At the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Energy Innovation Summit, Katie Fehrenbacher asked two CEOs (Michael J. Graff, American Air Liquide Holdings; Wayne T. Smith, BASF) their thoughts as to Bill Gates’ call for an “Energy Miracle” to address climate change.
To paraphrase, her question:
Bill Gates has called for an “energy miracle”, for focusing on creating innovations to create new technologies for addressing climate change for deployment 15 years from now. This has created a bit of a battle as to what we should focus on: deploying available technologies or innovation.
Do you think that we should be investing more on deploying technologies and systems available today or should be we investing on innovation research?
Smith’s direct response:
I think we need both.
And, Graff:
I would fully agree with that.
Simply put, these two high-technology CEOs — both heads of firms with significant resources invested, annually, in developing ‘new’ technologies and capabilities — rejected the either / or premise and emphasized the importance of deploying climate/clean energy solutions today even as we work to develop new options for tomorrow.
Prior to the Gates’ question, Smith discussed BASF’s research and development investment. At 1.9B euros/year (of annual revenue of 70B), BASF spends about six times ARPAE’s annual budget.
Roughly 75% is very tightly aligned w/specific business units. Roughly 1-5 year time frame.
About 25% is ‘really out there’, 5-10+ years of more breakthrough products
As part of his response re Gates, Smith returned to that.
Again, 75% is on close to home. 25% is longer term. Even that, this is not as long term as what Gates is discussing. So we need networks of collaboration. We need to do both.
Graff commented in his response re gates that he is
a firm believer that we never stop learning. Even if we think that we have the best solution today, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t work to have optionality for the future.