1. Customers don’t usually know what they want

You can’t just ask customers what they want and give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new. – Steve Jobs

Early in my career, whenever I started a new project, I would make the mistake of asking the customer’s program manager to provide a specification. The program manager would, of course, dutifully do his job by dreaming up some impossible “reach goals” and a long list of features.

I would then have to push back and try to “manage” the customer’s expectations. It was a losing battle. Too often, we would sign off on the spec and, from then on, the customer’s random wish list became gospel with our engineers. We’d spend hundreds of man-hours designing, developing, testing, and debugging. We’d run late…we’d run over-budget…we’d finally cry “uncle!” and ask to either “de-scope” (simplify) the project or receive additional funding. It became a mess.

I’ve learned that customers don’t know what they want. They’re just as busy as everyone else, so they typically don’t take the necessary time to really study their options. They’re not the experts in the field…you are! Instead of analyzing the tradeoffs, it’s easier for them to request everything and the kitchen sink.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t engage in a dialogue with your customers, but definitely be the one to make the final decision on what goes into the product and what is ripped out. Your customers will thank you for taking the decision off their hands…and for delivering something simple, elegant, and functional on time.

Remember that critics in the technology press declared the iPad “DOA: Disappointing on Arrival”. Little did they know.

2. Simplicity and focus

I’m a big believer in boredom. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, and out of curiosity comes everything. – Steve Jobs

Technology tempts us with countless avenues for distraction. Finished responding to all your email? …then surf the web while video-chatting on Skype, check out photos on Facebook, discuss on LinkedIn while simultaneously tweeting your latest thoughts and texting your spouse. If, instead, you’re in the mood for some thoughtful writing, then you can publish a blog with the click of a button!

In observing my mentors and other successful people, I’ve noticed that they make room in their lives for “boredom”, or undisturbed time for thought. They make space in their schedules for quiet time alone in their office, with the computer off. They read a lot. They make an effort to have frequent lunches and dinners with their colleagues.

Most of them constantly try to simplify, simplify, simplify. They avoid unnecessary complexity, they have tricks that block out all the digital noise, and they focus intently on what’s important.

Not only did Steve Jobs products’ design epitomize this simplicity but he was also a “designer” of his daily life. He focused on his role as CEO without pontificating on politics. He decided to end his philanthropy efforts to focus instead on Pixar. He blocked out all intrusions into his personal life.

Keep things simple.

3. Price isn’t everything

In one of my previous companies, we had a couple sales people who would never hit their sales targets. It was always one excuse or another. “The product just needs one more feature,” or “I can only make this sale if we offer a 20% discount.”

My partners and I decided to not engage in a “race to the bottom” with our competitors who had established manufacturing operations in China. We continued to manufacture in New Jersey. Our products were more expensive, but we made up for it in application engineering services and advanced software.

Steve Jobs demonstrated that customers don’t always make their final decision based on price. Offer them something well above the average and they’ll pay the justifiable premium.

4. Don’t limit your thinking with dogma

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. – Steve Jobs

Entrepreneurs can take two lessons from this quote. First, don’t believe your competitors’ press releases. Your competitors look ugly when they stand naked by the mirror, too. Out of their very nature, product press releases emphasize a product’s benefits and ignore its flaws. Similarly, the technology press rarely has the inside scoop necessary to report on the challenges that companies are really facing — the employee defections, the spaghetti code, the internal politics. They usually report the good stuff that’s fed to them. Don’t believe the dogma you read in the press.

Second, don’t look to the press to show where your next breakthrough product will be. As Wayne Gretsky said, “skate where the puck is going, not where it is.” Press releases and most news stories cover products that have been under development for at least six months, usually longer. They’re “old news.” If your product development efforts imitate what you read in the press, by the time you’re done building it you’ll be two years behind everyone.

Instead, focus on “your own inner voice;” figure out what it’s saying about the future you want to build, and then work like mad to build it better than anyone else. I’m not saying that you should stick your head in the sand and ignore your industry’s press. Stay technically informed and expect occasional sparks of inspiration from others…but remember that conventional wisdom is outdated.

5. Execution is more important than being a first mover

In a similar vein, don’t believe that “It’s all been done before.” Just because one company is already working on a similar idea to yours doesn’t mean that they’ll succeed. It doesn’t mean that they’ll develop a good product or build the right team or raise the necessary funding or capture your market share. I’m not saying that you should build another Groupon copy-cat service — there are thousands of those already — but you definitely should not be scared into inaction if competitors are attempting to build similar products.

I hate the phrase “first-mover advantage”. I believe that first movers usually end up with nothing except arrows in their backs.

Apple didn’t build the first computer. They didn’t build the first digital music player. They definitely didn’t build the first smart phone. Apple was the second-mover, and it dominated all of these markets. Execution is what made the difference.

Steve Jobs’s ability to inspire, cajole, and scare excellent performance out of his team is what made the difference. Apple learned lessons from its predecessors’ mistakes, found novel solutions for its competitors’ problems and shortcomings, and then executed perfectly.

Apple’s slogan was “Think Different.” A more accurate version, I think, is “Think Better.” Over the next few weeks, whenever I use an iProduct created by Steve Jobs, I’ll try to remind myself to do just that.

——

Thanks to Nicole Quiterio for the idea that sparked this article.

Photo credit: www.gizmowebs.com “Life of Steve Jobs in Pictures”

If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.     – Sir Isaac Newton

All technical innovation has come from building on what came before, by using the building blocks provided by engineers who came before us. While its easy to recognize this is true for big innovations, engineers forget this principle way too often in their daily work.

[If you don’t have the time to read the rest of this post, then skip straight to this article about a disastrous example — Netscape v5.0 — of what happens when engineers and managers decide to build from scratch instead of building on what came before. I consider it required reading for all engineers working for me.]

A Shortcoming of Engineering Education?

Consider for a minute how engineering education teaches students to approach problems:

• Professors always go back to first principles (and rightly so).
• Problem sets force students to start their analysis from the ground up…and usually by themselves.
• Copying others is considered cheating.
• Students must finish all the coursework within one semester, which prevents them from building up a “toolkit” of solutions for solving more complex problems.
• Project management and risk management are rarely taught.

Engineers are taught to reference the textbook when trying to solve a difficult problem; they are not taught where to look on the web for a pre-existing solution since that would be considered cheating. They’re definitely not taught the social skills necessary to cold-call a subject-matter expert to pick his brain. (To read more about this, see my post from last week on Emotional Intelligence.)

Fortunately, some professors are starting to change their teaching methods to account for the wealth of information on the web…and to teach students to solve problems as they would in the “real world.” This is easiest in computer science, where a solution can simply be copy-and-pasted, as opposed to disciplines that involve hardware.

For example, computer science Professor Adrien Treuille at Carnegie Mellon encourages his students to use code available for free online in solving their problem sets, as long as they cite the source. He explained to me, “This approach allows students to develop much more complex and interesting programs than they could if everything were coded from scratch, and they become familiar with the coding style…and the best sources for free code…that is typically used in industry.”

Information Asymmetry in Engineering

In addition to their academic training, “asymmetric information” also entices engineers to start from scratch, even when an existing solution is available. Let me explain what I mean by “asymmetric information” in this context…

There are usually several ways to solve a problem, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Frequently the choice is between modifying an existing implementation versus building a new one from scratch.

The Existing Solution (warts and all): If an engineer has an existing solution in front of him (or her), all the hacks, bugs, and shortcomings are totally apparent. Documentation is frequently lacking, so reverse-engineering is necessary. If multiple people have worked on the project, the solution is frequently a messy mix of various coding and design styles.

Building It from Scratch: In contrast, when the engineer considers a new, fresh approach, the advantages are much more apparent than the disadvantages. The engineer sees the final solution in his mind’s eye as a gleaming, flawless example of engineering perfection. Of course, as the saying goes, “The devil is in the details.” Without the opportunity to work through the details on a new solution, the devil, Murphy’s Law, and shortcuts necessitated by project deadlines have not yet impacted the work.

For these reasons — the apparent shortcomings of an existing solution and the undiscovered shortcomings of a brand new implementation — engineers are tempted to scrap an existing solution in favor of doing it their (presumably better) way.

As I mentioned earlier, the best and most disastrous  example I’ve seen of this is the re-coding of the v5.0 Netscape browser. I consider this article REQUIRED READING for all engineers, regardless of their specialty. Please…think twice before you start rebuilding something from scratch!

On the Shoulders of Giants

There is a great scene in the movie Flash of Genius. Greg Kinnear plays Dr. Robert Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. The scene shows him in a courtroom, cross-examining an expert witness called by the defendant, Ford Motor Company, which stole his invention. The expert had just testified that since Dr. Kearns did not invent the capacitor, the transistor, or the variable resistor and just bought them out of a catalog, that he did not create anything new.

Dr. Kearns starts his cross-examination by reading from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.”

Kearns asks the expert witness,  “Did Charles Dickens create the word ‘it’?”

“No, he didn’t create that word,”replied the witness.

“Did he create the word ‘was’?”

“No.”

“The?”

“No.”

“Best?”

“No.”

“Times?”

“No.”

Kearns continues, “I’ve got a dictionary here. I haven’t checked, but I would guess that every word that’s in this book can be found in this dictionary. Do you agree that there’s not, probably, a single new word in this book? All Charles Dickens did was arrange them into a new pattern, isn’t that right?”

“Right.”

“But Dickens did create something new, didn’t he? By using words. The only tools that were available to him. Just as almost all inventors in history have had to use the tools that were available to them. Telephones, space satellites all of these were made from parts that already existed, correct, Professor? Parts that you might buy out of a catalog.”

“Technically that’s true, yes, but that does…”

“No further questions, your honor.”

Don’t invent a new language and write a new dictionary before starting your work. Even though the English language is an imperfect work-in-progress, it is still used successfully every day to communicate, and sometimes even to create beauty and inspiration. Use the tools, resources, and existing solutions you have available to you, even if they’re not perfect…and build on the shoulders of giants.

—–

Image credit: The original source and artist are unknown to me, otherwise I would provide credit. Link to Google search results for this image.

P.S. While people are listening, I want to publicly shame Mark Schultz for skipping out on the Hightstown Triathlon last weekend.  No excuses in 2012…start your swim training now so nobody has reason to worry about you drowning!

Originally, I applied the same mentality to my professional development: in order to be a successful engineer, I reasoned, I had to know everything well enough to develop engineering solutions by myself. Big brain = success, or so I thought.

Most of my real-world engineering projects were larger and more complex than I could handle by myself, of course. Fortunately, I read a passage in the book “Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman that fundamentally changed the way I approach my work as an engineer:

Researchers Robert Kelley and Janet Caplan  studied star performers at Bell Labs, a renowned research lab near Princeton, New Jersey. The telecommunication systems the Bell Labs engineers developed were highly complex…more than any one person could understand…so everyone worked in teams, ranging from 5 to 150 people.

While everyone at the lab had a high IQ, only some stood out as stars. At the beginning of the study, managers and peers were asked to pick the top 10% of their colleagues.

The assumption was that those with the highest IQ or best academic performance would also excel in this highly technical environment. That assumption was wrong…by standard cognitive measures such as IQ, standardized tests, and academic performance, and even social measures such as personal inventories, there were no discernible differences between the stars and everyone else. The researchers had to dig deeper.

By performing detailed interviews, they discovered the critical difference was the stars’ interpersonal skills and how their professional relationships impacted their engineering work performance. The star performers put time into cultivating good relationships with people whose services might be needed in a crunch. When faced with a challenging problem, they were able to pick up the phone, call the right person, and get a quick answer that was usually correct. The average engineer, on the other hand, either struggled mightily to develop a solution on his own — and frequently an inferior one — or wasted his time with unreturned calls and unanswered emails.

The researchers summarized it this way: ‘The formal organization is set up to handle easily anticipated [and routine] problems. But when unexpected problems arise, the informal organization kicks in. Highly adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.’

– Paraphrase of Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence, p. 161-162

An engineer I worked closely with for several years, Keith, embodied the lessons I took of the Bell Labs study. Keith wouldn’t initially strike you as a straight-A braniac student. I never saw his transcript, but I would guess that he enjoyed socializing as much as he enjoyed studying. But, man, he is one of the best engineers I’ve met. Whenever he’s faced with a challenging problem, he’s able to research it quickly and thoroughly enough to be able to ask the right questions. He then tracks down the best subject matter experts he can find, calls him them up, picks their brains, and, if necessary, visits them in person that same week. That’s usually enough to rapidly solve most challenging problems, but if not, he’ll contract them to see a solution through to completion. He repeats this day after day. The result is an ability to solve engineering problems that have vexed his entire industry for decades.

Based on the lessons from Goleman’s book and Keith’s example, I make a concerted effort each day to stay in touch with other bright people in my industry and pick their brains on a regular basis. I still code and design hardware, but it’s the continuous, informal expert input that allows me to incorporate best practices and lessons learned, and minimize the risk of the schedule delays and budget over-runs that typically kill projects.

In my post next week, I’ll write about what I see as the “corollary” to the emotional intelligence problem with engineers: what happens when engineers — including myself at the start of my career — undervalue outside feedback and ignore lessons learned. It’s a problem of “asymmetric information” that leads to costly efforts to re-invent the wheel. Stay tuned.

Special thanks to Mark Kasrel for teaching me about Emotional Intelligence and its importance.

Photo credit: iStockPhoto

Friedman writes:

If only…If only America could be China for a day — just one day.

As far as I’m concerned, China’s system of government is inferior to ours in every respect — except one. That is the ability of China’s current generation of leaders — if they want — to cut through all their legacy industries, all the pleading special interests, all the bureaucratic obstacles, all the worries of a voter backlash, and simply order top-down the sweeping changes in prices, regulations, standards, education, and infrastructure that China’s long-term strategic national interests — changes that would normally take Western democracies years or decades to debate and implement. That is such an asset when it comes to trying to engineer a sweeping change, like the green revolution, where you are competing against deeply embedded, well-funded, entrenched interests, and where you have to motivate the public to accept certain short-term sacrifices, including higher energy prices, for long-term gains. For Washington to be able to order all the right changes and set up the ideal market conditions for innovation, and then get out of the way and let the natural energy of the American capitalist system work — that would be a dream.
– Tom Friedman, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded“

Friedman goes on to cite examples of mandating unleaded gasoline: America started the process in 1973 and didn’t finish until 1994. China accomplished the same between 1998 to 2000. America stalled 32 years before implementing new vehicle efficiency standards, but China took only two years.

Friedman’s “China for a day” thought was sparked by an interview with GE’s CEO, Jeff Immelt, who commented,

“What doesn’t exist today in the energy business is the hand of God. I think if you asked the utilities and big manufacturers in this business what they would most like, it would be for the president to stand up and say: ‘By 2025 we are going to produce this much coal, this much natural gas, this much wind, this much solar, this much nuclear, and nothing is going to stand in the way.’ You’d have about thirty days of complaining, and then people…would just stand up and say, ‘Thank you, Mr. President, now let’s go do it.'”

…and we would. I’d be one of them.

America’s CleanTech Vision, Adapted for the Stage

Image credit: unknown

In America, we instead have the political theater that unfolded this past week in Congress (for example).  I heard Peter Sagal describe it best during this past weekend’s broadcast of the “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” news quiz on NPR.

PETER SAGAL: The House this week tried, but failed, to keep the government from taking away America’s what?
(Soundbite of bell)

SAGAL: Incandescent light bulbs! This is what happened; I will explain. Back in 2007, a bipartisan majority in Congress, and President Bush, passed a law [the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which was voted in at 314-100 that year,] calling for a major increase in light bulb efficiency. It’s only now that Republicans, including the guy who actually sponsored that bill [Rep. Mary Bono Mack], realized that the whole thing was a plot by President Obama to rob us of our freedom, using his Kenyan socialist time-traveling technology.
(Laughter)

SAGAL: So they tried this week to repeal the law calling for light bulb standards. Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann weighed in. She said, quote, “The American people want less government intrusion into their lives, and that includes staying out of their personal light bulb choices,” unquote.
(Laughter)

SAGAL: Ms. Bachmann believes Americans should have perfect freedom to screw whatever they want, but only if we’re talking about light bulbs.
(Laughter)

The sad thing is that after the Republican’s repeal failed, they voted successfully to strip the Department of Energy of the funding necessary to enforce the lightbulb switch. Read more here.

Stimulus Funding — Thanks, but No Thanks

Take a look at this graph of the DOE’s solar energy technology research funding profile. Do you think this is the right way to fund an organization…let alone a nation-wide research effort?

Image credit: Department of Energy

It would have made infinitely more sense to spread that huge spike from the stimulus evenly over 4-5 years. Last year I saw the DOE struggle mightily to manage twice the amount of funding (and triple the money from 2006). Spreading out the funding was, of course, not politically feasible for Obama. He had to pass the stimulus and then move on to the next fight. Obama had to beat the clock before the Republicans took the House in 2010.

I recently spoke with a friend who works for a senior DOE official; he said that under the current political climate, staffers are expecting a 30% budget cut in the DOE’s EERE (Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy) office funding. He also said he wouldn’t be surprised if the Republicans killed ARPA-E — a new Obama initiative to pursue high-risk/high-reward energy technologies — within a year or so.

This on-again, off-again nature of clean tech research funding in the U.S. prevents innovators and engineers from gaining momentum through sustained funding, and it makes investors skittish about the unpredictability of government support.

The CEO of one clean tech company that I’m involved with — a company that was one of the largest recipients of DOE research stimulus funding, landing nearly $10MM in contracts — quipped “The DOE is driving this company out of business!”

No, he was not just being an ungrateful S.O.B. The company had received notices from the DOE that they were selected for awards. The CEO took the risk…assuming the money would come in on the usual timeframe…to start hiring the additional engineers necessary to execute the projects. This is exactly what the stimulus was intended for! Instead, the DOE, which was overwhelmed with administering double the number of projects, took nearly six months to get the funding in place. In the meantime, the company couldn’t bill for its work and bled cash in paying all the additional heads.

Just Leave it to the Free Market!

In Europe, the grass roots support of clean tech is strong, so governments are much more likely to mandate utility renewable portfolio standards and higher vehicle efficiency standards. On the other hand, Europe has triple the electricity and gasoline costs than in the U.S.

On the other side of the world, in China, the government issues 5-year plans and can mandate sweeping reforms in a matter of months. On the other hand, China suffers from lack of enforcement and grass roots initiative.

In the U.S., free-market conservatives say that anything the government can do, the market will do better. Want to bet? I’d wager they’ve never sat on a standards development committee, which is one way the free market decides on technologies, performance, and safety standards…these committees move painfully slow!

Can you imagine building our national highway system based on free market incentives? A commercial company trying to do that would go bankrupt just from fighting all the lawsuits from affected neighborhoods.

Can you imagine building the space shuttle and space station programs using the free market? Several companies are currently trying to build tourist spacecraft (30 years after the first space shuttle was built), and they’ll only have a fraction of the altitude and payload of the shuttle.

We Can be China for a Day…and Better than China Thereafter

There definitely is a role for government in providing leadership for big, important projects. The space program, the national highway system, the military, safety enforcement for drugs and food are among them…and so is clean tech. The government doesn’t necessarily need to bankroll clean tech the way that it paid for the entire highway system, because financing that’s the role of the free market.

What the government does need to do is:

1. Provide bold, clear targets to give the industry’s technologists direction, and
2. Its support needs to be unwavering, to give investors the peace of mind that the rules won’t dramatically change after the next election cycle. 

Voters need to demand that of their representatives at the polls and through advocacy, because if the government provides the marching orders, my colleagues and I in the clean tech industry will do the rest!

— August 20, 2011 UPDATE —

RenewableBizDaily recently posted this interesting, short article describing how China is out-pacing the United States in most aspects of renewable energy development. Much of this is simply due to the country’s explosive economic growth, which driven by the move of millions of people into cities and at a higher standard of living. However, the country’s support of clean technologies — as opposed to more traditional coal, oil, and gas energy sources — is driven by the Chinese government’s ability to make decisions more quickly, decisively, and definitively than those in the West. It’s a short article, so take a look, here.

The annual R&D 100 Awards identify the 100 most significant, newly introduced research and development advances in multiple disciplines. Winning one of the R&D 100 Awards provides a mark of excellence known to industry, government, and academia as proof that the product is one of the most innovative ideas of the year, nationally and internationally.
– Wikipedia

Image credit: R&D Magazine website.

Not one but two new products I was involved with won the R&D 100 Awards this year!

Princeton Power Systems’ Demand Response Inverter (DRI)

The DRI was one of my projects at Princeton Power Systems (PPS), together with Mahesh Gandhi and Paul Heavener. I’d love to list all the talented engineers who worked on the project — they’re the ones who got the work done despite management’s best efforts to the contrary! — but I’m afraid they’d immediately get recruited by headhunters if I publicly listed their names. They know who they are and know how much I appreciate their hard work.

The DRI was funded under the Solar America Initiative and was one of the 4 winners of a Stage III Solar Energy Grid Integration Systems (SEGIS) commercialization contract from the DOE and Sandia Labs. PPS and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Ward Bower and his team at Sandia for their support over the past several years.

Image credit: Princeton Power Systems website

The DRI significantly simplifies the integration of solar to the grid. As I described briefly in this post and I’ll describe in more detail in an upcoming post, utility companies would much prefer to see a constant flow of power coming from a solar array. The solar array’s random output due to weather, varying cloud cover, and changing temperature make it incredibly difficult for utility companies to predict the power that will be available on the grid.

The simple solution is to add energy storage. In order to truly solve the problem of intermittancy, however, the energy storage system must be able to respond fast enough to make the power flow “seamless” when a cloud suddently casts shade on the solar array. By integrating both the solar and battery power converters into one box with an intelligent control system “blending” the power, the DRI can make the solar array “look” to the utility company like a steady power generation source.

Integrating a fourth terminal for motor/generator control provides additional benefits, such as the ability to decrease power consumption on demand. The DRI should be available as a product in the next few months, so stay tuned to the Princeton Power website for more details.

Successful Research Projects depend upon Luck and Networking

I first came across silicon carbide when I was doing some homework for a NJ Commission on Science and Technology funding grant. The Commission’s goal was to encourage collaboration between NJ universities and NJ companies, so I started looking at the research programs at various NJ schools to see if they were working on anything relevant to my work at PPS. Lo and behold, I came across Prof. Jian Zhao’s silicon carbide research at Rutgers. After a brief meeting in his office I realized that we could use his high-voltage silicon carbide thyristor research — which he had shelved several years earlier — in PPS’s AC-link power converter. AC-link and SiC thyristors by themselves were good, but combined in one product for Navy shipboard power distribution and wind and wave power conversion, they would cut energy losses by 2/3 and increase power density (reduce size) by 5-10x! Together, we would be the first to integrate silicon carbide thyristors in an actual end product, using devices developed by Prof. Zhao’s spinoff company, United Silicon Carbide.

Thus started a 3-year research program funded jointly by New Jersey, the U.S. Navy, and the Department of Energy. In particular, thanks to Steve Swindler at NAVSEA for his ongoing support of this effort.

Some time during year one, I met Jon Greene and his team at Widetronix at an SBIR conference in DC. They had an interesting technology to solve some of the reliability problems with silicon carbide, which I wrote about in this post. They introduced me to Ranbir Singh at GeneSiC Semiconductor, who was also developing a silicon carbide thyristor product.

GeneSiC Semiconductor’s 6kV Silicon Carbide (SiC) Thyristors

Ranbir and I have had a close working relationship ever since this initial introduction. I encourage anyone interested in silicon carbide to look into their products. For a small business, their technology, manufacturing, and test capabilities are quite impressive.

GeneSiC won the R&D 100 Award for its 6kV silicon carbide thyristor product, which I started integrating into a prototype AC-link power converter at PPS. There are still some hurdles to overcome, but the technology is incredibly promising.

This little device (the image below is its true size) can switch 20-50 times faster than existing silicon thyristors under voltage stresses that are 50x higher than the 120V power outlet in your home. They are sure to become the “valves” used in utility-scale power distribution equipment to control power flow on the future smart grid.

Image credit: GeneSiC Semiconductor website

Congratulations to Ranbir and his team.

Are you in-the-know with other successful technologies?

If any readers have exposure to the technology and products developed by other R&D 100 Award winners, please email me. I’d be interested to learn more about these other innovations.

According to a recent IEEE Spectrum magazine article about the LED lightbulb, a 40-watt-equivalent LED bulb starts at around US $20, and 60-W versions retail for far more. In addition, you’ll have to buy new ballasts, which contain power electronic switching components and provide another source of revenue.

$20 for a measly 40 W bulb is too rich for my blood. Fortunately, these costs will drop significantly over the next 2 to 3 years.

…and Then Costs Will Keep Dropping

LEDs are similar in constructions to the transistors that make up your computer’s microchips. The information age was fueled by the rapid miniaturization and falling costs for computer chips, known as Moore’s Law.

Moore’s Law  states that the density of transistors doubles approximately every two years.

Image credit: Wgsimon. Used under Creative Commons license.

LEDs are also subject to Moore’s Law, which means that they will quickly become more efficient. Fewer LED chips and less power conditioning hardware will be needed to provide the same amount of lighting.

I’ve been told that the industry expects LED lighting to quickly become a commodity. That’s good for the rest of us, but not so good for a long-term growth business. LED and power semiconductor manufacturers see only a narrow (maybe 5-year) window to make a profit off of this technology.

Expect a gold rush as companies try to capture all the profits possible before Moore’s Law zeros them out. Then score one for the consumer and planet earth.

1. Provide a structure for entrepreneurs to regularly check their progress and re-visit their plans.
2. Provide more regular, asynchronous updates to board members and advisors — as opposed to just once every 6 weeks.
3. Facilitate real-time coaching.
4. Enable coaching despite long-distance separation between the company and its advisors.

Steve backed up his hypothesis with promising results from an experimentation at Stanford.

Why Not the Entire Company?

I went for a run along the Delaware River after reading Steve’s post and I started thinking about whether this idea could be useful for an entire startup company, not just the executive team and board.

I recognize that one of the main issues with board meetings is that they’re only scheduled every 6 weeks; they’re not real-time. In a company this shouldn’t be the case: the employees show up to the office and interact with each other daily. But hear me out…

At my first company, we frequently struggled with three issues:

1. We had more good ideas than we had time to pursue. We didn’t have a good system for capturing new ideas, vetting them, and then executing on the best ones. This created some frustration amongst our creative employees, since good ideas were frequently neglected.
2. We subjected ourselves to time-wasting debates and endless pontification. People didn’t take (or have) the time to really think through their positions. As a result, old debates were frequently rehashed.
3. We lacked materials for on-boarding new employees and orienting them on past projects. Megabytes of documentation were buried on the company server and weren’t written in a readily-accessible manner. “Training” typically consisted of throwing new employees into projects and expecting them to teach themselves to swim. This approach wasted countless manhours…but we had no good alternative.

At one point, we tried establishing a company wiki…but it lasted only a few months. It was yet another IT item to support, required “curation” to keep it organized, and didn’t integrate well with our other communication channels, like email.

So…here’s the idea: Establish an internal, private, employee-only blog. Everyone can make posts and add comments. A blogging engine like the one I use (WordPress) would automatically email new posts to all employees and simplify organization of the posts.

Upwards Communication

Whenever someone has a new idea for a project they can’t implement by themselves or within a small group, they’re expected to spend 1 hours writing it up as a short blog post. The blog engine makes it incredibly easy to add photos and other media to illustrate the problem. Once it’s posted, the idea is automatically distributed to all employees. This allows — for example — the CEO and engineers to be exposed to the issues the guys in production are struggling with and their solutions without every employee having to speak with every single other employee every day. Unlike emails, the posts don’t get buried in the daily deluge.

A blog would allow people to post comments to engage in discussion and flesh out the idea (contribute to cost estimates, explain how the idea would affect their work, etc.). The original author can update the original post based on this feedback. Negative “sniping” comments are easily deleted, but fact-based critical analyses are available for everyone to see. It’s also clear who originally came up with an idea so that credit can be given where credit is due. The blog posts turn frustration among the “troops” into ideas…and reduces whining…as people record and distribute their ideas. Meetings are no longer derailed by tangential discussions, since people can park new ideas on the blog to develop and discuss later. Management can occasionally parse through the blogged ideas and pick the top ones to implement.

Downwards and Lateral Communication

The management team can also post occasional company-wide updates or use it to record policies and procedures. Engineering project teams can document their design ideas on the blog and brainstorm pros and cons. It becomes a record of what ideas were considered and becomes a training tool. New (and existing) employees can review the posts so that they can learn from past design efforts…regardless of whether the originator still works at the company.

Writing is Good for Your Health…If Done in Moderation

In this post I wrote about the tricky balance required in a startup between staying lean and implementing new processes to keep a growing company efficient. I always erred towards too much process and my co-founder always erred on the side of being too lean. The problem with this blog idea is that it could become a huge time sink, with people spending more time polishing their posts and debating via the comments section than actually getting work done.

That said, I’ve found writing as an excellent way to explore, organize, and develop my ideas, even though it does take time. The more I do it, however, the less time it takes. I’ve especially appreciated the ease of sharing and discussing ideas with others via a blog. I’m curious whether these benefits could be applied to an entire organization and whether they’d outweigh the negatives. I’m interested to hear your thoughts. Is this the right 21st-century communication tool to apply to a startup?

You will eventually find silicon carbide in every single electric vehicle, computer power supply, solar inverter, and battery charger. These devices will be everywhere. These are multi billion-dollar markets. The question is…which companies will survive that long?

As Clayton Christensen wrote in the Innovator’s Dilemma and Geoffrey Moore wrote in Crossing the Chasm, there is a large gap between the early adopters of a technology and widespread commercial adoption (also know as “success”). It takes millions of dollars, years of hard work, and patience for a company to bridge that gap. In this post I’ll describe why silicon carbide is important in the renewable energy industry and how far it still needs to trek to get to the next watering hole.

Introduction to Silicon Carbide — Why It’s Important

I explained in an this earlier post that every renewable energy system required power conversion. The power switches inside the power converters are the single component that generates the most energy losses. They’re also the third least-reliable component in the entire system (only capacitors and circuit boards are less reliable). I provided insight from the key power switch suppliers, in this post.

One of the most promising, “game-changing” technologies in the renewable energy industry is silicon carbide. Instead of making the power switches out of silicon (the same material that’s used to make the chips inside your computer), it’s also possible — but still difficult — to make them out of a much harder material, silicon carbide. Silicon carbide is already used in many ways, including LEDs, lightning arresters, astronomical telescope mirrors, heating elements, jewelry. It’s great for power semiconductor switches because it can operate at 300°C (as compared to 150°C for silicon-based devices), can withstand 20,000 Volts (versus 6,000 Volts), and generates 1/3 the energy losses at high voltages.

The drawback is that silicon carbide is an incredibly hard material. It’s nearly as hard as diamond, which is why it’s also used in cutting tools, Porsche disk brakes, and bullet-proof vests. This means it’s difficult to work with in manufacturing. Since the manufacturing process hasn’t yet been fully worked out, the materials have many defects, especially basal plane dislocations, which can’t be detected by visual inspection. If these defects are present, they gradually cause bipolar devices to fail over a matter of weeks or months. You can rule out mass market adoption of bipolar devices until these issues are worked out! Unipolar devices, such as Schottky diodes, JBS diodes, and JFETs do not suffer from the degradation caused by the basal plan defects, but they can be impacted by other materials defects.

The sweet spots for silicon carbide applications are:

1. Residential-scale solar inverters – silicon carbide can be used for high-voltage MOSFETs, which reduce power losses, and reduce the system’s size by switching faster and operating at higher temperature. Why is this useful? Image being able to easily lift a small inverter up a ladder and onto your roof and install it next to the solar panels…instead of having to run DC cables all the way to your basement to a heavier wall-mounted inverter.
2. Computer server power supplies – silicon carbide MOSFETs. Here, efficiency is the main gain.
3. Electric vehicle power converters – Current Tesla’s have an air intake on the hood with two fans blowing directly onto the inverters. Imagine the cost and size reductions if vehicle manufacturers had highly-compact hardware that could survive in the hot under-the-hood temperatures without special cooling.
4. Utility-scale power converters – The future “smart grid” will have power converters that intelligently route power to avoid brownouts and minimize blackouts. High-voltage silicon carbide thyristors will make these systems more practical.

Silicon carbide products are made in the following steps. Currently, each step still has reliability and yield issues that need to be worked out:

1. Epitaxy growth – take a silicon carbide wafer and then grow additional crystals on top.
2. Device fabrication – take the epitaxy, etch it with chemicals, blast it with ions, expose it to specialized gases, and deposit metals to create a power semiconductor switch.
3. Packaging – take the finished device, attach  miniscule wires, and surround it with plastic to create a “brick” with 4 electrical terminals.
4. System integration – take the packaged brick, attach 2 wires for triggering the switch, and 2 heavier cables for the input and output power connections.

U.S. companies working on silicon carbide:

• Epitaxy
• II-VI – NJ-based division of an international company, epitaxy supplier
• Cree – the leading epitaxy supplier
• Dow Corning – recent market entrant, epitaxy supplier
• Widetronix – early-stage NY company, was developing epitaxy growth technologies, now working on “nuclear batteries”
• Device Fabrication
• Cree – the leading U.S. SiC diode supplier
• GeneSiC Semiconductor – early-stage VA company developing SiC devices
• Semisouth – SiC device developer
• United Silicon Carbide – early-stage NJ company developing SiC devices
• Silicon Power Corporation – small business in PA developing SiC devices with the Army Research Lab
• Packaging and/or Systems Integration
• Applied Pulsed Power – silicon carbide device packaging
• Arkansas Power Electronics International – silicon carbide device packaging
• Princeton Power Systems
• others

Overseas companies working on silicon carbide (incomplete list):

• Infineon
• Mitsubishi
• Panasonic
• ST Microelectronics
• Toshiba
• Toyota
• Numerous smaller companies.

U.S. universities and government agencies working on silicon carbide:

• U. Arkansas – Dr. Alan Mantooth
• Cornell – Dr. Mike Spencer
• RPI – Dr. T. Paul Chow
• Rutgers University – Dr. Jian Zhao
• U. South Carolina – Dr. Chandra MVS Chandrashekhar
• Army Research Lab

A Promising Start

DARPA, which is the government’s agency that funds “far out” technology ideas,” funded silicon carbide research throughout the late 80’s, 90’s, and early 2000’s…but then the funding started to dry up. DARPA’s feedback to the research community was: “The technology is advanced enough…now go find some actual applications and deploy SiC as a product.”

So, some startup companies raised money from angel investors and seed money from VCs and started developing SiC-based products. They and other research-focused companies started figuring out how to package the devices so that they could actually be installed inside a larger system.  They partnered with other universities that were developing power converters for electric vehicles and built a prototype residential-scale solar inverter.

The simplest and easiest to manufacture of the silicon carbide products are diodes, so two or three large companies successfully developed silicon carbide-based diodes, launched these products through a major electronics distributor, and saw strong sales.

The Valley of Death

What about all the other promising power semiconductor products? This technology is supposed to be a game changer applicable to all aspects of the renewable energy and electric vehicle markets! Hundreds of millions of research dollars and decades of work resulted in just one mainstream line of products?? The three problems are:

1. Cost, cost, cost – due to low manufacturing yields and low manufacturing volumes, silicon carbide devices are 10’s to 100’s of times more expensive than existing mass-market silicon devices.
2. Reliability – invisible defects make it impossible to know which devices will fail in the field.
3. Integration – researchers have been so focused on making the devices work (in the lab) that many of the packaging and triggering issues, required to make silicon carbide work in an actual renewable energy product, haven’t been fully addressed.

Silicon carbide has passed its “proof-of-concept” phase. Early prototypes are under testing. Next comes widespread commercialization…and here we come across a barren landscape riddled with gaping financing holes and prickly technology risks.

Take a look at the figure below; the black vertical bar illustrated the technology Valley of Death. DARPA funded the “Technology Creation” of silicon carbide. The simple silicon carbide diodes — with the backing of large, established companies — successfully crossed the chasm and are being bought by the “Early Majority.”

Startups — funded by angels, seed-stage VCs, Dept. of Energy, and other Dept. of Defense grants — were the “Innovators,” who started packaging silicon carbide and inserting it into actual applications. Due to the issues listed above, however, the “Earl Adopters” are having difficulty using the devices. Working out the remaining issues will take millions and millions of dollars. That black chasm is huge.

Credit: Dept. of Energy. Found here.

The Valley of Death is vast and can be encountered on multiple different paths — both at the start of a company and again when it attempts to commercialize. This National Renewable Energy Lab article and the Renewable Energy World podcast (see the 9/14/2010 entry) have argued that the entire clean tech industry is facing the valley of death. Dot-com startup just need a computer, internet connection, and a desk to get started with coding a new website. Clean tech companies, in contrast, need to spend millions of dollars to build cleanroom fab facilities or high-voltage test facilities…just to get started. The finance industry and both state and federal agencies have recognized this problem and started developing solutions. I’ll discuss these ideas in a subsequent post, but I’ve already provided some links here.

In the meantime…an immensely promising technology is on the precipice. Silicon carbide will eventually inhabit countless vehicles, computers, and renewable energy installations. Which companies do you think will survive long enough to reap the profits?

Topics (pick à la carte):

• Power semiconductors, the workhorse of all renewable energy systems,
• Explosive product demand and large capital investments,
• Germany’s electric vehicles charging network,
• The silicon carbide market,
• Renewable energy jobs in the U.S., Germany, and globally,
• U.S. vs. German corporate culture.

My college friend asked me to keep his name private. Everything he shared with me is public information, so don’t expect to get any insider info here…just some insight (hopefully).

The Intel of Renewable Energy

If PCs have the “Intel Inside” sticker, most renewable energy systems should have an “Semikron Inside” or “Fuji Electric Inside” sticker. These companies and their peers make the power semiconductor chips like MOSFET and IGBT switches that route the power for renewable energy systems. Have a wind turbine? Their chips are used to turn the wild AC power into the grid’s regulated power. Have a PV array on your roof? Those same chips turn DC into grid AC power. Dreaming about buying a Tesla or Nissan Leaf? You’ll also be buying the power semiconductor chips located between the car’s batteries and its motor.

Unlike Intel, these companies are more vertically integrated. They make the “bricks” that are used to package and cool the power chips. They also make the driver boards to safely turn the chips on and off. Many even build full switching assemblies, including heatsinks and capacitors, which would be analogous to Intel building its own PCs at the same time as supplying its chips to Dell.

Huge Demand, Huge Capital Investments

At the beginning of 2011, my Semikron sales rep was quoting me 6 to 10-month lead times for standard components in early 2011, due to a Chinese wind turbine manufacturer buying up all their production capacity. My classmate said that his company was making huge capital investments to bring more power semiconductor manufacturing online. One typical plan in the industry this year was to invest about 20% of revenues…pretty much all of their profits! My friend mentioned that some companies are not only investing their own capital to finance expansion but have also successfully asked customers to finance this expansion.

Customer-Financed Growth: My friend cited one example with Infineon’s “Capacity Insurance Program.” Customers are so desperate to get parts pay up-front in order to get guaranteed capacity, which won’t be available for another 1 to 2 years! This helps to 1) get additional cashflow for capital investments and 2) locks in customer demand. Not only is this a sign of strong market demand for products, but also demonstrates the critical role that power electronics play in enabling renewable energy technologies.

Jobs: Keep in mind that much of the job growth from these capital investments are in Germany. Believe President Obama when he says that the U.S. needs to play catch-up if we want the clean tech jobs of the future to be here in the U.S. Germany’s progressiveness is paying off with a 6% unemployment rate as compared to an 8.7% unemployment in the U.S.

Growing Too Fast? Since all power semiconductor companies are investing hugely in expanding capacity, it’ll be interesting to see what happens to prices in the next two years. The PV module industry went through a similar capital investment explosion about 3-4 years ago, as many new entrants (especially from China) drove the competition that spurred a 35% drop in prices. Ouch.

Image credit: Solarbuzz

However, my classmate that higher barriers to entry in the power semiconductor business will prevent a market glut. Unlike PV modules, for which the fabrication equipment is readily available and production techniques widely known, the power semiconductor industry better protects its technology. Today’s market leaders have invested for decades in R&D to build deep know-how. Their vertical integration reduces the risk that their special “recipes” leak out. In addition, the industrial customers who use these devices set very demanding requirements. For example, Siemens Wind Power needs to be able to trust the high performance and reliability of the parts it buys. Since there are so few potential suppliers, it also requires that its suppliers will be able to consistently deliver the $1000 components needed for its $1 million wind turbines. It would take years for any new entrant to develop the levels of trust needed to establish themselves in the business, just like it would take decades — if ever — for anyone new to compete with Intel.

Electric Vehicles

I was surprised with my classmates’ answer to my question about electric vehicle (EV) charging stations. Apparently, utilities in Germany are already rapidly building out a large network of EV charging stations. The utilities are the ones who invest in EV charging stations because there is high PR value in Germany with appearing green and progressive. That’s a far cry from the attitude in the U.S., where utility customers revolt when their utility wants to install smart meters…for free.

Image credit: Photographer unknown. Found here.

He commented that if you own an EV, you could probably could drive around most of Germany almost worry-free because all of the major utilities already have or are building out charging stations Here are links to German-language sites from E.ON, RWE and Vattenfall. (Open them in Google Chrome to get translations.) Tesla points out in this interesting article that only five charging stations (strategically placed, of course) are needed to drive across England.

The tradeoff is, of course, that Germans pay $0.30/kWhr, which is 3x what we pay here in America, in order to be able to afford new clean tech infrastructure like this (though since gasoline also costs ~$9 per gallon, E-mobility still remains economically competitive). Clean tech doesn’t come cheap (yet).

Silicon Carbide

Silicon carbide (SiC) is one of the most promising “game changing” technologies in the renewable energy industry. I mentioned to my classmate, however, my theory that SiC is peering into a deep technology “Valley of Death.” More to come about this in a future post. If you’re not familiar with the Valley of Death concept, here is some background.

He didn’t seem convinced about my theory, but we both did agree about the two sweet spots for SiC:

1. Replacing MOSFETs in residential-scale solar inverters and computer and server power supplies.
2. High voltage switches for “smart grid” utility-scale power converters.

I found a chart on Infineon’s website that displays #1 quite well graphically.

Image credit: Infineon’s IFX Day shareholders meeting R&D presentations.

He mentioned that many big power semiconductor companies (like ST, Toshiba, Infineon, Panasonic, and Cree) are all developing their silicon carbide technology in-house. I’m aware of a slew of small and mid-sized companies that were founded specifically to focus on SiC technology. It’ll be interesting to see which survive, especially given how many big players are also pursuing this market.

Renewable Energy Jobs

I gave my classmate my list of the top cities and regions for renewable energy jobs in the U.S.:

1. Silicon Valley, California
2. Boston, Massachusetts
3. Austin, Texas
4. Boulder, Colorado
5. New Jersey
6. Detroit, Michigan
7. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

However, he suggested I think more globally and provided a list of countries, each with different interests and motivations to adopt renewables:

1. China – lots of people + lots of growth + not enough energy + government willingness to make big investments = big player
2. Germany – engineering competence, highly environmentally conscious, heavy government involvement to “make” green markets
3. Japan – one word: Fukushima
4. Certain places in the Middle East (lots of capital, lots of sun, plus the oil cash cow won’t last forever; of many projects, Masdar is one of the most impressive
5. India – similar to China, minus the capable government, but plus a dash of “Gandhian engineering;” already home to innovative companies in the space such as Suzlon

Within Germany specifically, he cited the southern states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemburg, which are the industrial heart of the country, and arguably Europe. Munich, in particular, boasts the headquarters of well-known technology names such as BMW, Siemens, Semikron, Infineon, Epcos (capacitors), and TUV (safety compliance testing). I might just consider moving there…I’d be much closer to where my father grew up grew up.

U.S. vs. German Corporate Culture

Lastly, my classmate commented on how different the corporate culture is in many German companies compared to what he’s seen in the U.S. Instead of laying off employees during the recent economic downturn, companies furloughed workers and utilized the the government’s “Kurzarbeit” program to make up the difference in salary. This was the alternative to the U.S. system of the government only pays unemployment benefits upon full termination. The German policy comes at the cost of higher taxes, but it allows companies to retain talent during the downturn and fosters good relations between labor and management.

Interestingly, a quick Google search shows that several U.S. states allow employers to opt-in to programs, called “Work Sharing Unemployment Insurance,” similar to Kurzarbeit. Why haven’t we heard more about this, especially for startups and service companies? If you have any experience with these programs, please contact me.

Apparently nearly all small- and medium-sized German companies still family-owned and some large German companies as well (like Bosch and Semikron…even BMW is still 46% family owned). There’s also much less of a push amongst smaller companies to go public. The result of not having shareholders is typically a longer-term outlook and avoids some of the shenanigans seen in public companies in order to make their quarterly numbers.

By this point, it was close to midnight in Germany, so my classmate had to sign off. Thanks for all his insight. If we were still at reunions, I’d go get him a Budweiser…or a good German Hefeweizen.

It has shocked me over the years how deep the shortage is of mechanical engineering skills in the renewable energy industry. When I say this, the first response is usually: “But renewable energy is related to power generation and electricity. Wouldn’t we need more electrical engineers?” NO! Wrong.

This widely-held belief — that energy-related topics fall mostly under Electrical Engineering (EE) — is harming the industry’s growth, hurting innovation, and are a lost opportunity for MechE professors to win research funding.

This topic is important because we need more U.S. students to become engineers…and once they decide to become engineers, we need them to specialize in areas where they’re most needed. Many students enter the field that they think will provide the best job prospects. When my classmates and I were picking our majors in college during the heat of the dot-com boom, everybody was flocking to EE and Computer Science (CS) departments. English majors were entering the CS department and suffering through three years of courses they hated in order to improve their job prospects. No wonder half of my EE and CS classmates went to Wall Street or other non-tech jobs after the bubble burst during our senior year.

My college degree says I’m an electrical engineer with a focus on embedded controls, which is heavily software-based. Through experience, however, I’m a power electronics engineer, embedded controls engineer, engineering manager, technical sales moonlighter, and entrepreneur. I believe this mixture has given me a good perspective on what training I was lacking despite attending one of the best engineering schools in the world and therefore had to teach to myself or supplement through hiring.

Research Funding

In the past five years, new research centers have been sprouting up on college campuses around the country, including the following. Note that this is not an exhaustive list, so if I’m missing one please send me the link. For a list of schools that have strong energy and power programs, see the end of this post.

• Carnegie Mellon Smart Grid Research Center (2010)
• NC State FREEDM Systems Center (2008)
• Princeton Adlinger Center for Energy and the Environment (2008)
• MIT Energy Initiative (2006)
• Virginia Tech Center for Power and Energy (1985)

Princeton’s center is headed by a MechE professor and MIT’s is headed by a physics professor. All others are spearheaded by EE departments. While the centers usually try to be cross-disciplinary, it’s difficult…professors are busy focusing on their own, ongoing research. With renewable energy depending so heavily on mechanical engineering skills, I believe these centers represent lost opportunities for funding really interesting and impactful MechE research. Improving the integration of the necessary disciplines presents opportunities for boosting the effectiveness of the government’s research dollars.

Examples of Renewable Engineering

(If you’re willing to take my word for it and aren’t interested in the technical details, then just skip to the end of the list below.)

Other than the obvious — like designing wind turbine blades and towers — here are some examples of the work that goes into designing some critical components within any renewable energy system. You’ll notice that they’re all taught in mechanical engineering departments.

• Reliability under extreme conditions: One DOE manager told me that a major solar inverter manufacturer was providing sheepalong with their product. He was serious. The inverters were located in the middle of nowhere, so instead of mowing the lawn and having the grass clippings clog the ventilation intakes, the sheep took care of a major reliability and maintenance headache.Renewable  energy systems not only need to survive but they also need to continue operating optimally and safely under extremely hostile environmental conditions: in the baking sun, under strong winds, exposed to salt water spray, in downpours where the rain comes in horizontally, under condensing humidity, subjected to lightning strikes, and in grimy industrial environments. They need to do this, ideally, for 20 years with only nominal maintenance and minimal degradation of performance. We need MechE’s!
• Control Theory and Modeling/Simulation: I haven’t seen a single renewable energy system that isn’t saddled with control problems. Power converters require control of their switch trigger timings. Motors and generators require specialized controls, which vary widely based on how they’re constructed. The grid as a whole requires complex distributed controls to remain stable. Wind turbines require controls for the pitch of their blades to maximize energy capture and other critical controls to make sure they don’t fly apart during a grid outage. Even stationary hardware like PV panels and batteries require max power tracking and charging/discharging controls, respectively. Smart grid components such as thermostats require controls. The list is endless. Control theory courses are usually taught in the MechE department.In dot-com product development, if your code fails then just reboot your crashed computer. In renewable energy development, if your code fails then your hardware blows up, you lose thousands of dollars, and someone could get injured. Renewable energy equipment is so large, expensive, and energetic that systems must be modeled and simulated long before anything is built. We need people who can perform these simulations in a realistically yet efficiently.
• Mechanics (mounting heavy components, designing for shock & vibration): Power equipment is heavy (minimum of 20-100 lbs for residential, 500-2000 lbs for commercial installations, and much higher for industrial utility-scale systems). For these heavy components, mounting considerations and shock and vibration stresses during transport are incredibly important. I’ve seen several pieces of hardware (typically $5,000 to $20,000 apiece) get destroyed in transit due to overlooked mechanical design considerations.
• Enclosure / packaging design: Between 25-44% of a solar installation is the “balance of system” cost (mostly mounting hardware) and installation labor. The high-tech solar panels are only 50% of the cost. MechE’s have the same potential to reduce the cost of solar installations as the well-funded photovoltaic cell researchers receiving billions of dollars in government and VC funding. The large size of renewable energy systems drives materials cost, manufacturing labor, inventory  overhead, shipping costs, and installation costs. In most cases, a MechE needs to figure out how to pack 2 pounds of stuff in a 1 pound bag or how to assemble things faster.

• Magnetics: Motors, generators, inductors, and transformers are all examples of magnetics. Several magnetic components are found in every single solar, wind, electric vehicle, and power distribution box. I’ve seen that MechE’s are the best at the 3-dimensional visualization of the cores, windings, and magnetic flux lines, which is necessary in doing the magnetics design. This is a lost art and I can count on two hands the number of engineers I’ve encountered who are good magnetics designers. If you want job security, teach yourself magnetics design.
• Thermodynamics (thermal and airflow design): This is a huge topic and a huge challenge. To put it in perspective with one example: an industrial-scale solar inverter dissipates in losses the same amount that 2 to 4 homes consume. All that power needs to be dissipated out of just six brick-sized components. Doing that without overheating anything…over a period of 10-20 years…is a huge mechanical engineering challenge.
• Rotating machinery: Many renewable energy systems, most energy efficiency improvements, and all electric vehicle systems include a rotating machine like a motor or generator. I’ve run into the problem way too many times of having an EE who doesn’t understand how the machine works and a MechE who doesn’t know how the power system works…and the two don’t speak the same engineering “language.”
• Materials: Capacitors are designed by chemists and physicists, but their reliability and cost are determined by the MechE who packages them. Batteries are designed by chemists, but MechE’s make the packaging safe. They also make sure the materials inside every type of renewable energy system don’t corrode under salty, humid, or high-voltage conditions.

We need more renewable engineers with mechanical engineering skills!

Tear Down the Silos

It’s risky for me to make such broad generalizations. Someone can easily say “XYZ skill is purely EE or chemistry” or “the best engineers are cross-disciplinary.” I recently visited MIT and spoke with a computer science professor. He knew virtually no EE professors and referred to the various departments as “silos,” with little interaction between them. From my own experience, I know that undergrad education doesn’t cross disciplines very frequently…after taking their electives, students typically need to focus the majority of their course load on their specific major. Freshman be forewarned: if you know which industry you want to enter, you need to make sure you get the appropriate mix of classes, regardless of how the departments and curriculum are structured.

As for the research centers…from the outside it seems that MechE professors are not seizing on the opportunity to become the leaders in renewable energy research and education. Maybe the issue is that MechE departments have focused on airfoils and engines for so long that it’s difficult to jump into this 21st-century industry which also requires EE skills as well. Maybe this is a sign that the traditional divisions between MechE and EE are outdated.

Regardless of the reason, if universities want to become leaders in renewable energy research and want to create the highest-performing engineers in this hot field, then topics that have traditionally been taught in the mechanical engineering department need to become requirements for anyone interested in renewable energy.

Update:

I’ve received some interesting responses to this post, especially the following from Yogesh Nama:

Erik, There is no shortage of mechanical engineer. How many do you want?? Most of recruiters in the US and UK simply do not bother to look at the CV properly. They simply run a search for a keyword. If it’s not in the resume then the candidate isn’t considered for the job.

In this post I tried to make the argument that either (a) we need more mechanical engineers with an inclination towards working in renewable energy and the necessary additional skills to work on renewable engineering technologies or (b) we need to cross-train EEs in traditional mechanical engineering skills. I’m sure there are plenty of MechE’s being trained with the skills necessary to work at Ford or Boeing…and enough EE’s with the skills to work at Intel…but very few with the necessary mixture of skills to excel in renewable energy work.

Renewable energy engineers don’t just need the standard materials, mechanics, and thermodynamics training necessary to build airplanes and cars…they need slightly broader training. If they did have that training, I believe they would be the best for most clean tech engineering jobs.

As for the comment about keywords on resumes…I completely agree.  Reviewing resumes that are receive “over the transom” for keywords and just spending one hour interviewing someone results in poor hiring results. References and working with someone on a trial basis are the only way to know for sure whether a person is a good fit for the position and the company’s culture.

Image credit: GE. Found here.
Chart credit: John Lushetsky, Dept. of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Program. Found here.