How “Smart” Is Vinod Khosla?

Well-known venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has moved from botching biofuels to bungling the Smart Grid.

 

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Khosla claimed that building new transmission lines is “10 times more important” than the Smart Grid. He says we need those lines to bring energy from remote wind farms to urban areas.

 

Khosla doesn't know enough about electric power to understand that just building new transmission will make the problem worse. Unless those new transmission lines are hooked into a Smart Grid, they will simply destabilize our system. Today¹s utility distribution systems cannot cope with massive amounts of intermittent renewable energy. In April 2008, for instance, fluctuating winds nearly brought down the Texas grid on two separate occasions.

 

Khosla's bone-headed pronouncement is about as smart as building an Interstate Highway System without exit ramps and city streets. Sure, the 18-wheelers could move lots of freight back and forth – but they couldn't get it where it was needed without crashing through concrete barriers and offroading it to each delivery.

 

Khosla originally became famous (and wealthy) at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the iconic Silicon Valley venture firm that backed Google and Amazon. More recently, he has become infamous (and less wealthy) through a series of wrong-headed investments in biofuels.

 

Now running his own firm, Khosla made early bets on biofuels that (1) were based on inefficient first-generation technologies that create a food-versus-fuel conundrum or (2) have not been able to scale to commercial size or (3) both.

 

I say: Fix the biofuel mess first, Mr. Khosla, before messing with the Smart Grid.

   Wall Street Journal discussion with Khosla and other VCs

   Business Insider report on Khosla’s remarks

   Khosla Ventures home page