Technological progression and societal changes go hand in hand

By Alix Paultre, contributing editor

Power is fundamental to progress, for nothing moves without energy. The problem is that such a ubiquitous infrastructure need becomes part of society. This means that technological change in the space is often linked to societal change as well. This goes in both directions: As technology changes society, it causes society to change how it deals with tech.

In the power industry, this back-and-forth play is going on in many arenas with some of the arenas and players overlapping and interacting. Advances in areas like materials science can create new technologies while impacting legacy solutions for both good and ill. New approaches create new markets, which often disrupt existing paradigms.

We are confronted by difficult choices in almost every facet of the power industry today. Wide-bandgap semiconductors and the resulting enabled topologies are challenging power electronics design; alternative energy development is forcing society to re-evaluate how it generates and uses power; and electric mobility is changing how we look at transportation.

All of these (and other) changes in the power industry directly impact society. Smaller, more efficient electronics make for more portable and functional personal devices, which increase the number of clients in the cloud, which increases the demand on server farms to support them, which increases the power demand in the grid. Each of these issues has its own cascading set of related impacts on other application spaces.

The focus and pressure on the power industry hasn’t been this intense since switching electronics went commercial a couple of decades ago, but this time, it’s different. Instead of a “mere” topology migration, the current disruption is being led by advances in materials, so the change also involves the components themselves, not just how they are arranged on the board.

These challenges also bring into focus a bitter corollary to development in the ongoing question between what can be done and what should be done. To that, one can add the complications of what needs to be done and what we have the will to do. We now arguably have the technology to address any iteration and application in society with a real-world functional solution. However, the ability to do something is as far from accomplishment as an acorn is from an oak tree.

Engineering is at the heart of almost all debates about the future of society. Ironically, two applications closely wedded in core technology and application have almost diametrically opposite societal arguments. Industrial development, as envisioned in Industry 4.0, is not only considered a given, it is already being modified into Industry 5.0 (or at least 4.9) by the injection of artificial intelligence into factory automation. Yet electric vehicles and self-driving cars (two linked but independent developments) are each being hotly debated on aspects that have little to do with technology but everything to do with societal acceptance.

This is also mirrored in the energy industry as legacy technology holders fight, often with little concern for society, for their monopoly in fossil-fuel power generation and central distribution. They ignore the obvious advantages of decentralized mixed-energy (including fossil fuels) grid management because it would cost them market share and profits.

The advantage of industrial power engineering is that it is very close to a perfect meritocracy in that only the best solutions have a chance of thriving. The problem is that this near-ideal development environment is heavily corrupted in all areas that can be influenced by perception or politics. Any space where people who aren’t making decisions purely from an applications solution position is very muddied by special and legacy interests. Let’s be better than that.