Adedeji Olowe

Digging Deep: Generating power with geothermal

Ensuring sustainable energy sources has become an existential game with depleting oil reserves, dangerous nuclear stations, and expensive alternatives. What if we could dig deep into the earth and use geothermal to power the next generation?

The world is currently faced with energy challenges: oil reserves are being depleted at an unprecedented rate and depending on which statistic you use, we could run out of gas (literally) within the next 100 years. Renewable sources are not enough or difficult to harness. Nuclear power is extremely tricky to play with and the repercussions of misuse can last for generations. Cold fusion is currently the stuff of science fiction. We are living on borrowed times.

Apart from major hydroelectric schemes (Itaipu, Three Gorges, Aswan, Hoover, etc.) most of electricity consumed are made from turbines. Water is heated to super critical temperature and pressurized. The resultant steam is used to drive big turbines that produce electricity for use by industry and consumers. So, the biggest need for a power generation system is a sustainable heat source.

Currently controlled nuclear reaction, burning of gas and other fossil fuels, burning of coal, etc. produce the required heat.

The other major challenge posed by power generation has been the dangerous environmental after taste. The sourcing of the required input (oil, coal) and the running of these stations (nuclear waste, carbon dioxide, acid rain) have exposed everyone in the world to an impending climate disaster. So, there is also a need to balance out these effects by looking for green energy sources. That is where we ran into a brick wall. There are no green and realistic sources of energy. Solar panels are very expensive, and the efficiency is still at the very low levels. Cold fusion is still a technical mirage. Harnessing the ocean waves have been disappointing.

But what about digging deep?

Basic geography shows that the deeper you dig into the earth the hotter is becomes (and the more pressure too). Some measure it as .7 degree centigrade per every mile journeyed downward. The idea is this, what if we dig deep enough to reach a very high temperature and instead of using water, we could create some synthetic fluid with specialized features such as low boiling point whose vapor has the required pressure characteristics. All we need do is pump such fluid into the ground, get it heated up and it comes back up as highly pressurized gas which can be used to drive turbines for electricity production. At least there is a never ending supply of heat.

It sounds simplistic albeit it is probably packed with enough complexity to make scientists think rocket science is junior level arithmetic. However, the whole idea is to look inward to the unending (basically) power stored in the earth crust. If this can be achieved, the concept of energy generation would change forever. Cheap energy should put 100% electric vehicles on the road and if technology comes to the rescue, we could even have batteries that could charge fully in 5 minutes.

Behavioral finance and the science of voodoo

I just had some argument with a PhD researcher about the value of behavioral models over the up-till-now traditional financial modeling. You see, behavioral finance is a growing field of financial science and came into prominence after the last catastrophic implosion of the global financial market. Obviously some greedy folks went berserk and all the fancy market models developed to understand them were obviously on vacation (read Fama, French, Sharpe, Markowitz, Merton Miller and a bunch of others. I can’t even imagine that some people actually got a Nobel for this type of rubbish. In a world where Obama can get a Nobel for Peace in anticipation of peace, anything can happen!).

From the behavioral finance people’s point of view, financial and capital models are crap and can’t model how the financial world will behave as it is based on what is called the rational model (players will behave according to expectation) but can’t understand the primordial human instincts (greed, fear, ego, etc.) which ultimately always upturn things.

This is actual bone of contention. We both agreed that the current models are capital BS but I believe that the financial and capital behavior can be modeled. What we don’t have now is enough attributes to put into the model to factor things in. Another thing is to redefine what a rational attribute is. Purchasing an equity based on PE ratio is a rational behavior but it doesn’t even rank as much as buying because of fear! Or why would the experts spend so much time wondering that the Weekend Effect is all about?

This is what luxury good purveyors have known for centuries, people don’t buy because a purchase makes sense, they buy for all manners of reasons and that is what we modeler need to figure out.

Can fear be modeled? Yeah! Same for herd behavior, for greed, for revenge, etc. What I dont know is if a smart dude is going to figure it out in a year, decade or century but I can put my bet on 2 decades out there. What do you think we are going to use all those powerful computers to do? Turn them into Precogs while the world reenact Minority Report. So between now and then, I will advice my fancy research to go find another job; behavioral finance career is about to hit a dead end.

The economy of enforcement

Lagos is a mad place. Chaos incorporated. Although that isn’t enough to make me do the Andrew Method (run away) . Apart from security and electricity, traffic is the biggest problem we have. It takes X number of hours to move from point A to B. I know that LASTMA was created to solve this problem but they are more interested in shafting drivers than resolving the road logjam. But that is a story for another day or symposium like Abami Eda would say.

Another tangent to this post is that all tiers of government are broke, my dear Lagos inclusive. Fashola is rolling out tax laws faster than Usain Bolt could complete a 100m dash. That itself hasn’t worked well.

Talking about the traffic palaver, even though we have bad roads, 80% (don’t ask for the source of data!) of the gridlock is caused by bad drivers: Danfo drivers picking passengers; vehicles moving against traffic; impatient drivers not giving way at junctions, etc.

It came to me that government could augment its income with loads of law breakers roaming the street. I know LASTMA has gotten away with not doing much because government wasn’t expecting much from them. But say LASTMA has a target of catching 5,000 offenders a day with average fine of 10,000. That is some 50M per day and almost a billion in one month. Well, maybe that is an exaggeration but come on, if LASTMA can generate enough fines to pay for its officers, what is wrong with that? When people know that the cost of breaking a traffic offence is so much, they start behaving and then traffic is better and ultimately there is going to be need for fewer LASTMA officers.

Same crooked (smile) idea could be applied to building codes (those converted shops cause more evils that you can imagine) and to companies messing up the environment. Think of the glee of fining offices that block drainages with N100K or the premises get locked down. When it becomes so expensive to break the law, the government can spend less money unblocking those drainages.

And hopefully, they would have more money to pave the road and a smooth road makes it easier to escape LASTMA in case I get caught. Now, I think you get the point.

Will the database move into the cloud?

In 1999 when senior vice president Marc Benioff left Oracle to create Salesforce.com, many thought he was headed for a cliff at full steam but 10 years down the line, software as a service (SaaS) is a matured business model. Online productivity applications have joined the fray and are maturing at a brisk pace (Say Google Docs, Zoho).

In our modern enterprise, the database is a corner of most of the software architecture and I ask myself, will the database move into the cloud too? Will I be able to implement applications and point it to a database somewhere unknown?

The benefits are obvious – zero hardware configurations, zero backups (hey, I could spend a million dollars for that!), titanium grade security protection, etc. But should things fail, I have loss of data staring me in the face. With that I could get a jail time or be bankrupt depending on what data is missing.

These are interesting times.

Synch your Outlook Contacts with Facebook

Just like every other person, almost all my phone contacts are on Facebook, with constantly changing profiles. However, keeping track of who has changed picture or who has a new number is hell. Obviously, the dudes at Developing Trends shared my pain. So they came up with Fonebook, a nifty application that synchronizes your Microsoft Outlook contacts with their Facebook profiles. One caveat though, it doesn’t synchronize numbers and emails as it is against Facebook security policy.

You can download it from this link.