The continued high cost of gasoline, and analysts’ estimates that it’s likely to stay elevated for some time to come, have started to have a large fallout of effects for the research community.
First off, the Dept. of Energy has recently given out a number of research awards for alternative energy sources, like wind turbines and geothermal. Likely these awards would have been made at some time anyway, but the current pricing situation has surely accelerated their implementation. In the aerospace arena, airlines are increasingly scrapping their gas guzzling older aircraft and concentrating on more fuel-efficient models. Aircraft and engine manufacturers continue to focus their research on even more fuel-efficient models. And as airlines get the double-whammy of higher fuel costs and a slowing economy—their revenue streams are slowing while their costs are increasing—they are reducing their orders for new aircraft as well just to survive.
Solar energy developers are seeing increased demand from industrial and consumer customers alike for their products and increasing their R&D to satisfy both. The high costs have also renewed efforts to recover oil from older abandoned oil wells where the price to recover the final 20% was not cost-effective—well now it is, but no one knows where all those old wells are and researchers are using new imaging and sensor techniques to find them.
And in the alternative energy market, solar cell and wind turbine developers are increasingly competing against each other to see who will be able to get a bigger share of the energy market. Some wind turbine developers are already claiming to be able to get to $1/watt costs, while others are developing rooftop models to compete head-on with photovoltaic systems.
In business school, you learned that changes are always opportunities for innovators and developers. Well, the huge changes going on in the energy marketplace are likely to create dramatic opportunities for those developing the right technologies.
