One university's engineering department was showing off a hybrid car that had solar panels splattered all over the roof to help run the battery. Wonderful idea. A few other groups had innovative ideas to capture energy, such as smaller wind-capturing technologies and a process to use energy from grapes. There was even a small float plane being touted as the next-big-thing.
It was like looking into the future. One of the beauties of such a conference is its ability to bridge the gap between ideas & commercialization and actually take some of these great innovations and put them to use in the real world.
However, as I'm discovering with some of my research this summer, this gap is often much wider than many people believe. As Prof. Stephen Hill of Trent University (the prof I'm doing much of my summer research with) outlined in his brief discussion at the conference, a great deal of these innovations are technologically and economically feasible (often by a wide margin) but are not widely implemented in the world.
As he says, this is because of social and political opposition. What might be economically feasible might not be socially or politically feasible. For example, a large solar farm in the outskirts of a medium-sized town might be able to produce enough electricity to power the entire town with clean, emissions-free energy at a relatively low cost. But the residents near the proposed farm might be vehemently opposed to the proposed project, be it for a variety of reasons, making it a non-feasible project overall.
Much of our research is directed towards the renewable energy sector, where much popular talk revolves around economic incentives for these technologies (wind, solar, small-hydro etc) so they can compete with traditional energy sources. But while much time, money and research is being put into making these technologies economically feasible, a far lesser proportion is being put towards making them socially and politically feasible.
As technologies become increasingly efficient and governments provide incentives to make them cost-effective, the economic barriers are essentially eliminated. But the socio-political barriers are still standing and are very, very strong.
While putting millions of dollars into getting that extra few miles per gallon out of our hybrid vehicles (which is not as effective as many think) is a great technological leap, perhaps we would get more bang for our buck if we put that money towards safely and effectively implementing the wonderful technology.
The money and resources could be put into research of social acceptance, making stakeholder involvement in projects more inclusive and widely distributed, the training of specialists (ex. engineers and other designers) to include social and political aspects of their work and even an established framework for standardizing project development processes to make them more socially and politically acceptable.
This is certainly not a call to withdraw funding from technology research and development. That would be idiotic. But if our goal is to actually implement this technology, we should probably divvy those funds up a little bit.
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