Michael Barnard Mike works with startups, existing businesses and investors to identify opportunities for significant bottom line growth in the transforming low-carbon economy. He regularly publishes analyses of low-carbon technology and policy in sites including Newsweek, Slate, Forbes, Huffington Post, Quartz, CleanTechnica and RenewEconomy, with some of his work included in textbooks. Third-party articles on his analyses and interviews have been published in dozens of news sites globally and have reached #1 on Reddit Science. Much of his work originates on Quora.com, where Mike has been a Top Writer annually since 2012. He's available for consultation, speaking engagements and Board positions.
April 23rd, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
We want to see adoption of the Energy Web chain as the standard blockchain foundation—the digital DNA—of the many applications in development by utilities, energy companies, startups, and others
April 19th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Nori, a company which recently emerged from stealth, is creating the NORI token. It’s a cryptocurrency token that represents a ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere and sequestered in one of a number of potential ways. This isn’t a cap-and-trade or carbon-tax system, but a market mechanism which values removed tons of
April 15th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
CleanTechnica would like to engage the brain trust of our readership to get your opinion on blockchain and cryptocurrencies. For those of you who have not been following along with our Cleantech Blockchain series, or those of you who have been considering upgrading your Nokia cell phone to a Motorola flip phone, here's the difference
March 12th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
WePower is building a blockchain platform to allow renewable projects to get funding. As part of an ongoing series on blockchain for clean technology, five questions were put to them.
January 18th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
Recently Business Insider published a fairly thoughtful, historically informed, but ultimately inaccurate opinion piece saying that GM just hadn't bothered crushing Tesla yet, but was about to. In other words, it looked backward well, but forward poorly
January 15th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
It's safe to say that cleantech is going to involve blockchain and similar distributed ledger approaches. And it's also safe to say that each of the technologies and approaches represented here have better and worse uses. If someone tells you that the answer is only one of these, then you can be pretty sure that they are enthusiasts, not architects
January 12th, 2018 | by Michael Barnard
All of the hysteria about cryptocurrency energy use is going to go away in the next few months. The bubble will pop for stale assets like bitcoin, places like China will clamp down on wasting electricity on competitive mining, and everybody else will move to variants of proof-of-stake or perhaps IOTA, which seems to dodge the bullet in a different way
December 28th, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
Cognitive science is helping us understand how to communicate more effectively with people who don't currently accept the science behind global warming and climate change
December 27th, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
To avoid regulatory and tax burdens, many ICOs choose their country as carefully as they choose their blockchain base. Given that cryptocurrencies are inherently without country and every regulatory experience is new, this is more reasonable than with IPOs, where both currency and IPO experience in a specific country matter more
December 27th, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
From buying and selling electricity to raising capital for new ventures to securing the grid and valuing decarbonization directly, innumerable innovators from tiny startups to the largest technology firms and governments in the world are exploring how blockchain technologies can transform
December 27th, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
As these 3 articles show, blockchain-enabled smart contracts aren't a home run in the utilities sector. There are many cases where the advantages are strongly one-sided. But that doesn't mean that they have no value or that value won't emerge
December 24th, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
9 factors will help us determine where smart contracts based on blockchain will shine. There are many cases where the advantages are strongly one-sided. But that doesn't mean that they have no value or that value won't emerge
December 23rd, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
Blockchain-enabled smart contracts aren't a home run in the utilities sector. There are many cases where the advantages are strongly one-sided. But that doesn't mean that they have no value or that value won't emerge
December 16th, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
So that's HVDC and why the electricity you use will increasingly come through HVDC transmission. It gets more power delivered over longer distances, it's increasingly economically viable, it works better underground, it works better underwater, it can dodge NIMBYs and it reduces the challenge of variable renewable generation. It's one of the top innovations in the world of electricity, and it's coming soon to a grid near you
December 13th, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
Not all of these ancillary services are currently in a position to take advantage of the advantages of market forces. There is significant regulatory burden in generation, a rational response to an historic natural monopoly. Now that electric grids are liberalizing with the greater ability to have multiple participants competing and driving costs down due to advances both in computerized administration and markets and new supply and demand control technologies, markets and proto-markets are emerging
December 12th, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
Bitcoin is very interesting for cleantech for two reasons. One is obvious: the primary currency sucks a lot of electricity, and more electricity demand is good for investment in renewable generation. Of course, a lot of the electricity still comes from carbon-rich fossil fuels too. The second is the underlying technology, blockchain, which has a number of interesting uses emerging in the cleantech space
December 10th, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
The USA especially is in a challenging place right now. A significant portion of the populace although not a majority believes a variety of things which are provably false and appear immune to reason and fact. They are supported by a President who has ridden their willful ignorance to a powerful position, and in turn he continues to feed their warped world view. The USA was built as much on engineering and science as on capitalism. Rejecting it will only hurt a great country, and by extension, the world
December 9th, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
You could retool a Tesla Model X and drive it around on Mars. But it probably wouldn't end up looking like a Model X. The rover that Mark Watney drove around in the movie based on Andy Weir's great book "The Martian" is much more likely to be what the hacked vehicle would look like
December 9th, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
The USA alone uses roughly 220 billion gallons of hydrocarbon fuel a year for transportation. Diverting 3.4% of that to hydrogen as a fuel still displaces 7.5 billion gallons, and the gallons which will be diverted are the most polluting and have the highest greenhouse gas emissions.
November 23rd, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
Six of the ten companies that appear committed to electrification of their vehicle lines are Chinese. Most of them have international partners, but the international partners are mostly the four that have equivalent commitments
November 19th, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
Chevy plans to put three more cars based on the Chevy Bolt platform on the road by 2021, and then introduce a new modular electric platform supporting at least 20 new vehicles by 2023. If they stick to these plans, a reasonable question is how long it will take before they have more fully electric cars on the roads of the world than Tesla, if ever
November 12th, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
Seven concepts -- fungibility, ubiquity, loose coupling, electronics outperforming the physical, human nature, economics and the future already being here -- make it clear that the future is electric
November 11th, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
We haven’t reached peak consumption, also known as peak demand. We are likely to reach it globally by 2050, but it’s unlikely to occur before 2030 at the very earliest. There are six major factors which make defining exactly when it will occur very difficult
October 22nd, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
Is Tesla still ahead in the race to self-driving cars, or has it fallen back into the pack? I think it still has a much more complete and robust solution set than anyone over several factors which support one another. Other companies are a bit ahead in one component or another, but no one else has the complete set
October 15th, 2017 | by Michael Barnard
Hydrogen seemed like a viable contender to displace a lot of fossil fuels in 2000. But in 2017, it’s not credible for as many applications. We now know very well what it takes to get useful power from fuel cell applications, what it takes to store hydrogen, and what it takes to distribute it. And we know very well the trajectory of battery electric applications, its primary long-term competitor in most situations
