Feb 9, 2017
Datas and Sankey flow diagrams, a geeky discussion with Saul Griffith
“I’m not sure I wanted to be an inventor as much as I couldn’t do anything else.”
This article was published in The Beam #4— Subscribe now for more on the topic.
Saul Griffith is an Australian-American inventor whose innovations span industrial design, technology and science education. As a PhD-graduate of MIT and a principal at Squid Labs (self characterised as the “do” tank, not think tank), Saul demonstrates his boundless energy for inventing across diverse disciplines in the global public interest. Saul has founded and co-founded seven companies, including Otherlab, Makani Power and Instructables, and has received numerous awards including the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the Collegiate Inventor’s award and the Lemelson-MIT Student prize. Saul shared his thoughts with The Beam about future innovations and his interactive map that shows the flow of energy through the entire American economy and society.
Thanks for your time Saul. We’re interested to know what made you want to become an inventor.
I’m not sure I wanted to be an inventor as much as I couldn’t do anything else. I think of myself more as an engineer, and occasionally a scientist, but my wife and children prefer inventor more because it sounds more fun. I like being an inventor because it allows you to look at problems in the world, or gaps in the marketplace, and figure out what would help those things. It’s an optimistic job in every sense, always looking to improve things and make the world better.
When did you start thinking about applying your skills toward energy and environmental global issues?
About age 11. My mother was an artist and environmentalist, my father an engineer, and the union of the two was always important to me. I’ve been working full time on energy pretty much since leaving graduate school at MIT in 2004.
OtherLab can be described as an accelerator that develops the best inventions of the coming decades. How do you decide if one idea is better than another?
Otherlab runs projects that we feel are important or will be important. The majority are ideas developed internally, although sometimes someone brings one in. The right people are sought after to work on each, and away we go. Candidates are picked on their skills and portfolio and their drive to independently get it done.
How optimistic are you about our ability to solve the world’s energy problems?
A little bit. One has to be a little bit optimistic, but quite honestly it isn’t looking good. The Paris Agreement isn’t strong enough, and people are already pulling out of that. I’m hoping people will realise that it is more of a political and sociological problem than an energy one. There are many entrenched interests in the fossil fuel industry, and there is a lot of inertia to doing things “the way they’ve always been done”, even though the way we do most things are ways that were developed after the 1950s.
You recently decided to calculate the carbon footprint of every single action in your life. Why and how did you do it? And what were your conclusions?
Not the carbon footprint but the energy content. I wasn’t surprised by the overall results (too much!) but was surprised at some details like just how much newspaper and magazines use, and how significant the energy cost of transportation is for most people.
Last year you presented an interactive map that shows the flow of energy through the entire American economy and society. Where did this idea come from?
Sankey flow diagrams (as they are called) have existed for a long time to help understand the flow of energy and of energy waste in energy systems. I’ve stared at the Stanford GCEP exergy and the LLNL energy flow diagrams many many times in an effort to choose what is important to work on. I thought it would be nice to expand the detail of the project enormously, with a goal to get to a resolution of 0.1%, to find all industries and things that consume 0.1% or more of the energy flow. The results are fascinating, and focus the mind on what the problems worth solving and inventing for are.
How did you gather all the numbers?
Gathering numbers is a skill one learns in grad school. I had some friends who were also interested in the energy data. They helped. The data is Energy Information Administration data, NAICS data, the Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS), the Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS), the Manufacturing Energy Consumption Survey (MECS), the National Household Transit Survey (NHTS), various trade industry surveys, and some academic publications of global embedded energy flows. It took us a few weeks. It is really just a prototype for an even more ambitious effort. I’d like us to solve climate change by understanding energy flow in detail, and signing up for a society, in a more honest way, to make the changes required.
How would you explain this map to an amateur like me?
A consequence of the first law of thermodynamics is that energy can neither be created, nor be destroyed, it is just changed into different forms. Flow diagrams are conservative, meaning in any vertical slice along that flow diagram, all the energy flows are just adding up to 100%. So this diagram allows us to see not only all of the places in our lives we use energy, but also everywhere that there is waste. This allows us to think about new ways to do things, as well as ways to avoid waste, as well as ways to provide clean energy into the system.
Were you surprised about the numbers you gathered?
I’ve looked at energy data long enough to not be hugely surprised by anything. There were however some really interesting things that I found. In the U.S., about 5–6% of energy flow is used to process crude oil into the gasoline that we use. What this really means is that cars are even worse than you think. 28 quads is how much oil we use in the transportation sector, but that really should be thought of as 33–34 quads. That means your car, in some sense. is getting even worse mpg [miles per gallon]. There are similar issues with coal and natural gas, where the mining and processing and transportation energy costs are placed into the industrial or manufacturing categories by the way people currently draw these charts. This emphasizes that it is even more important to move to renewable and non-carbon sources of energy, and that there are bigger gains in efficiency than we thought if we do [have these sources of energy]. I also love some of the tiny details such as that one can infer that short car trips (less than five miles) use a shocking amount of energy, as does the 0.5% of American energy flow which is jet fuel for the U.S. military.
What are your main findings and conclusions with this work?
We have been focussed too much on technical solutions and on consumer decisions. What I mean by that is that as individuals we only make a small number of decisions in our lives that individually and collectively have a big impact on our energy or environmental footprint. Think of that small number of decisions as the “infrastructure of your life”:
- How far you live from the places you work, go to school, and go to play
- What type of car you drive or whether you ride a bike or electric moped
- How large your house is, and where it is. (Smaller, closer to where you work and play and well insulated is better)
- What is your diet (less meat is better)
- The number and efficiency of your appliances and devices (how many fridges/washing machines/light fixtures/flat screen TVs do you own, and so forth).
We need to acknowledge that people don’t want to make the “right choice” at every purchasing decision, so rather we need to redesign society and culture to help people make the right infrastructure decisions in their lives. This means helping people make an electric vehicle their next vehicle. It means redesigning cities to make them more walkable and shorter commuting distances. It means we need to have better, more efficient architecture and recognize that when one builds a house you are locking the occupants into energy use behaviours for the next 50–100 years.
We need to stand up to fossil fuel companies, and the stock markets that support them (and are reliant upon them). We have to find a way to wind down their operations much sooner than they would have you think we should.
We need to redesign our “free market”. What we think of as a “free market” is really a late 20th century idea, and it’s not very free at all, but rather a set of rules and behaviours that have locked us into doing things in certain ways. We need to clearly identify where those failures in the market are, and adjust the market rules to motivate the right behaviours. A global consumption tax or carbon tax is one proposed way to try and do this. I’m not qualified to say whether it is the best way, but we haven’t made much progress getting it to the point of impacting the marketplace significantly.
Any new projects in the loop that you’d like to share with The Beam? What’s next on your plate?
Ramping up our solar project — sunfolding — for production and expanding; new work in high efficiency compressors and heat exchangers to make better HVAC systems and refrigerators; an awesome new project in textiles that get warmer and cooler in response to the environment; more energy data projects; more fun education projects like howtoons.com.
Interview by Anne-Sophie Garrigou
