Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
Bob Metcalfe is very smart, very successful, and very rich. Now an unashamed venture capitalist investing in both PV and home nuclear as part of his diversified portfolio, his major vision is for a new “enernet” that would fundamentally revolutionize the energy industry. He spoke of this as well as his invention of Ethernet this evening at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. “Just as it took 30 years to break the communications monopoly, with energy it will probably take 30 years to break the energy monopoly and be able to create new affordable energy sources for the world,” postulated Metcalfe.
Trying to sell the value of networked PCs back in the 1980s, he decided that the value increased approximately as the square of the number of connections, which is what gave us “Metcalfe’s Law” (see figure). So the major commonality between Metcalfe’s and Moore’s Laws is that each one was originally just a marketing tool (the term used by Moore at a previous Computer History Museum event).
“Metcalfe Law has never been numerically evaluated. What is value, what is connected, what is a user?” quipped Metcalfe. In all seriousness, he talked about reasonable attempts to quantify his namesake law. “If you do the math, the critical mass depends on the cost of the connection and the value of the connection,” explained Metcalfe about the current effects of the internet and new devices. “The critical mass is heading down.”
The energy grid today has limited capacity, is very synchronous and fragile, and so it reminds Metcalfe of the computer world of the 1980s. “We need some research on what the smart grid of the future will look like,” he said. From first principles, it needs a control pane, standards, storage, and it should be far more symmetrical (in terms of allowing for safe metered energy to flow both in and out), etc. “Maybe the internet will be the control pane,” continued Metcalfe. “Maybe we should give up on AC and go back to DC as Edison wanted.” More on Metcalfe and innovation will be in the BetaSights Newsletter. –E.K.