Welcome to St. Pete, smart people!
I went to the St. Petersburg Downtown Partnership luncheon today, where the keynote was Len Polizzotto from Draper Labs - an engineering and science non-profit that spun off from MIT. They’re moving into new office space in the Gateway area and doing some really interesting work.
He talked about coal and how unrealistic it is that we’ll ever be able to do away with it entirely - we would have to put a new nuclear powerplant online each week for the next 10 years to sustain supply. Whoa. Their solution is to make it more efficient. They just installed a nifty little widget at the Progress Energy plant at Crystal River that tracks something rather important, and by doing so, can improve efficiency by 1%. Doesn’t sound like much, but I get the impression that it is.
He also touched briefly on the so-called renewable energy sources like solar, wind and hydro. He says that not only are they intermittent and storage of that energy is the real issue, but the materials necessary to collect that energy are not renewable. Who knew that a solar panel has to be replaced after 10 years or so*?
They’re also doing some very cool things with NEMS and MEMS - nano and micro electronic doodads that have powerful implications in science and medicine. We’ll be looking for some great technology coming from their partnership with Moffitt Cancer Center.
Those that know me, know that I spend at least 3 meals a week at some kind of a networking event. Now, I wouldn’t want ALL of them to be quite so brainy, but it is refreshing to hear about things so COMPLETELY out of my realm of work, and be reassured that there are, indeed, some very intelligent people in the world… some of them right here in St. Pete!
*I am obviously paraphrasing from memory and would never claim to understand any of what Len presented at the luncheon. He was very skilled at boiling down some rather complicated issues into terms that the average attendee could grasp, but I went through communications school for a reason.
