The Global Challenge of Energy
Access to affordable energy is one of the greatest challenges that countries face today in creating sustainable growth. This point was highlighted by two of the latest visitors to MIT’s campus. The first was William Kamkwamba (whom Ben previously blogged about), who built a windmill from junkyard parts at age 14 with no formal engineering training. The second was President Barack Obama, who came to campus to talk on the topic of “American leadership in clean energy.”
William came to campus on Wednesday, the last stop on a long tour that took him and co-author Bryan Mealer across the country several times to promote their new book, “The Boy who Harnessed the Wind.” They talked about William’s remarkable achievement, and the events that led up to it. William’s family was one of maize farmers, and in 2001, there was a terrible famine that swept across Malawi. Faced with a terrible shortage of food, they were forced to cut back to one meal per day, and William was forced to drop out of school. Not wanting to be behind when he was able to rejoin school, William began spending a lot of time at the library, reading up on anything he could get his hands on. One of the books at the library was a British physics textbook, which talked about wind energy, and how it could be harnessed to pump water. Being able to pump water would mean that William’s family would be able to irrigate their fields, which would mean that they could harvest up to three times throughout the year, and not have to go hungry. Inspired, William decided to build a windmill for himself. He didn’t have any materials, and so he went to the local junkyard and picked out a melange of discarded parts from tractors, automobiles, bicycles, and pipes. His neighbors, and even his own parents, thought he was going crazy, but he kept on going, determined to show them that if somewhere, someone had constructed one of these before, then he could do it too, and use that power to help his friends and family. After finally getting it to work to the point where it could illuminate light bulbs, power radios, and charge cell phones, he became something of a local celebrity, with people coming from all over to him to see his strange contraption and to charge their cell phones. In 2007, he was invited to speak at the TEDGlobal Conference in neighboring Tanzania, where he took a plane for the first time, stayed in a hotel room for the first time, and, for the first time, told his story onstage to an the rest of the world. He now attends school at the prestigious African Leadership Academy in South Africa.
President Obama arrived on campus on Friday amid much hullabaloo, with people lining Massachusetts Ave for hours before his scheduled appearance holding signs with pictures of wind turbines and slogans such as “Clean energy NOW.” In his speech, he talked about the commitment that America has always had to new technology and the advancement of new ideas, calling us “heirs to a legacy of innovation.” He made reference to the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act signed into law by President Lincoln during the Civil War and the G.I. Bill signed into law by President Roosevelt during World War II, both of which had a great impact on economic recovery, while at the same time encouraging innovation and discovery by making education more accessible. However, he acknowledged, some of the challenges that we face today are more complex and more interconnected than those in the past: “The system of energy that powers our economy also undermines our security and endangers our planet.” There is “no question,” he said, that something has to be done about harnessing renewable fuels, creating new clean energy technologies, and preventing the consequences of climate change. “Countries on every corner of this earth now recognize that energy supplies are growing scarcer, energy demands are growing larger, and rising energy use imperils the planet we will leave to future generations.” He then went on to talk about his commitment to meeting these challenges: “The world is now engaged in a peaceful competition to determine the technologies that will power the 21st century . . . The nation that wins this competition will be the nation that leads the global economy. I am convinced of that. And I want America to be that nation.” He talked about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which represented “the largest single boost to scientific research in history.” Going forward, he said, “we have always sought out new frontiers, and this generation is no different. These frontiers cannot be found on a map; they are being explored in our classrooms, our laboratories, our startups, and our factories . . . This is the nation that has led the world for two centuries in the pursuit of discovery. This is the nation that will lead the clean energy economy of tomorrow.”
While these two visitors came from starkly different backgrounds—one representing a village no one has heard of in rural Malawi, and the other representing the highest office in the most powerful country in the world—it was startling to see how much their interests and their messages aligned. I believe this goes to show how energy truly is a global challenge, one that affects people everywhere, no matter where you live, no matter how old you are, no matter what your social or economic backgrounds are. Listening to these two speeches, I think a common theme that becomes apparent: looking ahead, it is through clever innovation and new ideas that we will solve the world’s energy needs, no matter if that innovation occurs in the state-of-the-art wind testing facility being built in Boston, or atop a windmill made of scrapped parts lashed together in sub-Saharan Africa. The fact of the matter is, there is an energy problem today, and it is up to us to do what we can to fix it for the generation of tomorrow.
—Mark