I recently had the pleasure of attending* a special reception and Regents Lecture by Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, founding partner at venture firm KPCB, and Berkeley alum. At Kleiner Perkins, Joy is in charge of greentech investment, and his talk focused mostly on the technological challenges and opportunities of decarbonization.
He had a few overarching points.
One, there is tremendous need and potential for economic innovation in clean technologies, even as we approach physical limitations in how efficiently they can produce energy. These will be essential, as we need to buy down the cost of clean tech to the point where it "beats the grid unsubsidized."
Two, we need to be building things in America. Manufacturing will be a vital and economically invigorating component of the transition to clean energy, and missing out on that opportunity would be devastating to American competitiveness and economic health. Without manufacturing, says Joy, we will become overly dependent on a service economy, which will "run idle."
Three, government support is required for private ventures to "cross the chasm" that prevents the free market from achieving the energy technology goals we aspire to. Prompted by a question from the audience, Joy said his preferred government policy is loan guarantees, which have mostly been used in the past for projects with high upfront capital expenditures.
All in all, it was a cool lecture from a technological giant -- an encouraging addition in the campaign for decarbonization.
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*Thanks to Dee Dee Mendoza of the UC Berkeley Relations Group for the invite!
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