Ep40 Robert Metcalfe @ACM ByteCast, with Scott Hansleman
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes 2022 ACM A.M. Turing Award Laureate Robert Metcalfe, Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and Research Affiliate in Computational Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Metcalfe received his Turing Award for the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet, the foundational technology of the Internet, which supports more than 5 billion users and enables much of modern life...
He took a job as a computational engineer at MIT. He models geothermal wells, and loves the challenge, and recognizes that he needs to have a deeper understanding of thermodynamics.
"Oh, clean energy is all we need." Well, no, no, it has to be cheap. You won't get massive adoption until it's cheap, so it has to be cheap and clean, not merely clean. And so there's a thing called the Levelized Cost of Energy, the LCOE, and we're all fighting to get it. It varies. It's 10 cents per kilowatt-hour or 20 cents, and we'd like to get it to one cent. My goal is one cent per kilowatt-hour, and that's viewed as very unrealistic, but I think when we achieve the drilling breakthrough, one cent LCOE is going to surprise us. It's going to come suddenly.
