Lessons in forced democracy

A key tenet of current U.S. foreign policy is to export democracy to other countries. So, how well does that really work? What are the critical success factors for one nation imposing democracy on another?

The Washington Post (17 September 2007) reports on new research by political scientists Andrew Enterline and J. Michael Greig that sheds light on this. Enterline & Greig studied 41 cases over the past 200 years and came up with four critical success factors (ingredients) for imposing democracy:

• large occupation forces early on to stamp out nascent insurgencies;
• a clear message that occupation forces were willing to spend many years to make democracy work;
• an ethnically homogeneous population, where politics was less likely to splinter along sectarian lines; and,
• the good fortune to have neighboring countries that were also democratic, or least didn’t interfere.

The two most successful “forced democracies” — West Germany and Japan — had all four ingredients. They’re in the category of “strong democracies,” which tend to survive at least 15 years and perhaps indefinitely.

Then there are the “weak democracies,” such as The Philippines, which tend to fail within the first 10 years.

Iraq, unfortunately, has none of the four ingredients.

Top HR challenges (hint: they include acquiring, retaining and grooming key talent)

Ranked list of the top HR challenges (in North American business)

1. Acquiring key talent/lack of available talent
2. Building leadership capability
3. Driving cultural and behavioral change in the organization
4. Retaining key talent
5. Increasing line manager capability to handle people-management responsibilities
6. Succession planning
7. Constraints on headcount (“making do with less”)
8. Increasing workforce productivity
9. Lack of consensus about the organization’s strategy/direction
10. Encouraging organizational innovation
11. Resourcing and managing HR issues in “new geographies” for the company
12. Managing human capital during and after an acquisition or merger
13. Implementing people changes resulting from changes due to operational performance
14. Workforce planning
15. Measuring the contribution of human capital to business performance
16. Reducing overall human capital costs
17. Coping with an aging workforce

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Base: Survey of 154 senior HR professionals in the U.S. and Canada
Source: “The State of HR Transformation,” North America, Mercer Human Resource Consulting, 2006
Discovered via Workforce Management (10 September 2007)

Deconstructing… Nestle

Nestle SA (based in Switzerland) this week is expected to name CFO Paul Polman as its new CEO, according to numerous media reports. [Update: Oops. They picked Paul Bulcke instead. The challenges below remain relevant.] So what’s the situation that the new CEO faces? Here are some clues, gleaned from various articles in The Wall Street Journal:

Problem: Nestle is the world’s biggest food company (2006 sales of $78.6 billion) but lags the industry in profit margin (13.5% on food).

Problem: An acquisition binge — from Dreyer’s ice cream and Ralston pet food to Jenny Craig weight-loss programs and Gerber baby food — has produced a company so big that it’s unwieldy and sluggish. Weak divisions are being put on a “value destroyers” list (ouch!) that’s reviewed by the executive committee at monthly meetings.

Problem: Too many unprofitable brand variations. Current CEO Peter Brabeck discovered last year that the food maker was churning out 130,000 variations of its brands, and 30% weren’t making money. So he pushed to jettison weaker brands.

Problem: Organizational complexity; the org chart is a thicket of arrows, boxes and subsidiaries, which are being pruned.

Future decision: Whether to buy the rest of consumer-products titan L’Oreal SA (Nestle already owns 29%).

Innovation: Brabeck appointed a new head of innovation (Werner Bauer) and told him to be pickier about which ideas to pursue. The CEO now tracks Nestle’s 10 most promising innovations at monthly meetings. Bauer has slashed the number of new projects by about half.

Technology: CEO Brabeck hopes to finish one of his biggest projects: implementation of a modern ERP system (from SAP AG). The project started in 2002.

Polman’s challenge: Having “already gone after the low-hanging fruit, he could have a tough time squeezing more growth out of the huge company.”

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Sources: “After Buying Binge, Nestle Goes on a Diet,” The Wall Street Journal (23 July 2007); “Nestle’s Polman, A P&G Veteran, Likely Next CEO,” The Wall Street Journal (17 September 2007)