Justin Hall-Tipping: Freeing energy from the grid

Why can't we solve these problems?

We know what they are.

Something always seems to stop us.

Why?

I remember March the 15th, 2000.

The B15 iceberg broke off the Ross Ice Shelf.

In the newspaper it said

"it was all part of a normal process."

A little bit further on in the article

it said "a loss that would normally take

the ice shelf 50-100 years to replace."

That same word, "normal,"

had two different,

almost opposite meanings.

If we walk into the B15 iceberg

when we leave here today,

we're going to bump into something

a thousand feet tall,

76 miles long,

17 miles wide,

and it's going to weigh two gigatons.

I'm sorry, there's nothing normal about this.

And yet I think it's this perspective of us

as humans to look at our world

through the lens of normal

is one of the forces

that stops us developing real solutions.

Only 90 days after this,

arguably the greatest discovery

of the last century occurred.

It was the sequencing for the first time

of the human genome.

This is the code that's in every single one

of our 50 trillion cells

that makes us who we are and what we are.

And if we just take one cell's worth

of this code and unwind it,

it's a meter long,

two nanometers thick.

Two nanometers is 20 atoms in thickness.

And I wondered,

what if the answer to some of our biggest problems

could be found in the smallest of places,

where the difference between what is

valuable and what is worthless

is merely the addition or subtraction

of a few atoms?

And what

if we could get exquisite control

over the essence of energy,

the electron?

So I started to go around the world

finding the best and brightest scientists

I could at universities

whose collective discoveries have the chance

to take us there,

and we formed a company to build

on their extraordinary ideas.

Six and a half years later,

a hundred and eighty researchers,

they have some amazing developments

in the lab,

and I will show you three of those today,

such that we can stop burning up our planet

and instead,

we can generate all the energy we need

right where we are,

cleanly, safely, and cheaply.

Think of the space that we spend

most of our time.

A tremendous amount of energy

is coming at us from the sun.

We like the light that comes into the room,

but in the middle of summer,

all that heat is coming into the room

that we're trying to keep cool.

In winter, exactly the opposite is happening.

We're trying to heat up

the space that we're in,

and all that is trying to get out through the window.

Wouldn't it be really great

if the window could flick back the heat

into the room if we needed it

or flick it away before it came in?

One of the materials that can do this

is a remarkable material, carbon,

that has changed its form in this incredibly beautiful reaction

where graphite is blasted by a vapor,

and when the vaporized carbon condenses,

it condenses back into a different form:

chickenwire rolled up.

But this chickenwire carbon,

called a carbon nanotube,

is a hundred thousand times smaller

than the width of one of your hairs.

It's a thousand times

more conductive than copper.

How is that possible?

One of the things about working at the nanoscale

is things look and act very differently.

You think of carbon as black.

Carbon at the nanoscale

is actually transparent

and flexible.

And when it's in this form,

if I combine it with a polymer

and affix it to your window

when it's in its colored state,

it will reflect away all heat and light,

and when it's in its bleached state

it will let all the light and heat through

and any combination in between.

To change its state, by the way,

takes two volts from a millisecond pulse.

And once you've changed its state, it stays there

until you change its state again.

As we were working on this incredible

discovery at University of Florida,

we were told to go down the corridor

to visit another scientist,

and he was working

on a pretty incredible thing.

Imagine

if we didn't have to rely

on artificial lighting to get around at night.

We'd have to see at night, right?

This lets you do it.

It's a nanomaterial, two nanomaterials,

a detector and an imager.

The total width of it

is 600 times smaller

than the width of a decimal place.

And it takes all the infrared available at night,

converts it into an electron

in the space of two small films,

and is enabling you to play an image

which you can see through.

I'm going to show to TEDsters,

the first time, this operating.

Firstly I'm going to show you

the transparency.

Transparency is key.

It's a film that you can look through.

And then I'm going to turn the lights out.

And you can see, off a tiny film,

incredible clarity.

As we were working on this, it dawned on us:

this is taking infrared radiation, wavelengths,

and converting it into electrons.

What if we combined it

with this?

Suddenly you've converted energy

into an electron on a plastic surface

that you can stick on your window.

But because it's flexible,

it can be on any surface whatsoever.

The power plant of tomorrow

is no power plant.

We talked about generating and using.

We want to talk about storing energy,

and unfortunately

the best thing we've got going

is something that was developed in France

a hundred and fifty years ago,

the lead acid battery.

In terms of dollars per what's stored,

it's simply the best.

Knowing that we're not going to put fifty of

these in our basements to store our power,

we went to a group at University of Texas at Dallas,

and we gave them this diagram.

It was in actually a diner

outside of Dallas/Fort Worth Airport.

We said, "Could you build this?"

And these scientists,

instead of laughing at us, said, "Yeah."

And what they built was eBox.

EBox is testing new nanomaterials

to park an electron on the outside,

hold it until you need it,

and then be able to release it and pass it off.

Being able to do that means

that I can generate energy

cleanly, efficiently and cheaply

right where I am.

It's my energy.

And if I don't need it, I can convert it

back up on the window

to energy, light, and beam it,

line of site, to your place.

And for that I do not need

an electric grid between us.

The grid of tomorrow is no grid,

and energy, clean efficient energy,

will one day be free.

If you do this, you get the last puzzle piece,

which is water.

Each of us, every day,

need just eight glasses of this,

because we're human.

When we run out of water,

as we are in some parts of the world

and soon to be in other parts of the world,

we're going to have to get this from the sea,

and that's going to require us to build desalination plants.

19 trillion dollars is what we're going to have to spend.

These also require tremendous amounts of energy.

In fact, it's going to require twice the world's

supply of oil to run the pumps

to generate the water.

We're simply not going to do that.

But in a world where energy is freed

and transmittable

easily and cheaply, we can take any water

wherever we are

and turn it into whatever we need.

I'm glad to be working with

incredibly brilliant and kind scientists,

no kinder than

many of the people in the world,

but they have a magic look at the world.

And I'm glad to see their discoveries

coming out of the lab and into the world.

It's been a long time in coming for me.

18 years ago,

I saw a photograph in the paper.

It was taken by Kevin Carter

who went to the Sudan

to document their famine there.

I've carried this photograph with me

every day since then.

It's a picture of a little girl dying of thirst.

By any standard this is wrong.

It's just wrong.

We can do better than this.

We should do better than this.

And whenever I go round

to somebody who says,

"You know what, you're working on something that's too difficult.

It'll never happen. You don't have enough money.

You don't have enough time.

There's something much more interesting around the corner,"

I say, "Try saying that to her."

That's what I say in my mind. And I just say

"thank you," and I go on to the next one.

This is why we have to solve our problems,

and I know the answer as to how

is to be able to get exquisite control

over a building block of nature,

the stuff of life:

the simple electron.

Thank you.

(Applause)