Bob Metcalfe invented the Internet, or rather, he invented one of the key technologies that led to it, the ethernet. Then he started 3Com. Now he's a professor at the University of Texas and an investor with
Polaris Venture Partners. For the past five years, his passion has been energy. Specifically, Metcalfe wants to solve the looming energy crisis, in part by using his experience laying the groundwork for the Internet to help plan for a more sustainable, greener energy future. He's nicknamed this approach the Enernet.
His key point is the need to focus on more efficient, less destructive sources of energy to allow for huge increases in available energy. The Internet has shown us that innovation and distributed resources can not only provide faster, cheaper, better access to information and entertainment, but also create a foundation from which unknown advances will spring forth. Metcalfe quipped, "When the Internet was being built, I was there, and no one mentioned YouTube." Now, services such as YouTube and Netflix use enormous amounts of bandwidth to deliver content. (According to Google, YouTube gets 35 hours of video uploaded every minute, and 2 billion views a day.) The founders of the Internet took a closed system provided by IBM and AT&T and distributed it across a global, accessible network, but they never envisioned the dominance the Internet would have a few decades later as a platform for providing disruptive and positive changes to our way of life. As we try to solve the energy problem of reliance on unsustainable, damaging fossil fuels, Bob foresees a "squanderable abundance" of clean energy and the impetus for currently impossible ideas like cheap space travel. For Metcalfe, the exciting part is the potential for great benefits we can't even dream of — and solving global warming in the process.
How do we get there? Interviewer Joel Greenberg noted, "Efficiency is the cheapest form of innovation." A lot of very smart companies are trying to find alternative sources of energy. Polaris has invested in Sun Catalytix, a startup developing a method of separating hydrogen and oxygen from water sources, including contaminated water and sea water. The output is powerful, clean‐burning gases and super‐clean water. Cool stuff.
Other Polaris interests are working on various methods of energy storage such as "giant scuba tanks" for compressed air and bio‐fuel research such as carbon dioxide loving algae. Not all the investments end with great success, Metcalfe admitted: "One of our investments was in algae, but it didn't work out. But it wasn't the algae's fault, it was mine."
Metcalfe is betting on nuclear and solar, but suggests that natural gas will be the bridge to get there. Natural gas is cheaper than oil, produces half the harmful biproducts during use, and — due to recent advances in drilling — is available domestically in "virtually limitless" quantities. The evolution of primary energy sources has been wood, coal, and now oil. Gas is next, and Bob sees solar and nuclear beyond that.
The discussion pointed to learning from the innovations of the technology, strategy, and government involvement with the proliferation and growth of the Internet, and applying the same ideas to energy. Bob hasn't been happy with the results of the industry so far. He noted that the Department of Energy was set up with the explicit goal of ending the US's dependence on foreign oil. He thinks it should now be shut down due to failure to make inroads towards that goal. Even early attempts to shift to more domestic resources, such as corn ethanol, have been unsuccessful, although Metcalfe did note, "At least we're wasting the money in the Midwest now instead of in the Middle East."