White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Question That Must Be Answered: How Dangerous Is AI?

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Races have winners and losers — at least so I have always thought. At some point, the competition ends and a winner is identified, whether it is first-past-the-post as in a horse race, or first in the marketplace as in a commercial race. Think about VHS and Betamax.

Similarly, we knew who won the space race and many other international races. However, the race we are engaged in with China over artificial intelligence isn’t defined — there are no winning posts, and we don’t even know what winning will look like.

Will we wake up one day and be told we have cleared the winning post and China is in the dust, or the other way round?

We don’t even seem to be engaged in the same race as China. Is it the one President Trump talks about where we are going to out-invest, out-talent, out-research and dominate AI?

Or is it the one China appears to be running, emphasizing using AI as it is now, with the construction of many thousands of deployable robots?

Is it a purely commercial race or a purely military one for both countries?

So far, it seems, we have taken the high road, with proprietary systems, and China has taken the low road with widely deployed, open-source, ready-now systems.

China is aggressively spreading AI across its commercial operations and developing families of robots. The United States is still nibbling at universal deployment. China is mass-producing droves of humanoids that dance, leap in the air, and perform complex duties like cooking.

They entertain and threaten. They are a new workforce, presenting a new level of competition.

Although the United States has reached new heights in invention and pushed the frontiers of AI discovery, it lags in deployment. It has been slower in harvesting the technology.

Now comes the unsettling — actually terrifying — warning from AI researchers that the human race may face extinction as soon as the end of this decade. Three AI bosses — Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of Grok — have called for a slowdown and regulatory oversight.

This warning deserves to be treated as truth until proven otherwise.

Could, as the doomsters fear, no bells ring, no shouts of joy echo from the bleachers at the race’s end because AI has killed us all short of the winning post.

It is a strange race run not by the government but by corporations, with the government cheering from the sidelines. Bill Gates has said the thing about AI is that — unlike other dangerous technologies, such as nuclear — the government has no depth of knowledge, no deep bench. Where AI is concerned, the government is an outsider.

When my television crew and I covered the Upscale conference in Malaga, Spain, last year, we got insight into people from around the world surging ahead in the creative uses of AI, without regard to whether they were using Chinese or American AI. For this cohort, these were just off-the-shelf tools.

This was a new generation of creatives using AI with relish to create fine art, advertisements and designs for everything from a new shape for a car or a wild-patterned shoe to a more comfy living room couch.

I had to wonder whether they weren’t the real winners in the AI race: Those who use it without scaling the heights of its technical possibilities or using it to displace truck drivers.

Only two countries are in that race, the United States and China, but all have a stake. In AI deployment, the United States is far from dominant. Indeed, it is down the list of countries where AI is already incorporated into daily commercial operations. Estonia and the UAE stand out.

The United States is challenging the future before exploiting the present.

It is easy to declare the need for regulation and guardrails, but hard to do that when the subject is in constant transmutation, changing daily and likely to change again tomorrow.

I would propose that the Trump administration appoint a small, nimble, non-industry expert panel to answer just three questions: Is AI an existential threat to the human species? What should be done about that? And how much time do we have?

The threat has been debated academically since 1958 — the heftiest warning came from British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in December 2014.

Warnings from within should be heeded. J. Robert Oppenheimer warned about nuclear weapons. His words still govern nuclear non-proliferation policy and security settings.

The creators of an even more dangerous technology are warning, much as Oppenheimer did.

Is Rubio Starting a Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East?

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The Trump administration has announced and appears to be crowing over an agreement with Saudi Arabia to help the kingdom not only to build nuclear power plants but also to enrich the uranium fuel.

There is no reason for the Saudis to enrich uranium. There are plenty of willing suppliers of enriched uranium and more are coming online.

Besides, it has always seemed curious that Saudi Arabia, with its huge fossil reserves and its abundant, reliable sunshine, should want to stress its industrial infrastructure with a nuclear power program when it clearly doesn’t need it. We are at war with Iran not because of nuclear power, but because it refuses to abandon its enrichment ambitions.

Enrichment raises the potency of uranium fuel by increasing the amount of the fissile isotope Uranium-235.

Today’s generation of light water reactors — the workhorses that provide about 20 percent of U.S. electricity — use uranium that has been enriched by 3 percent to 5 percent. The uranium for the new small modular reactors will be enriched by about 20 percent.

Weapons-grade enrichment is generally considered to be uranium that has been enriched by over 90 percent. But Ernie Moniz, who was secretary of energy in the Biden administration and is a nuclear physicist, told a conference organized by the Earthshot Foundation on June 8 that “you can make a pretty good bomb” with 60 percent- enriched uranium, a reference to the Iranian stockpile that we are trying to destroy.

I have been covering nuclear power — and by extension nuclear proliferation — for more than 50 years. For most of that time, Saudi Arabia has hankered for nuclear power and enrichment. The question is why.

When I began my coverage, there was great fear of nuclear proliferation — that more countries would get nuclear weapons. Those who have, in that time, are Pakistan and North Korea. China acquired a weapon in 1964.

Israel has never declared itself nuclear-armed, but the arms control community believes it has a weapon and that the United States helped it get one years ago.

The original nuclear weapons nations, the United States, Russia, Britain and France, held the technology close and were loath to see any country step in that direction.

Making civilian nuclear power available to the world has been a plank of U.S. foreign policy since President Dwight Eisenhower launched the “Atoms for Peace” program in 1953.

One of the beneficiaries of that program was Iran. In fact, before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, American companies, led by Bechtel, the giant engineering firm, were set to build reactors across Iran.

America’s global nuclear policy was, de facto, nuclear civilian power, yes, nuclear enrichment, no. It was pretty sensible and has worked well. Now it is set aside.

The U.S.-Saudi Arabia deal comes at a time when many nations would like to start down the weapons path. The wars in Ukraine and Iran are a stark inducement to go nuclear.

If Ukraine hadn’t given up its nuclear weapons, would Russia have invaded? Almost certainly not. If Iran had a proven bomb, would Israel and the United States have attacked? I think not.

Nonetheless, every nuclear weapon is a threat to world security. The danger isn’t only that desperate or ambitious countries will use them aggressively, but also that the danger of accidental detonation is ever-present.

The United States and the Soviet Union were so concerned about this that they shared safety technology. For example, when we developed an insensitive TNT for the trigger of a nuclear device, we shared this with the Russians. Neither side wanted a thermonuclear war triggered by someone dropping a weapon off a forklift.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio would seem to be so busy that he hasn’t had time to read up on the history of proliferation.

Rubio, declared about the U.S.-Saudi Arabia deal, “Suffice it to say that any agreement that we are going to make with any country in the world on civil nuclear is going to be one that will have safeguards in place to ensure that it can’t be turned into a weapons program.”

Rubio might want to take a few minutes to ponder these three things: How it is that we came to be at war with Iran, how Iran started with civilian power and went on to weapons, and how safeguards were bypassed.

Saudi Arabia’s neighbors in that volatile region will soon be at Rubio’s door looking for nuclear power — and enrichment. First up, expect Turkey, then Egypt.

If Congress approves Rubio’s deal, then a nuclear arms race in the Middle East is more or less assured. Is there a worse place to have that happen?

The Birth of a New Reactor: Thorium Past and Present

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If you are designing a car from scratch, there are certain essentials to begin with. You need to start with the wheels on the corners, for example.

But when it comes to building a nuclear reactor, things are different. There are hundreds and maybe thousands of ways of doing it. The constant is that you need fissionable fuel and a moderator to collect the heat and manage the neutron flux.

That embarrassment of choice — now reflected in the number of small modular reactors (SMRs) vying for market acceptance — may be why thorium reactors, which began with promise, have been left on the shelf.

The nuclear establishment, goaded by the Nuclear Navy’s Adm. Hyman Rickover, wanted light water technology. That is what the first 100-plus U.S. civilian reactors employed.

At the dawn of the civilian nuclear age, it was a straight contest between two fuels: uranium and thorium. Thorium is fertile but not fissile: It can’t start a chain reaction unless it is triggered by a small amount of the isotope uranium-235.

Once this happens, thorium becomes uranium-232 and fizzes wonderfully with a steady stream of neutrons, producing heat in the moderator, which is where the first steps in making electricity are taken.

That heat is captured to create steam that turns a turbine.

Thorium was used in part in the first power-producing, commercial nuclear reactor: the 60-megawatt Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. With three different fuel assemblies, it ran for 25 years, starting in 1957. It used solid fuel, which was to become the standard for civilian nuclear power.

Meanwhile, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, under its director, physicist Alvin Weinberg, work went ahead on what would become a legendary fast-breeder thorium reactor, using a liquid fuel embedded in molten salt. It went critical in 1965 and operated for five years before it was closed by the Atomic Energy Commission (forerunner of the Department of Energy) in a political move.

A fast reactor uses extra neutrons to create new fuel and burn up radioactive waste. The process is akin to perpetual motion — but isn’t, of course.

Now a charismatic nuclear engineer, Yash Patel, founder and CEO of AMReactor, is planning to bring thorium back as a viable future option for space exploration, power generation and, eventually, ship propulsion.

Patel told me that his reactors – he has designs for a microreactor (under 20 MW) and for a SMR (250 MW). The planned reactors are molten salt-moderated, thorium-fueled fast reactors.

He believes they will not only be cheaper, but will also operate better than the SMRs now entering the market.

Patel’s plan for Austin-registered AMReactor is to outsource as much of the fabrication as possible.

A fast reactor is called a breeder reactor because it generates more neutrons than are needed to produce fission, and these transmute waste into additional fuel.

Patel went to school in California and while looking for a career, a break came that changed the trajectory of his life. He got an internship with NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There he worked on Curiosity, the plutonium-fueled Mars rover. His nuclear love affair, he told me, was “complete and instant.”

From NASA, he went to Texas A&M and graduated in nuclear engineering. He was well along with his PhD, when a family illness caused him to abandon it.

Patel lists two great blessings in his life. “The first was that I moved to America from India. The second was attending Texas A&M. That was another wonderful break.”

After a stint in biopharma, where he prospered, Patel started designing reactors in all his waking hours along with a friend, D’mitri Scott, now the chief technology officer at AMReactor.

Patel said the numbers didn’t work for their plans until they switched to thorium. It was a eureka moment.

There followed a period which he likened to Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak working on the first computer operating system. The two young men were obsessed and inspired by what they believed was extraordinary. “Our girlfriends, now our wives, saw very little of us. We sometimes worked all night,” Patel said.

With thorium, they found all they were looking for: a stable source of reliable power that was safe, couldn’t melt down, and was able to handle most of the fission products.

And it was proliferation-proof because of the presence of intense gamma radiation, which made it hard to process, steal or divert. “Thorium was the winner,” he said.

A new reactor is on the way.

 

The Collision Between Money and News — We Lose

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Trillions, as in trillions of dollars, are being bandied about in the way millions were, then billions. But take a look at 1 trillion expressed numerically: 1,000,000,000,000. Awesome, isn’t it? Twelve zeros.

The national debt stands at $39 trillion, and the interest on that will top $1 trillion this year. Very soon, the first trillionaire will thunder past the post, presumably Elon Musk.

I have nothing against Musk. And I have nothing against successful people being rewarded for their talent.

Musk has done enormous things. An immigrant, he made his first fortune with PayPal. Since then, he has given the United States the solar revolution, the electric car, and a viable heavy-lift rocket that has made space exploration cheaper than when NASA alone was at the controls. His Boring Co. still holds promise.

It is assumed, as so often, that because a person is good at one thing, that same person must be good at everything else. Whoa! Musk’s limits as a manager and a visionary were exposed when he barged about streamlining the government for President Trump.

It was a case of a bridge too far for Musk. A disaster for America that eroded privacy, critically wounded many departments and saved no money.

Whereas much of what Musk has achieved has been beneficial, his purchase of Twitter, rebranded as X, was evidence of the harm that accompanies gigantic wealth. He wanted to control not just the medium, but also the news.

Musk — although it isn’t good that he has taken steps to control the message with X — isn’t the problem facing the media and the public’s right to know. When so much money is floating around, press freedom is in trouble.

The immediate threat comes not from Musk, but from two other men of gargantuan wealth: Larry Ellison, co-founder of the tech firm Oracle Corp., whose personal net worth is estimated at $245 billion, and his son, David.

Together, they are set to control the media to an extent not imagined and never seen. The media titans of yesteryear — Pulitzer, Hearst, Luce, Thompson, Sulzberger, Graham and Murdoch — are knee-high to the fearsome power that the Ellisons have, and which will more than double if (and it is more when than if) the merger of their Paramount Skydance Corp. with Warner Bros. Discovery is approved by regulators.

At present, the Ellisons control the CBS Television Network, CBS Sports, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Paramount Network and BET. They control CBS News, and Paramount+, which has 79 million streaming subscribers.

If the merger goes through, they will control CNN, HBO Max and Warner Bros. Studios — a treasure trove of entertainment.

In short, they will control a huge swath of American broadcast news, information dissemination, and movie and television culture.

Their declared purpose is to incorporate more technology and more AI across their astounding current and probably future empire. That is bad for journalism and worse for movies. The invasion of the bots.

I know how media control works. I have seen it firsthand: It isn’t what is said, but what is implied or what employees feel the owners of the outlet want. A casual remark can become policy; a hint of preference can become a hard rule.

If an Ellison family member were — of course, this is hypothetical — to say they hated rhubarb, you could bet the Food Network wouldn’t do a show episode on rhubarb pie making. If it were known that one of the owners of Paramount was a booster of nuclear power, movies such as “The China Syndrome” and “Silkwood” would never have been made.

In journalism, the story that isn’t covered is as important as the one that is covered. If a disease caused by a common product — asbestos is a good example — isn’t covered because the staff has heard that the media owners love that product or is invested in it, then you can bet it won’t be covered.

Consolidated corporate ownership is antithetical to free speech, creativity and open government. No news is bad news.

News isn’t suited to the corporate world; it isn’t a fit with those whose interest is adding zeros to bottom lines. It is the pursuit by an irregular army of often eccentric individuals, who turn over stones to find out what is beneath.

Likewise, individual ownership furthers the news objective, which for me was summed up by something Dan Raviv said when he was a correspondent for CBS Radio (recently shuttered by the Ellisons): “My job is simple. I try to find out what is going on and tell people.” 

Write that in the corporate prospectus.

News organizations need to be owned by news people, like Ted Turner, Bill Paley and, yes, Rupert Murdoch.

In the Turmoil, Challenges for Graduates in the Class of ’26

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Dear Graduates of 2026,

Welcome to the world you will be taking jobs in and where you will begin building careers, and at times shaping history.

It isn’t the world of your parents, and it isn’t the world your college has taught you about, because it is changing too fast. It begins anew daily. As Maya Angelou said, “This is a wonderful day. I haven’t seen this one before.”

There are three big forces looming on the horizon that will shape your world and that you will play a role in shaping. They are technology, specifically AI; politics, the harsher politics of today; and the environment, which is eventually everything.

AI will have an effect that defies comprehension — it is so enormous. It is also evolving so fast that it keeps slipping out of your grasp.

“It is exponential, and human thinking is linear.” So said one of the foremost thinkers about AI, Omar Hatamleh, former head of AI at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He has written five books on AI.

All that is absolutely, definitely and incontrovertibly known is that AI will affect everything. It will change how we work, play and learn. It will change how we mate, think and expect.

Graduates, you will come to realize that political action and speech have changed from what they were. Both are out of the guide rails that have served them well over time.

Authoritarianism has taken root in America, and it will be hard to pull out. The bureaucracy has been politicized. There has been an expansion of presidential power over areas constitutionally assigned to Congress, under the watch of an accommodating Supreme Court.

There are troops on American streets, political searches and seizures, arrests and indictments, and deportations without due process. All this was unleashed with the Republicans. When Democrats take power, will they put the evil genie of unconstitutional government back in its bottle?

Domestic politics has also changed our relations to the world — a world where America, Canada and Europe stood together, sharing a common heritage and a common view of law, and savoring a shared peace in Europe until Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, and set in motion four years of bloody fighting.

Could we have done more? Yes, more weapons, more money, and less acceptance of Putin. Maybe troops, too.

We didn’t, and that has changed the world. Free countries now know that America won’t axiomatically have their backs. That time is past and will have major geopolitical consequences.

Internationally, the big, open American hand has been closing as it has curtailed or ended participation in international institutions from NATO to the World Health Organization to the Paris climate agreement. The arbitrary closing of USAID was a declaration of withdrawal from the world and from the exercise of soft power as a diplomatic tool.

Another challenge for future Americans as they grow into adulthood: They will live in a more dangerous world with fewer friends. Hubris is an expensive luxury.

They may also not live in a world where the climate is as predictable as it once was. Already aberrant, unpredictable weather is the norm with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and tinder-dry regions.

Politicians may deny that the climate is changing, but the evidence is there. Sea levels are rising, city streets are flooding, and beachfront homes are being swept away. Hurricanes and tornadoes, part of our usual weather cycle, are getting more severe. Drought and floods, recurring phenomena, are worsening.

Texas and the Southwest, which have long attracted working and retired residents, are facing prolonged droughts and water shortages that will curb future growth.

Dealing with the environment is a challenge that AI may meet quite dramatically. Its ability to predict, organize and find the exit in dense data is without peer.

Graduates, as the generation coming of age in 2026, you shouldn’t fear AI; rather, you should throw yourselves at it and learn what it can do for you. Gradually, it will be understood, regulated and you will come to terms with it as a tool, not an aggressor.

We have left you a messy world, but it was always that way.

Over two and a half centuries, America has absorbed and changed. Along the way — including civil war — it produced a society in which there is still opportunity; there is still freedom, although the door may be closing; and much has been perfected here.

Remember, more people live better in the world today because of America, its ideas, its inventions and its heart. Go forth and be that American.

The Billionaires Will Rule Down Through the Generations

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Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book “Careless People” takes aim at Facebook (parent company Meta) and tells a tale of its potentate, Mark Zuckerberg, as a man who is sought after by the great and the powerful and who lacks social consciousness or real interest in anything beyond himself and his company.

Wynn-Williams is the New Zealander who went to lengths to get hired at Facebook because she believed in its ability to do good. She ended up in the company’s inner circle of management as director of global public policy.

Zuckerberg was of keen interest to heads of state because of Facebook’s influence in their countries. A meeting with Zuckerberg would confer status on them, even if they were the heads of quite important nations.

Additionally, they were paying homage to wealth, something that happens throughout society. If you are rich enough, you get the bended-knee treatment.

It occurs to Wynn-Williams, while once looking at these leaders, sitting around a table, waiting for Zuckerberg (he doesn’t get out of bed before noon for anyone), that none of them will be in power in a decade, but Zuckerberg will still be there.

That is sobering.

We live in a time of billionaires, and their impact shouldn’t be minimized. Nor should the impact of their billions down through the generations.

The heirs to today’s billions will shape the future for decades, possibly centuries.

Money has staying power. In the 1700s, the Grosvenor family began developing property in what is now the West End of London, the most exclusive area which includes Mayfair and Belgravia. The duke of Westminster, heir to the Grosvenor fortune, still owns large amounts of some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

In the last century, some very wealthy people lost their money, but none of them had the kind of wealth we are talking about today.

Huntington Hartford, heir to the A&P grocery chain fortune, and Barbara Hutton, who inherited part of the Woolworth five-and-dime store fortune, both squandered enormous amounts and ended up nearly broke.

Today’s fortunes are so much larger that even if the same mistakes were made with inflation-adjusted dollars, large fortunes would remain, fortunes that will be heard from as the heirs take charge.

Wynn-Williams, in her very readable book — which The Economist listed as one of the best reads of 2025 — paints a picture of the extraordinary power of Zuckerberg and his money: power that seeks only extension and self-perpetuation. Zuckerberg emerges as shallow, self-centered and self-regarding.

My take is that the inherited wealth story this time is different. It is different, say, from the railroad oligarchs.

They sought control of the railway technology which had made them rich. The new tech giants seek to control new technology as it is invented: to scoop up startups, so long as they promise tech dominance. Think of Facebook and WhatsApp.

The current attempt by Zuckerberg to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on AI is an attempt to secure for himself and his family the same status in the future as he has in the present.

Leaders come and go, but money goes on forever.

There are over 1,100 American billionaires today who accumulated their wealth in their lifetimes, although some may have had a running start from family, such as Rupert Murdoch.

As this wealth — more money than the world has ever seen — moves down through the generations, it will have an ever-present impact on how we live and how we are governed.

The Washington Post has done some revelatory reporting on the impact of the richest people in politics. Mostly they support Republicans, in the belief that that will be the best way of protecting their wealth, according to the Post.

To the left of the political stage, there is always talk of wealth taxes or, as might be said in private, “soaking the rich.” This is easy to say and hard to do.

Punitive taxation sends money flooding overseas and its owners changing their abodes. Switzerland, Monaco, the Channel Islands and other offshore destinations make billions and their owners feel welcome.

Benjamin Disraeli, who was to become prime minister as a Conservative, said in his 1845 novel “Sybil” that Britain had become two nations: the rich and the poor.

In the United States, we are becoming three nations: the ultra-rich, the comfortable and the lamentably poor. Is this the American dream or the beginning of a long, sleepless, distorted night?

The U.S. Commands the Heights of Science — for Now

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Pull up the drawbridge, flood the moat and drop the portcullis. That, it would seem, is the science and research policy of the United States circa 2025.

The problem with a siege policy is that eventually the inhabitants in the castle will starve.

Current actions across the board suggest that starvation may become the fate of American global scientific leadership. Leadership which has dazzled the world for more than a century. Leadership which has benefited not just Americans but all of humanity with inventions ranging from communications to transportation, to medicine, to entertainment.

An American president might have gone to the United Nations and said, “As we the people of America have given so much to the world, from disease suppression to the wonder of the internet, we should expect understanding when we ask of you what is very little.”

This imaginary president might have added, “The United Nations is a body of diverse people, and we are a nation of diverse people.

“We have been a magnet for the talent of the world from the creation of this nation.

“We are also a sharing nation. We have shared with the world financially and technologically. Above all, we have shared our passion for democracy, our respect for the individual and his or her human rights.

“At the center of our ability to be munificent is our scientific muscle.”

This president might also have wanted to dwell on how immigrant talent has melded with native genius to propel and keep America at the zenith of human achievement — and keep it there for so long, envied, admired and imitated.

He might have mentioned how a surge of immigrants from Hitler’s Germany gave us movie dominance that has lasted nearly 100 years. He might have highlighted the energy that immigrants bring with them; their striving is a powerful dynamic.

He might have said that striving has shaped the American ethos and was behind Romania-born Nikola Tesla, South Africa-born Elon Musk or India-born and China-born engineers who are propelling the United States leadership in artificial intelligence. The genius behind Nvidia? Taiwan-born Jensen Huang.

I have been reporting on AI for about a decade — well before ChatGPT exploded on the scene on Nov. 30, 2022. All I can tell you is wherever I have gone, from MIT to NASA, engineers from all over the world are all over the science of AI.

The story is simple: Talent will out, and talent will find its way to America.

At least that was the story. Now the Trump administration, with its determination to exclude the foreign-born — to go after foreign students in U.S. universities and to make employers pay $100,000 for a new H-1B visa — is to guarantee that talent will go somewhere else, maybe Britain, France, Germany or China and India. Where the talent goes, so goes the future.

So goes America’s dominant scientific leadership.

At a meeting at an AI startup in New York, all the participants were recent immigrants, and we fell to discussing why so much talent came to the United States. The collective answer was freedom, mobility and reverence for research.

That was a year ago. I doubt the answers would be as enthusiastic and volubly pro-American today.

The British Empire was built on technological dominance, from the marine chronometer to the rifled gun barrel to steam technology.

America’s global leadership has been built, along with its wealth, on technology, from Ford’s production line to DuPont’s chemicals.

Technology needs funding, talent and passion (the striving factor). We have led the world with those for decades. Now that is in the balance.

President Donald Trump could make America even greater: beat cancer, go to Mars, and harness AI for human good.

Those would be a great start. To do it, fund research and attract talent. Keep the castle of America open.

How Crowdfunding Brought a New Wind Technology to Market

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A California company, Wind Harvest, is in high gear to change the dynamics of wind energy and to vastly improve the economics of wind farms. 

But the company wouldn’t be marketing to large energy users and wind farm operators today if it hadn’t used crowdfunding for its recent rounds of financing. Crowdfunding can get a startup over the hill.

Kevin Wolf, Wind Harvest co-founder and CEO, explained that developers of hardware face a double problem when it comes to financing: The banks won’t finance their customers’ projects until the technology has been certified and, in Wind Harvest’s case, dozens of their unique wind turbines have been operating for at least a year which requires money.

Wolf said, “It takes about two years to complete a ‘technology readiness level,’ unless a company is well-funded. Six months to have all the components arrive, six months to a year to install and fully test the prototype, and then another six months to complete the new design.” Meantime, a team of engineers and the bills have to be paid.

Venture capitalists have shown a decided disinclination to finance hardware, preferring computer-related software products, he said.

But with crowdfunding, often through a special-purpose company, thousands of individuals have become venture capitalists in companies like Wind Harvest. Many of those investors have hit it big. 

Two standout companies which grew into multi-billion dollar ones: Oculus VR and Peloton.

Oculus, the virtual reality technology company, used crowdfunding to raise $250,000 in 2012. Two years later, it was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion.

Peloton, the fitness company, started with crowdfunding of $307,000, achieved a valuation of $8.1 billion its initial public offering, and rose to astronomically high valuations during the Covid pandemic. It has now fallen back considerably, after many difficulties in the fitness industry.

Wind Harvest is essentially offering new infrastructure which, should it catch on, would give it a steady and fairly predictable path forward as both a wind turbine Original Equipment Manufacturer and as a renewable energy project developer.

The company’s product, trademarked as Wind Harvester, is a vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT): The drive shaft and the electrical generator are aligned vertical to the ground. In traditional wind turbines, those components are horizontal to the ground. 

The most famous vertical-axis wind turbine is the Darrieus, named after a French engineer who patented it in 1926. It has an elegant, eggbeater shape almost like a fine outdoor sculpture. But it ran into problems with vibration and other technical drawbacks and wasn’t a commercial success.

At the outset of the energy crisis in 1973, Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, one of the jewels in the crown of the national laboratory system, did considerable theoretical work on wind turbines, concentrating on vertical-axis designs. But when the research was moved to another laboratory, the horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT) became the focus.

The codes developed at Sandia are foundational to the Wind Harvest design. Wolf explained that the choice between VAWTs and HAWTs isn’t an either-or choice, except where wind shears are high and wind near the ground slows down. Then tall, horizontal-axis wind turbines have the advantage.

Wind Harvest turbines are designed to capture the wind on ridgelines, hills and mountain passes where wind funnels and accelerates turbines under the tall horizontal-axis turbines. VAWTs can take advantage of the powerful wind that swirls around near the ground. This turbulent wind at the surface is an unused resource now.

With the bottom of their blades between 25 feet and 50 feet off the ground and installed in pairs 3 feet apart from each, Wind Harvest turbines can double the output of electricity from a wind farm while still leaving enough clearance for agriculture, whether it is grazing animals or growing crops. So, add efficiency to the virtues of these turbines: better use of the wind resources, land and infrastructure. 

Thanks to crowdfunding in four tranches, Wind Harvest is now ready to go to market with utility scale installations.

Wolf listed these additional virtues for VAWTs: 

  • They can be entirely made in America. Right now their blades are extruded by Step-G in Germany.
  • They are designed to withstand the 180 mph wind gusts from a Category 5 hurricane.
  • Because they are short, they can use larger permanent magnet generators (PMGs) not made of rare earth magnets. For example, their PMGs can use ferrite magnets which are iron-based. 
  • Wind Harvest installations have a fatigue life of 75 years with maintenance and periodic refurbishment. Most turbines now in use must be replaced after about 25 years.

The first Wind Harvesters to be put into service are planned for a dredge spoil-created peninsula on St. Croix, the largest of the U.S. Virgin Islands, located in the Caribbean Sea. The entire output of the first phase of the project will be bought by the oil refinery adjacent to the project site and replace the burning of costly propane for generation.

Big ideas now have funding sources besides “Shark Tank,” venture capital, and the banks.

Can Our Waterways Provide a New Source of Baseload Power?

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This article first appeared on Forbes.com

Virginia is the first state to formally press for the creation of a virtual power plant. Glenn Youngkin, the state’s Republican governor, signed the Community Energy Act on May 2, which mandates Dominion Energy to launch a 450-megawatt virtual power plant (VPP) pilot program.

Virginia isn’t alone in this endeavor, but it is certainly the most out front. There are many incipient VPPs clustered around utilities across the country.

A virtual power plant is the ultimate realization of something that has been going on for a long time as utilities have been hooking up various power sources, managed conservation and underused generation, known as distributed energy resources (DER). These, according to even small utilities, can contribute up to and possibly over 10 percent electricity to a utility system.

Organized and formalized and with enough coverage, DER becomes a VPP. Sometimes the terms are used interchangeably.

A virtual power plant not only depends on managed conservation and underused generation but also on some imaginative use of resources, like hooking up transportation fleets to discharge their batteries onto the grid when they aren’t in use. Electric school buses are frequently cited as playing a role in future VPPs. Conservation and solar roofs with related batteries are the backbone of DER and VPPs. Eventually, they are expected to be common to most utilities or consortia of utilities.

In Owings Mills, Maryland, an engineer and inventor with a slew of patents to his name, Key Han, dreams of a different kind of VPP, one which could, if widely deployed, provide a new source of baseload power.

Han, CEO and chief scientist at DDMotion, has pioneered speed-converter technology which, if widely deployed, would produce inexpensive, reliable energy in sufficient quantity to be described as baseload. Indeed, he said in an interview, “It would be a huge new source of baseload.”

Han’s technology converts variable energy inputs into constant speed outputs. For example, the flow of water in a stream is variable but with his speed-converter  technology, the energy in the flow can be captured and converted to a constant speed output.

With his technology, grid-quality frequency can flow from many sources without extensive civil engineering or major construction, he told me. In particular, Han cited non-power dams, like the ones in New England which were built in the 19th century to drive the textile mills.

“A simple harnessing module with a generator behind the spillway coupled with my technology can produce frequency that is constant and ready to go on the grid. If you have enough of these simple, low-cost generators installed, you have created a new baseload source, a virtual power plant of a different and exceptionally reliable kind,” Han said.

Another use of the same DDMotion technology would remedy what is becoming a growing problem for wind and solar generators: the lack of rotating inertia. Inertia is essential for utility operators to fix sudden changes in frequency caused by changes in generation or consumption (50 cycles in Europe and 60 cycles in the United States).

Lack of inertia has been blamed for the widespread blackout on the Iberian Peninsula and is becoming an issue for utilities with a lot of solar and wind generation, so called inverter power. This refers to the grooming with an inverter to power to grid-quality alternating current from its original direct current.

Here, again, his technology can inexpensively resolve the inertia problem for wind and solar generation, Han said. Either using a mechanical system or an electronic one, wind and solar systems could provide rotating inertia.

Increasingly, utilities are looking for untapped sources of power which can be bundled together into VPPs.

Renew Home, a Google-financed company, claims 3 gigawatts of electricity savings, which it says makes it the leader in VPPs. It relies on managing end-use load primarily in homes with load shedding of high energy-consuming devices during peaks. This is accomplished by using special thermostats and smart meters.

Industry experts believe artificial intelligence will be a key to extracting the most energy out of unconventional sources as well as fine tuning usage.

VPPs are here and many more are coming.

How Technology Built the British Empire

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As someone who grew up in the last days of the British Empire, I am often asked how it was that so few people controlled so much of the world for so long?

The simple answer is technology underpinned the British Empire, from its tentative beginnings in the 17th century to its global dominance in the 18th and 19th  centuries and most of the first half of the 20th century.

The first great tech leap forward was the steam engine, perfected in the 1760s by James Watt, but originally developed to pump water in coal mines by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. Steam was the workhorse of the Industrial Revolution, and the enabler of the management and expansion of the empire for Britain.

With steam, ships which had taken months to reach India got there in weeks and the great railways, whether in southern Africa or India, which were one of the hallmarks of the empire, were built.

Another invention which made communications throughout the empire possible was the electric telegraph, perfected by Samuel Morse in 1838.

But if there was one silver bullet, one invention that set Britain’s imperial ambitions ahead, it was the invention of the longitudinal chronometer, the first design of which was completed in 1730, but many modifications followed. The government had offered a substantial reward for a clock that could help its captains accurately establish their longitudinal positions. John Harrison’s chronometer gave British ships a great advantage: they knew where they were. 

Other technical innovations included copper-sheathed hulls and eventually steam engines and iron hulls, leading to steel ships. Henry Bessemer made steel an available commodity with the Bessemer furnace in 1860, and soon British steel hulls upgraded naval fleets.

In 1733, the flying shuttle was invented which made Britain rich and enabled British fabric mills to process local wool and cotton from around the world, including America, India and Egypt.

Imperial Britain was a mercantile country (government working hand in hand with commerce) that insisted that all raw materials had to be transported to Britain to be processed, including cotton and jute, and even agricultural products like tea. To this day, tea is packaged in Britain and Ireland but grown in China, India, Sri Lanka, Africa and other countries.

Weaponry, importantly, also got the Brit-tech boost and played its role in the expansion of the empire. First came rifling of muskets to improve accuracy. Then came breech-loaded artillery and toward the end of the 19th century, the deadly Maxim Gun, a forerunner of the machine gun. Mass weapons manufacture assured British dominance.

Advances in medicine were important as well, especially in treating malaria and understanding tropical diseases. The use of quinine enabled troops in malarial areas, particularly in Africa, to recover. Keep the troops healthy and ready for combat.

My paternal grandfather was one of those. He was shipped from London to India and then to South Africa where he was demobilized at the end of the Boer War, which is how I came to grow up in the last vestiges of the empire and to understand some of the complexities of British rule.

For example, when it came to local administration, one size did not fit all. India was the Raj, the jewel in the crown. Southern Rhodesia, where I grew up, was the only self-governing colony in all but external affairs. Kenya Colony was just that; Malawi (Nyasaland) was a protectorate, as was Zambia (Northern Rhodesia) and Bechuanaland (Botswana). If in doubt about a rock or a country, the Brits claimed it fell under the monarch’s suzerainty. Good enough. It was red on the map.

Despite some imperial rumblings lately, America shouldn’t want and wouldn’t benefit from trying to assemble even a modest empire this late in the game. But America has had the tech benefits of empire since the British one faded, starting with India’s independence in 1947.

America filled the gap left by Britain as the dominant force in the world, admired, copied and envied. But underpinning that state of esteem and financial ease was tech leadership, medical leadership, and cultural leadership through film and television. America became the techno supremo.

Now government research funding is being butchered across the board from advanced energy to, most shameful of all, the philistine slashing of the National Institutes of Health’s research budgets. 

Changing times doomed the British Empire, America’s future is at stake and it will be determined by technology and medicine. If we underfund research, the future is known.