Pick up any college or graduate school brochure these days, and you'll likely see pictures of smiling groups of students traveling the globe to gain experiences in our rapidly shrinking, "flat" world. Jet-setting has almost become a prerequisite for graduation from many programs today.
But what are these experiences really worth? Is it wise for universities to pour so much effort and treasure into building beautiful campuses, inviting the best and the brightest in, only to take students out to the far corners of the world in search of "experiences" that the university bubble cannot offer?
This question is especially relevant to me given my field of study. I came to Stanford wanting to solve energy challenges. It struck me that flying around trying to reduce carbon emissions was counterproductive.
Thankfully, Stanford faculty thought otherwise, and they were right. In a field like energy, the triumphs worth learning from—the energy projects that are the jewels of the modern world—are so capital-intensive and so few and far between that to travel to them is a small price to pay for what you get. As part of my education during and after Stanford, I have gone to see some truly remarkable feats in pursuit of the cleanest electron. Having dedicated the past four years toward creating the perfect replacement for a barrel of oil, I want to recount how travel informs and educates in a way classroom study simply cannot.
To get the most out of Stanford, it turns out, sometimes you have to leave.
West Bengal, India, June 2007. I am on a boat in the middle of the Ganges delta, hot, sweaty and generally uncomfortable. The malaria drug I'm taking, called Malarone, can induce apparitions, so I'm not sure whether the old creaky ferryboat to our left is real. It looks like there are a thousand people on it, many hanging onto random pieces of wood sticking out of the sides. By all objective measures, this is a rough trip. But it's the best class on energy that I've taken at Stanford.
The trip is part of a course called The Political Economy of Energy in India, taught by David Victor, director of Stanford's Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at the time. He is dragging us around India to coal mines and steel mills and power plants and oil refineries and liquefied natural gas terminals, scouring the subcontinent in search of yet another energy site. For energy nerds addicted to checking out power installations, this is a two-week overdose.
Sagar Island is our destination this day. The island has a Hindu holy site where more than a million pilgrims visit every January to bathe in the Ganges at the last point before it disappears into the ocean. During the rest of the year, the island is home to 180,000 people living in 40-odd villages with no access to the electrical grid. This is why we're here. It's the ultimate hit for our ragtag gang of energy nerds: Look, no grid!
Off the boat, we pile into five white SUVs and head for a village where an Indian-Canadian fund has paid for two solar installations, 26 kW and 120 kW systems. Our caravan, the only motorized transport in sight, speeds inland along brick roads. As we pass little huts and fields and barns, children run out to see the cars fly by. I feel like I've landed in an Age of Empires movie set. When we finally arrive at the village, we're followed around by a couple hundred people who love getting their pictures taken with us. Actually, the blonde women in our group are the main attraction for them because they're like what they've seen on TV. For us, it's the villagers' access to TV that's fascinating—in a place with no grid.
In most parts of the world, electric utilities set a single price for retail electricity throughout their territory; reselling at a higher price is usually illegal. The set tariff ends up being the lowest price at which the major population centers can get reliable power. This inevitably prices remote places such as Sagar Island out of the equation; in India, many areas have no access to power. But Sagar Island entrepreneurs have come up with an ingenious solution.
We've all seen images of women and girls in developing countries going to fetch buckets of water and carrying them back home. In this village, every morning the men and boys have a chore as well—carrying "buckets" of power. It works this way: The solar installations are hooked up to banks of used car batteries purchased in Kolkata. During the day, sunlight fills these lead-acid batteries with enough electrons to power a light, charge a cell phone or run a TV for a couple of hours. Men come and rent these batteries and take them home to their families for the night, paying more than 10 times the official allowable price of electricity for West Bengal.
Why are these incredibly poor people willing to pay more for power than the highest tariffs in the United States or Europe? Because the first electrons are just that valuable to them. In the modern world, power should really be an inalienable right. The gains in productivity and quality of life from the very first kilowatt-hour are so profound they are difficult to overstate. What's an extra five hours of light a day worth? If children have to spend daylight hours in the field, what can they learn after sundown? Will they grow up illiterate or will they learn to read? What stories can they hear from their parents and grandparents, huddled together and enjoying each other's company at night, after a long day's work? What values will those stories instill?
You cannot learn this inside the classroom. Until you see it yourself, understand in your bones what life is like in remote Indian villages, what the first electrons mean to a family, it is all theory. When you leave the Stanford bubble with its abundant supply of electricity from the on-campus power plant, it becomes practice.
Kiryat Ekron, Israel, May 2011. On one corner of a busy intersection, drivers are filling up their cars at a mega gas station. They fidget as they watch the numbers on the pumps rise—their weekly sacrifice to the oil gods. This is Israel and gas is expensive [roughly $8 per gallon].
Across the street, I'm standing at a facility designed to do away with filling stations. This is an emotional moment because it's the company I helped start after graduation. Called Better Place, it's trying to show the world what it would take to run a whole country without oil. Ambitious, crazy, foolhardy, I know. But what did they teach us at Stanford? It's those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world who do, right?
We were focused on a very specific question: Why were electric vehicles, which were falling in price all the time and improving in performance, not getting any traction? Tesla Motors had shown that you could build an electric car that performed well and was fun to drive. The only downside was cost, but that would come down fast. All those R&D dollars going into battery research to make your laptop and cell phone smaller and lighter could also make your electric car go farther. Indeed, it took only three years from 2007, when the Tesla Roadster cost $98,000, for Nissan to introduce its all-electric LEAF for $32,780.
It struck us that something else was missing. People talked about range anxiety, the fear of running out of charge, but that was only the symptom. You can run out of "charge" in your gas car, too, but in that case you pull into a gas station and fill up in five minutes whereas it takes several hours to recharge an electric vehicle. So the real problem is how to charge an electric vehicle fast. If you could solve this, we thought, then you could provide a product as great as our cars today, only electric.
It is very difficult to charge a battery of the size required in an electric car in five minutes. It's hard on the battery to be bombarded by so many electrons so fast and to try to catch them without damage, and it's hard on the grid to send such extreme power into one car for just a few moments. The only solution seemed to be to replace the battery itself: Pull into a facility that looks like a car-wash lane; remove the battery from the underside of the vehicle; and replace it with a fully charged one. This is what the Better Place switch stations are all about.
Switching batteries. Just like the villagers in India were doing. You let the battery charge up separately from your light, your TV, your car. You take the battery with you to do whatever you need to do, and you drop it off and replace it later.
As Steve Jobs told us, you can only connect the dots looking backward. There I was, standing at the world's first commercial battery switch station, built by Better Place in Israel. This was the very essence of modernity: bright lights, meticulously designed user experience, robots, glass, electric vehicles float-ing through in total silence. Whenever TV crews film these stations, they inevitably set it to cold, electronic music with lots of fade and bass. But whenever I look at them, I hear sitars. I see a Bollywood dance.
I've taken many other energy-related trips while at Stanford and since. I climbed up a wind turbine in the Central Valley and realized the huge scale of these modern marvels. I landed in Cyprus a couple of days after the main power plant was taken out of commission by an explosion, and the whole island had to deal with a power shortage so severe it knocked a few percentage points off their GDP. I visited solar thermal plants in the Mojave Desert and nuclear test reactors at Idaho National Lab. I saw Boeing's first biofuel jets, drove around the world's biggest oil refinery and took joy rides in ultra-modern electric taxis in Tokyo. Taken together, these visits are a wealth of experience and education equal to, if not exceeding, the classroom learning that Stanford can provide.
Stanford alumni have gone on to do world-changing science and build world-changing companies, and surely they will continue to do so. Stanford gives us the tools to solve any problem we set our minds to. But the hardest work once you leave school is to discover the next great problems worth solving, and this is where traveling off campus matters. It is the best way anyone has ever found to connect the dots.
Dimitri Dadiomov, '07, is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Foundation Capital in Menlo Park.
