If you don't believe me, listen to Richard Smalley, himself. The buckyball baron co-wrote a Houston Chronicle op-ed yesterday about nanotech and energy. The piece is tight combination of Texas flag-waving, nanotech boosterism and a dash of homeland security:
Seeing the nano-light: "Nanotechnologies also offer the possibility for vast new electrical energy storage capacity that must be tested and connected into the smart grid."
Fear Factor: "But as we saw from the Great Blackout of the Northeast, those inside an island under attack, including all city and state agencies and utilities, are currently on their own for early response."
Remembering the Alamo: "Texas then becomes the first to test nano and other advanced technologies related to transmission wires, environmental remediation, new generation technologies and other developments we can't even imagine now related to the smart grid of the future."
In today's Small Times, Smalley elaborates on how he'd use quantum wires to make the dumb grid a bit smarter and better able to harvest solar energy.
If the troubled summer at Ohio's FirstEnergy is any gauge of the power industry as a whole, it sounds like a smarter automated system might have made up for some pretty dumb human errors.
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