We live in times of confrontation and it would seem that suggesting something different from what we know is a capital sin that is punished with a penalty of silence; dreaming is prohibited —which is undoubtedly the beginning for innovating and transforming—. If you mention something about renewable energies, green hydrogen, energy transition, the knight-errants of the internet will seek to correct the audacity of going against what is known.
I imagine it would be as if the Florentine community of the 16th century had gathered outside Leonardo DaVinci’s room to demand that he stop designing instruments for flying, with arguments such as that man was destined to be on the ground, because if God had wanted it, he would have given us wings. Nothing different from the old inquisition that condemned men of science to death at the stake.
Let us go to the beginning of the 20th century, to the year 1908. Imagine the master blacksmiths saying: “there is still a long way to go before a Model T replaces the horse,” “there are not enough gasoline stations,” “How are you going to fill a tank on a long trip between cities?”, “The automobile will never replace the railroad.”
A leap further ahead in time would take us to RIM, the company that manufactured the Blackberry and that underestimated the potential of the market that Apple opened with iPhone. The company did not believe that people wanted a phone without a keyboard or a series of apps beyond email, messaging or the web browser. Even with the launch of the iPad that would open the tablet market, RIM executives would point out that they did not serve any specific market.
The wonderful thing about technology is that it does not advance as companies or governments would wish, but rather that it has its own inertia. We could talk about thousands of examples: whalers resisting the growing kerosene market at the end of the 19th century, or the producers of kerosene lamps themselves resisting the first incandescent bulbs lit by electricity.
Today we can see more and more drones in the streets or a memory card the size of a fingernail with a capacity of 1 TeraByte —which is equivalent to 1 million Megabytes—. There are more cameras than ever, with better definition than in recent years, and that, combined with more precise facial recognition, has generated very interesting moral debates and debates about the limits of the State.
Voice recognition, real-time translation, artificial intelligence and autonomous automobiles, to cite some examples, are advancing by leaps and bounds and there are still those who question whether the Earth is flat because they cannot see its roundness, without thinking, for example, that the first private space trips under the command of Space X have already begun.
In the world, solar energy breaks records in capacity and time, as do storage and green hydrogen. And also, why not?, conventional technologies such as combined-cycle turbines, nuclear fission or direct air CO2 capture, with which artificial diamonds are now even produced.
There are even challenges that we will see in the future that we still do not perceive in their complete dimension. The waste from batteries and solar panels, light pollution or the saturation of the immediate airspace could also require thinking about creative solutions in the long term.
This is circular energy and this is what this space is about: that no one tells you that it cannot be done, that you should conform; that it is impossible to think or even dream of a better world. That they do not tell you that it is too early to think about green hydrogen or decarbonization; that they do not tell you that it is not possible to have 100% renewable energy and storage; that they do not tell you that you cannot think or dream of a better world, because, quoting Heraclitus, the only constant is change.
This article was originally published by Business Insider México.
Date: June 22, 2021
Original Link: https://businessinsider.mx/energias-renovables-innovacion-opinion-energia-circular-paul-alejandro-sanchez/ [offline]
Archived Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240229054340/https://businessinsider.mx/energias-renovables-innovacion-opinion-energia-circular-paul-alejandro-sanchez// [Archived]