Originally I was going to call this blog post, “The Low Spark of High Tech Boys”, but I was pretty certain that not many people would get the reference (to an 1971 album by Traffic, “The Low Spark of High Heel Boys”),and this is not about boys – it’s about men and women of science and the projects they are leading.
So I focused instead on of our main messages: you don’t have to believe in climate change to believe in the intersection between sustainability and project management. You just need to have at least a little respect for science and you just have to be aware of how much money is going to be involved in launching climate change oriented projects.
Have a look at this table we assembled, mainly from The Financial Times – showing some pretty big bucks coming as a result of the Paris climate conference COP21:
Just a sample of some climate change-oriented developments (thanks to this link from the Financial Times)
• India and France unveiled a plan to mobilize more than $1 trillion (with a T) over the next 15 years to make solar energy affordable in sun-rich developing countries.
• A group of 20 countries including the US, China and India vowed to double their existing combined $10bn of spending on clean energy research over the next five years.
• Norway, Germany and the UK said they would deliver more than $5bn over the next five years to support countries committed to reducing deforestation, a significant contributor to global warming.
• Germany, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland unveiled a $500m plan to make large scale cuts in greenhouse gases in developing countries, in league with the World Bank.
““We’ve demonstrated these technologies are possible, but we don’t know yet how to manufacture them at a large scale,” he said. “We need to be trying a lot of things, in parallel with one another. We have many more ideas than we have the funds”. – Jeff Grossman, MIT professor of materials science and engineering.
This in turn reminded me of one of the best lines from the film, The Martian, which gave me the actual title for this post.
The article goes on to talk about some of the research projects being done at MIT and the manufacturing projects they will launch. It’s easy to see from the table above, and the quotes below – there will be PLENTY of project managers needed to oversee the vast quantity of projects that this investment will kick off. From the article:
Professor Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science and engineering who cofounded the companies A123 Systems and 24M, has spent years studying how to make batteries cheaper and last longer. He’s now seeking to cut in half the costs of the kind of lithium-ion batteries that power cutting-edge electric cars made by Tesla. He’s also looking at building batteries for electrical grids that can store energy from wind turbines or solar farms, so it can be distributed when needed.
“The right storage can solve many of the problems we have now with creating a low-carbon future,” he said.
Meanwhile, MIT is embarking on an unprecedented program to accelerate progress on low-carbon energy technologies. In the coming months, MIT plans to launch eight “energy centers” on campus that will seek more than $300 million in research funding over the next five years from companies, foundations, and other sources.
The centers, announced last fall as part of a “plan for action” to curb carbon emissions, aim to further research and ultimately commercialize new technologies in the areas of solar energy, nuclear energy, energy storage, energy bioscience, electrical grids, nuclear fusion, materials science, and the capture and use of carbon.
Another global effort called the Breakthrough Energy Coalition involves recent pledges by 20 billionaires, including American tech magnates Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, to invest in new clean energy projects and help commercialize them.
So whatever your views on climate change, there is no denying the straight up fact that if you are a project manager, you can be ‘chomping at the bit’ to get to work on some of these exciting project opportunities!
and this is not about boys – it’s about men and women of science and the projects they are leading.