EDITORIAL Mike Halls • mike@energystoragejournal.com
How disruptive is our ‘disruptive technology’? Phrases like ‘disruptive technology’ continue to be bandied around by large swathes of the energy storage community. Disruptive technology is an interesting concept because if this is really happening — and lots of people are saying it is — then fundamental change is on the way. Are we poised to see a sweeping change in electricity generation, transmission and distribution that will revolutionize life in the 21st century? Or is it something else? An industry that is over reliant on hype? And in place of solid deliverables — battery energy storage worldwide for the grid is minimal as is EV adoption — does it just continue to talk the talk? The term ‘disruptive technology’ comes from a 1995 article by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, who divided the world of technology into two spheres — sustaining and disruptive. Christensen’s thesis was a milestone — if a contentious one — in the way we look at human advancement. Do we slide towards the next phase of technological development or do we leap ahead and quite frequently into the dark? He said large corporations work with sustaining technologies. They know their market. They know their customers. And they continue to develop their products. But they’re not good at spotting new technologies. There are all sorts of reasons for that. Often — almost invariably in fact — the new technology is not up to much. Or not initially. Just think of the 15-minute-a-page fax delivery of the early 1980s or anything remotely interesting for nonacademics in the first internet pre-world wide web. Another reason is often that they don’t fit with one’s corporate aims. If you are a leading firm selling cassette players, do you really want to turn the world on to CDs and minidisks? The ruthless ability of men like Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, who was willing to cannibalize every previous product to advance a new product, is a rare one. And, of course, Jobs was one of the biggest 2 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2019
disruptors of this present generation. So how does this connect with storage or renewables and the wave of electric vehicles that we are told is about to descend upon us? Aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves if we’re talking about this being a truly disruptive technology? First, in a sense most of the renewable revolution — as many call it — isn’t proving disruptive at all. (Even the politicking around it has a whiff of everything too familiar…. the meaningless sound bites by politicians and self-styled thought-leaders, the band wagons being jumped on, the empty promises of a bright future.) One only has to think of the introduction of the combined cycle gas turbine power plant in the late 1960s to know that the era of coal’s dominance was going to come to an end at some point. But was CCGT technology disruptive? Hardly. The displacement of one technology by another that does the same thing but slightly better is just straightforward development. And as we see the vast banks of solar panels stretching out across the wild expanses of California or the green fields of Europe, we’re simply moving one step further in the provision of electricity. Irritating perhaps if you’re a nature lover or a farmer but hardly disruptive? Moreover, tapping nature for energy is as old as windmills — or in modern electric grid terms the first large scale generating plant lapping the shores of the Niagara Falls in 1895. Likewise, the need for energy storage is as old as the generating hills. Batteries accounted for a fraction of a percentage point of all storage until only recently. Pumped hydro takes the rest. Perhaps it’s business models that have been disrupted? Certainly there’s been a wealth of endless chatter about this. A few years back, the investment bank UBS predicted that power utilities would be a thing of the past … “Large scale power generation will be the dinosaur of the future energy system.” Looking at the aggressive adoption of solar by utilities www.energystoragejournal.com