Blockchain or Battery !!

Blockchain or Battery !!

I manufacture commercial drones at H Robotics. My biggest constraint is battery power. I watch closely to see if there are new ways to store power. So far, there is alot of research but few real breakthroughs. Elon Musk's Tesla has just announced that they are building the largest lithium storage grid-scale battery in the world in Australia. It will store 129 megawatt hours, which is enough to power 50,000 homes. But, it's not enough. Not by a longshot. One data center in the US can require the same energy as 5m American households use each year. One man was apparently able to create electricity out of nothing - Nikolai Tesla. Tomorrow is his 161st Birthday and we should be asking questions about his "power tower", the Wardenclyffe Tower, because it could light up lightbulbs and transmit power without needing any wires. (One wonders who ordered the destruction of that structure and why). It's the kind of big thinking we need today as we move from an analog to a digital world where more and more is going to stored and managed in the cloud and in the blockchain. Until we can create electricity out of nothing, we are going to need a backup if the power goes out. Batteries and the problem of power storage are not just a technical problem - they are central to the governance of our society.

Why? It is because we are abandoning bits of paper for computer bits and qubits. The next step of digitaisation is to store absolutely everything in the cloud and in the blockchain. Every transaction, every record, every document and every image will all be digitised one way or another. That means society is becoming more dependent on electricity. Transactions, payments, communications, data, analytics, contracts and even relationships can't occur without it. It is reasonable to ask - what happens if electricity stops? There are many reasons it can stop from bad weather to new EMP weapons to the wave of a hand according to Wired Magazine.

My own experience of power loss occured on 911 when I worked in the White House. The power station for lower Manhattan was underneath the World Trade Center. First it was on fire and then it flooded. There was no electricity. But, we had to find a way to power up the New York Stock Exchange to forward the data so that the equity markets could clear. The global equity markets hung in limbo for days, waiting for the US stock market to re-open and clear the trades. In the end, the US Government commandeered a power generator, which was shipped into lower Manhattan, in order to restart the stock market. Who could have imagined that the global financial market could be so vulnerable to the loss of electricity. And yet it was. Today we are placing many more "assets" than stocks into the cloud, where they cannot be accessed without power.

Do we want to become so vulnerable to a single risk? One answer is – batteries. If we want blockchain and a digital society, we need better batteries.

I’ll leave the scary weapons argument for last. Let’s start with the risk that we simply have too many air conditioners on and that blows the power. PG&E, one of America’s largest power companies, just announced that triple digit temperatures have caused a surge on the demand for power to record levels. That’s when systems tend to blow. Blowouts and brownouts have been around for a long time. But, we are now more dependent on less stable sources of energy. Wind and solar are great sources of electricity but the flow is more volatile than oil and gas. So, power outages have a bigger impact.

As we expand the use of data, we increase the need for refrigeration. More data requires more power. Faster processing requires more power. This is why we hear about many data centers being placed in cold locations like the Arctic such as the the Lefdal Mine data center or in deep underground locations like Iron Mountain in Pennsylvania. Google has just acquired all the power produced by the largest solar energy park in the Netherlands, Sunport Delfzijl to power it’s data center in Eemshaven. Ten years ago, one data center used the same amount of power that was required by 5 million US households. There have been efficiency gains since then. But, the amount of data is growing exponentially. It is now estimated that the energy demand by data centers will triple in a decade. The new quantum computers need temperatures need -273 degrees Celsius to operate properly. The crygenic coolers they require take power too.

Meanwhile, urban populations are increasing at a pace that clearly overwhelms existing power infrastructure. But, local blackouts and brownouts are not the core problem. The real issue is a massive failure than cuts off states and nations from the net and all its data. That means computer viruses are a more serious threat than before. The Internet of Things connects our kettles and refrigerators to the net. But, it also connects them to viruses like the Mirai Botnet which “recruited” such devices and used them to launch a massive DNS attack in 2016. That attack briefly shut down all the access to the net on the East coast and then the West coast of the US.

Thankfully the net hasn’t been taken down for long to date. And, thankfully blackouts and brownouts don't last long in most places. But we should also remember that batteries have their limits. They still can’t hold a charge for that long. It’s still hard to move power from the source to a battery. Batteries are still liable to degrade fast in the cold. Battery powered cars can’t go very far if it’s freezing outside. Sadly, Tesla's secret power generating and power storage ideas went to his grave with him.

What about weapons? This is not a silly question in a world where the superpowers spend billions perfecting weapons that can disable all forms of electricity including SATNAV, Wifi, GPS and even batteries. They are called EMP devices. Michael Peck writes in The National Interest that the US is seeking to build a “Munition-Delivered Non-Kinetic Effects (NKE) `weapon” which is the 21st century version of the neutron bomb. It would leave the people alive and the buildings standing but eliminate all forms of electricity and electronic communications. “If the (US) Army has its way, America’s next secret weapon may be an electromagnetic pulse artillery shell that paralyses an enemy city. These special shells won’t carry high explosive. These special shells won’t carry high explosive. Instead, they will emit EMP bursts, or some other non-kinetic technology, to disrupt the computers, radio communications, Internet links and other ties that bind modern societies. And do so without creating any physical damage.”

All this matters in a digital world where more and more of our lives is just an electronic signal. Remember how much of your life will be digital - even your desk!

I am all for the efficiencies digitisation and blockchain will bring, but I just wonder whether we need to be more aware of our vulnerabilities? Better batteries are not just a technical issue. They are perhaps a critical component of governance in civil society as we move into a digital era. Tesla's birthday reminds us that we need to devote more time to insulating our societies from risk as we step into a digital future. We cannot take power or access to it for granted. Ironically, our new high tech world is especially vulnerable to low tech events - like loss of power and having no battery big enough to re-access the cloud and blockchain..