Warren Buffet says man's last great technical challenge is energy

If you enjoy the pipes, you might enjoy a Celtic rock band by the name of Needfire. Needfire: Celtic Rock! Caught them at the Houston Highland Games a few years back. Their recordings are fun, but they are better live. "Fight where I stand" has become a bit of an anthem for me.

Hurts my gas mileage when I listen to the pipes though...

 

I hope that humanity will hopefully change its way of thinking. Think more about sustainability and less about more consumption. (I know try telling that to developing countries). I also don't agree with Buffett that energy is the last great problem to be solved. Nature has a way of throwing new challenges out. I'm not putting Mr. Buffett down- he is a very smart man in the arena of capital accumulation. I also am very pessimistic about any Human utopia in the near future.

 

Isn't the last challenge for Man to get off this earth before the sun implodes?

 

Escaping was the winning scenario in the computer game SimEarth. Wimps. Stay and fight! The 'present day' scenario was pretty much unwinnable, too, unless you got lucky with an escape pod.

 

I'm more an axis and allies player myself.

 

I'll check 'em out. Seven Nations and Enter the Haggis are pretty good. I tend to gravitate towards the solo pipers: Gordon Duncan, Stuart Liddell, Gordon Walker, Jack Lee, etc.

 

Not pipes, really, but if you like Celtic Rock check out Flogging Molly.

I see you're in Denver. There are certainly lots of Prius here in the Front Range Metro - we should start a local club!

 

We should there are thousands of the bloody things. It has surprised me that there hasn't really been any interest... even in Boulder. I've head of Flogging Molly, but nothing more. I'll chcek them out. Thx.

 

My dinosaurs had a nuclear war in SimEarth.

 

Combustible liquid fuels are awesome for their power density. But liquid fuels don't have to be drilled for.

In the future we can rely on Algae based liquid fuels to power our heavy equipment.

And the efficiency of heavy duty machines and vehicles can improved dramatically by adding hybrid battery systems. Such machines are already being manufactured and sold to utilities and whatnot.

 

Hello all, first post!

I was at that Warren Buffet stockholder meeting and when Warren and Charlie Munger (Warren's co-host) talked about man being able to harness power from the wind and sun, I was stunned. Charlie always used to make fun of climate change, saying he didn't mind if it got a little warmer as he was getting colder in his old age. These guys are not green or tech-oriented by any means, so it was definitely a change of pace for them.

Now they have really done the green thing a lot at the meeting this year. They had a home from Clayton Homes called the IHome, which had all sorts of green features (bamboo flooring, solar panels, recycled decks, etc.)

Of particular interest to this group were the cars from BYD, which they have a 10% stake in, one of which gets 250 miles on a single charge at highway speeds and will be sold starting in the last 1/2 of this year in China and in the US by 2012 (lithium ion Fe battery).

They also are doing a lot of battery smart-grid solutions, such as using a hybrid vehicle battery to store power in a neighborhood (where we now have transformers), to help provide power flow when the utility power is off, or to provide power regulation when dealing with wind/solar power sources, which may not be consistent like nuclear/coal.

 

The big investors, especially the successful ones, follow the money or control the investments.....but they do not create smarts that get us to sustainable energy. The sudden "arrival" of T Boone Pickens, Warren Buffet, and most Venture Capitalist firms are going green since renewable energy is on the border of becoming profitable. They sure as hades did not get a new religion. The engineers and designers who have been developing the turbines, solar collectors, and other technologies are (as always) invisible and the moneymen make it sound like they are the ones making the difference.

 

The one thing that these guys to bring that the engineers can't is a form of credibility that the mainstream can grock. Because they have scads of cash people (sadly) pay attention to them and give a lot of weight to what they have to say. The people that developed the technologies are seen as being "too close" to the solution so their opinions are not given, perhaps, the weight that they deserve. So, as usual, it's a mixed bag.

 

True, money gets people's attention. But I have to also say that my fellow engineers are not terribly objective and mostly operate like hired guns. Too many will either do whatever they can to make a project look attractive (tarting it up) when an objective look at the economics and assumptions really should lead to its quick rejection; or they will let their political passions/desire for something to be more favorable cloud their judgement--for the latter see their long rejection of AGW with tortured arguments.

As an engineer on projects you are rewarded for successfully executing the project...not necessarily making the actual venture successful. If you are given a project, then plug through the economics, take a look at the marketing assumptions and conclude "this will never make money and should be killed" then you will be in conflict with the execs/management who are pushing the project.

I've seen this on big projects where we threw out relatively inexpensive heat recovery cross exchangers and the like just to save a few dollars of capital. Even though the CFRR was 50-100% on an objective basis for the heat recovery the projects were capital constrained. So the lead engineer would "massage" the assumptions for the heat recovery to make it look like low return...this would allos a little capital to be shaved from the project, which itself was a dog that would only be worse without the exchangers.

 

I alluded to this in my post as well. Engineers are humans too.