Business Insight Zone

My college classmate Michael Webber – now on the engineering faculty at our alma mater — recently published this fascinating article in Scientific American magazine:

Energy versus Water: Solving Both Crises Together
Water is needed to generate energy. Energy is needed to deliver water. Both resources are limiting the other—and both may be running short. Is there a way out?

I’ll give away the ending of the article by telling you that the answer is a qualified Yes — qualified by the need for enlightened governmental policies (hey, anything’s possible, right?) and “innovative technologies that help to boost one resource without draining the other.”

Although I’m interested in many aspects of Michael’s article, for the purposes of this blog I want to highlight the business wisdom embodied in this sentence:

“The inventor who discovered a way to purify water using minimal energy could become the world’s richest person and be forever enshrined.”

Michael mentions several other technologies that seem ripe for continued development by entrepreneurs looking to blend the green sensibility of ecology with the greenbacks of commerce. These include:

• efficient drip irrigation systems for agriculture, which waste much less water than spray irrigation methods;
• better systems for reusing municipal and industrial waste­water;
• computerized and sensor-based systems that monitor and control industrial and residential water use; and
• solar water heating — a simple technology that needs less in the way of R&D and more in the way of savvy marketing.

Here are other excerpts from the piece, with my highlights added.

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“Many people are concerned about the perils of peak oil — running out of cheap oil. A few are voicing concerns about peak water. But almost no one is addressing the tension between the two: water restrictions are hampering solutions for generating more energy, and energy problems, particularly rising prices, are curtailing efforts to supply more clean water.”

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“The strains between the resources manifest themselves in tough choices at the local level — especially in land- and water-locked regions such as the desert Southwest. Is it better for a city to import fresh­water or to import electricity to desalinate brackish water in deep aquifers below? Or is it better yet to move the people to where the water is? With infinite energy, freshwater can be reached, but even if the public coffers were unlimited, policymakers are under pressure to limit carbon emissions. And with climate change possibly altering the cycles of droughts, floods and rainfall, burning more energy to get more water might be doubly dire. The challenges get even tougher because the U.S. has finally conceded that the best way to fix its energy and security problems is to break its dependence on imported oil.”

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“Whether proponents realize it or not, any plan to switch from gasoline to electricity or biofuels is a strategic decision to switch our dependence from foreign oil to domestic water. Although that choice might seem more appealing than reducing energy consumption, we would be wise to first make sure we have the necessary water.”

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“More than anything . . . we need to value water. We must move away from a long-standing expectation that water should be free or cheap. If we think water is important, we should put a realistic price on it. Without that, we send a confusing signal that everyone can be blasé about wasting water.”

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It seems to me that the dilemma that Michael discusses here relates to a broader observation I made a while back, about how “business evolves to incorporate elements that were previously regarded as externalities.”

Over time, our business ventures — whether because of social pressure, technical breakthroughs, or something else — can incorporate multiple benefits that might once have been seen as mutually incompatible. To take a handy example, cars of today are more efficient AND safer AND faster than Henry Ford’s Model T.

What I’m really talking about is Both/And thinking. And Michael’s absolutely right to guess that some entrepreneur is going to perfect a both/and technique that meets our water AND energy needs . . . and that entrepreneur will make a mint.

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Related posts:

• Designing a low-carbon future: building the new yacht.
• The greatest challenge of business: Both/And thinking.
• Bringing externalities inside the system.

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Photo by Frank-Bernard.

Category: Energy, Green & Clean, Innovation & Entrepreneurship