Saul Griffith | The Energy Problem(s) - Following the Numbers

Otherlab is a research and development firm focusing on renewable and clean energy, robotics, automation, digital fabrication, adaptive textiles, advanced manufacturing, and computational design tools. Similar to an accelerator/incubator, but with internally developed ideas, we nurture projects through the initial R&D phase, to forming entities within Otherlab, and eventually fundraising and spinning out into independently operating companies. In the past 5 years, Otherlab has collaborated with Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, NASA, Autodesk, GE, Ford, Google, Motorola, IDEO, and a host of other universities and private research labs.
Speaker Biography:
Saul Griffith is the Founder / Principal Scientist at Other Lab, where he focuses his work on engineering solutions for energy production and energy efficiency. He has multiple degrees in materials science and mechanical engineering and completed his PhD in Programmable Assembly and Self Replicating machines at MIT. He is founderor co-founder of numerous companies, including Optiopia, Squid Labs, Potenco, Instructables.com, Howtoons and Makani Power. Saul has been awarded numerous awards for invention and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007. In 2011 Saul was named a World Economic Forum ‘Young Global Leader’. Saul holds multiple patents and patents pending in textiles, optics, nanotechnology, robotics, energy production, manufacturing and smart geometry. Saul co-authors ‘Howtoons’ with Nick and Ingrid Dragotta - a children’s comic book series about building your own science and engineering gadgets. Saul is a technical advisor to Make magazine and Popular Mechanics, and sits on various advisory boards including Duke Energy and the San Francisco 100% Renewable Energy Taskforce. He rarely wears shoes, is typically found knee-deep in machinery with fists full of tools, and has holes in most of his pockets.

[@crowdsourcingsustainability]

Thank you Saul, this was awesome. Super useful!

[@tillabaganz1033]

This was really interesting, thank you! On a different note I find it rather curious, that at the end of the lecture, Stanford thanks Chevron for sponsoring this energy seminar.

[@FirstGigawattDown]

This is great! It's what we are trying to figure out for each state. For user friendliness, rather than "quads" we want to get the measure of each state in GWe end use power delivered - the "length of the energy field" in our football metaphor - also referred to as a 1GWe nuclear reactor so people really GET what that means. kzbin.info/www/bejne/pmWodHqmjdudrrs So, how many GWe, how many nuclear power reactors long is each state? Need to nail it down officially. And then you can do the conversions (how many wind turbines would that be, what impact would other demand side plays have, and so forth.)