Creating Certainty through Uncertainty

In Vinod Khosla’s tough-love speech, delivered to the electricity storage community at their own annual conference earlier this month, and expertly reported by GreenTechMedia, he focuses on the concept of Certainty.  

When it comes to energy in America, Certainty has most certainly become the condition we have come to expect – nay, demand -- from the electrical grid (think California governors).  Energy is the life blood of our idea of an advanced society. As described by Khosla, storage technology is central to creating the energy Certainty on which our operational assumptions have come to depend.  

Our path to sustained Certainty, however, is highly Uncertain.  Certainty, sustained into the future, will require leaps in the field of storage technology.   Even more, it will require conservation, efficiency, a continued and scaled-up movement toward renewable sources, and data-driven management.  It will require diversity – in its sources, its forms, its owners and its stewards -- all of which will enhance resilience, and hence Certainty.  It may ultimately require a different cultural expectation of what we ought to be “Certain” to expect.

Luckily, today’s SMART innovation story from-the-field (describing an innovation which helps create Certainty through energy management) reminds us that Uncertainty is at the very core of innovation.  The Uncertain path is the path which innovators routinely embrace – secure in the belief that, however unclear, a path forward is most Certainly there.