About this Video

This video is from Cleantech Forum XIII in Frankfurt, Germany.

To register for this October’s Cleantech Forum XIV in Toronto, visit the Cleantech Network.

Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy knows a thing or two about efficiency. Not only did Joy author much of Berkley UNIX (or BSD) on which much of MAC OSX is based, but he contributed to numerous innovations that allowed the internet (then called the Arpanet) to function and flourish.

Servers along the backbone of the internet still operate on code written by Joy, who as a grad student in the early 80’s wrote his own high performance TCP/IP stack for DARPA, upstaging BBN, the technology firm originally contracted to produce the code.

When Joy showed up to a big meeting between DARPA and BBN and they asked him “How did you do this?” Joy is reported to have said, somewhat controversially, “It’s very simple – you read the protocol and write the code.”

While others dispute as to whether or not these were Joy’s exact words, this story has become legend in IT circles and it sets the tone for Joy’s brand of wisdom — straight-forward, pragmatic, and efficient.

So it should come as no surprise that when Joy was asked to speak at this year’s CleanTech Forum in Frankfurt, Germany his main emphasis would center around energy efficiency.

As a partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, Joy is always in search of disruptive technologies — i.e. innovations that overturn the status quo. However, instead of espousing far-flung techno fixes to global climate change (dumping iron in the ocean or blotting out the sun, anyone?), Joy insists upon the implementation of proven, existing solutions and, at times, low-tech, energy conserving options (insulating homes, compact fluorescents, etc.) as clean technology’s oft-mentioned ‘low-hanging fruit’.

Over the course of this talk, Joy ruminates on the necessary deployment of old technologies, the development of new innovations and the possibility for achieving Armory Lovins’ ‘factor four’, wherein societies are capable of using one fourth the energy and natural resources to achieve the same level of comfort.

Along the way he likens his lungs to catalytic ’surface’ reaction technologies, ruminates on carbon sequestration and confides that corporations will stop acting so stupid when there is a monetary incentive to do so. He’s also a big fan of active controls, in case there are any systems design start-ups reading.

Joy is joined by Ed Crooks, who aside from serving as the moderator and host of this fireside chat, is the energy editor for the Financial Times.

Curtiss P. Martin is ScribeMedia.Org’s Cleantech editor. He can be reached at cleantech [at] ScribeMedia [dot] org.