Elon Musk have change the car industry with Tesla, and projects like Hyper loop and SpaceX often reach the news. But in this interview he talks about how he want to change the way we build tunnels for cars by changing the tools and the requirements for the tunnel. It is interesting to see how he adress a problem and how he step-by-step working towards a solution. Look at the interview about 3D tunnels and the future for Elon Musk.

You drop the diameter by a factor of two and the cross-sectional area by a factor of four, and the tunneling cost scales with the cross-sectional area. So that’s roughly a half-order of magnitude improvement right there. Then tunneling machines currently tunnel for half the time, then they stop, and then the rest of the time is putting in reinforcements for the tunnel wall. So if you design the machine instead to do continuous tunneling and reinforcing, that will give you a factor of two improvement. Combine that and that’s a factor of eight.

The transformation into a sustainable society is one of the toughest challenges facing humanity. Even with a consensus regarding the need to decrease and prevent the negative impact on the environment, many strategic considerations remain. Choosing strategies (what should be done?) as well as tactics (how should it be done?) wisely, may significantly improve success rates. Doing the right thing has though been shown, even with the best intentions, to be very difficult. The challenge is exceptionally complex and encompasses very intricate considerations and judgements. There is a need to categorize and illustrate possible routes in a simplified way to facilitate evaluation and communication.

Analyzing potential and investments made within cleantech, two major categories surface:  sustainable technologies that are presently not profitable or competitive on their own merits and incremental improvements decreasing the negative impact of well established technologies. Läs mer