Every Engineer is a Green Engineer

BY JOHN R. PLATT

Yes, it's true, some American solar and wind-energy jobs have moved overseas  and more might follow — but there are still plenty of opportunities for engineers who want to be "green" or eco-friendly. In fact, being green might already be an essential part of your job no matter what industry you work in.

"I think every engineer needs to think green when they do their jobs," says Dave Arthur, CEO of SouthWest Nano Technologies in Norman, Okla., who says all engineers should constantly be aware of the need to produce things cheaper, more efficiently and with fewer emissions. Of course doing so means leaving behind a cleaner planet for our children and grandchildren, but Arthur says it's also part of the daily life of a modern engineer.

"We have responsibility to the environment as engineers. We also have a responsibility to our company to reduce costs," Arthur says. He disputes the conventional wisdom that producing greener products always costs more money. "I found it to be totally untrue. Really, the mindset's got to be that youcan have it all. Let's reduce costs and make this better for the environment."

Arthur says his company, which produces carbon nanotubes for printed electronics and other applications, expects to reduce its costs dramatically by greening its processes. "A lot of your costs are energy and raw materials consumption," he explains. Even though he says they currently have a good process, it won't be good enough in the future when the demand for new materials grows and production expands. "Greener manufacturing initiatives become very important as you scale your business, not just from a regulatory standpoint, but just from sheer cost. Right now, a kilogram of nanotubes that we make consumes 1,000 kilograms of chemicals. So if you want to make one ton of nanotubes, you would consume a thousand tons of chemicals and produce a thousand tons of CO2 emissions. That's becoming frightening."

Arthur says his company has developed techniques that will dramatically reduce that waste flow and, in the process, reduce emissions and costs. Implementing these green, cost-saving techniques will be essential to the success of their products. "You have many materials vying to become the standard in printed electronics, so it's very competitive," he says. "You can't stand pat. We are going to improve our quality many fold and reduce our costs tenfold over the next five years. Greener manufacturing initiatives are the primary way to do that."

Different Thinking Required

Making that transition may mean engineers need to challenge themselves to break past convention. Praerit Garg did that when he co-founded Symform, a cloud-computing storage and backup company in Seattle, Wash. Symform developed a peer-to-peer data storage network that does not employ an energy-hungry physical data center like most other online companies. Instead, Symform encrypts its users' data and stores it in fragments on other users' hard drives, a process that requires no dedicated data center and which uses significantly less energy. "Here was a solution where the economic argument and being green are actually completely aligned," Garg says.

But a distributed, decentralized approach doesn't come pre-built out of the box. It meant hiring engineers who wanted to solve a unique set of problems. "I find engineers are always intrigued by a different way of doing things," Garg says. "Those are the engineers we want in our company."

Engineers aren't the only ones who need to think differently. Arthur says the message of innovating and going green should come from the top. "It's a mindset in the leadership and management of the company that needs to drive that approach."

Unfortunately, many companies don't have that built in to their cultures, and that can lead to environmental consequences. "I think it's very easy for companies and businesses to take the easy way out," Garg says. "It takes time to develop an approach like ours. But in most economic models time is a very precious resource. Companies want to do the simpler thing, the quicker thing. Usually the easy way out is also wasteful."

Collaboration Makes Perfect

Developing new and green technologies isn't done in a vacuum. It requires collaboration between engineers from many different disciplines. For example, look at what is required to design a smart thermostat: "That takes an electrical engineer, a computer engineer, a mechanical engineer and possibly an industrial engineer, just for that one device," says Nathan Johnson, a postdoctoral fellow with the Nation Science Foundation and the American Society of Engineering Education who is researching micro-grid power system modeling at HOMER Energy LLC in Boulder, Colo. "If you want to make something that robust, it's going to take all of those different kinds of thinking," he says. Sometimes one person will be able to fill more than one of those roles, but more often than not design will involve a team of complementary skills and personalities.

Wind turbines are another example. "There's still a lot of research that is needed in terms of tower strength, increasing the robustness of the power curve, and generating power at low wind speeds," Johnson says. "That requires a team of mechanical, electrical and materials engineers."

Small wind turbines that can be mounted on buildings or put up to power individual homes require similar teams. "They're so closely intertwined that you can't separate them," says Mateo Chaskel, assistant vice president of operations at Urban Green Energy in New York City. Small wind is still an emerging technology and a young field, so the company often needs to conduct its own modeling rather than study published research. "We have to come up with our own simulations, hypotheses and testing methods, which is a new stage for a growing company," he says.

Sometimes collaboration means tapping into skills outside of a particular organization. "In our company, we mainly have chemical engineers, chemists and mechanical engineers," says Arthur. "However, we have several very significant collaborations with companies that have expertise higher up the value chain. We work hand in hand with their electronics engineers to make sure that our materials are being designed to meet the needs of their next-generation devices that they want to build."

While SouthWest NanoTechnologies does not employ any electrical engineers itself, Arthur says "We do encourage our people to become savvier about electronics so they can collaborate with our customers." "You can't have one engineer who knows absolutely zero about what the other engineer does. Engineers always have to work with other engineers. Having a little bit of common ground makes that a lot more practical."

The Invisible Green: Just Because You Can't See it, Doesn't Mean It's Not There

Opportunities for engineers to go green or develop more eco-friendly products and processes abound, but at this point they probably won't get the same amount of press as electric cars, photovoltaic cells or wind turbines. "It's not going to be in the headlines," Arthur says. Instead, green engineers will make products more efficient, reduce waste in production, figure out ways to produce fewer emissions, and maybe break a few old business models in the process. It might not be as well understood by the public as an electric car, but it will make a difference.