Prologue

      With the price of oil at well over $120 per barrel and the prices of gasoline and diesel over $4.00 per gallon at the pumps and RISING, the subject of energy presses heavily on the American consciousness.  Many attempts have been made over the last few decades to find a solution to America's addiction to foreign oil in particular and fossil fuels in general, but most have been non-starters because they failed to speak to our uniquely American zeitgeist.

      In her book "Anne Frank Remembered", Miep Gies describes how the sturdy Dutch bicycles were as much a part of the Dutch cultural identity as any flag.  When the Nazis occupied Holland in WW-II, they made a point of forbidding Jews from owning bicycles as much to isolate them from Dutch society as to hinder any escape.  To BE Dutch is to ride your bike.

      Americans are like that with our cars.  We are a mobile nation.  It's in our genetic makeup.  Ultimately, all of us came from somewhere else; all immigrants who traveled vast distances and endured many hardships along the way; asking nothing more than a fair shot at the American Dream.  To Americans, mass transit is tolerable where absolutely necessary, but for us to feel truly American, a private vehicle on the open road is not just a preference; it is an essential part of who we are.

      Ironic, then, that this very symbol of American freedom, our beloved automobile, should also be the iron shackle that enslaves us to the oiligarchy and the vehicle, if you will, of our own economic downfall.  We are the nation which put footprints on the Moon!  Certainly we can solve this crisis.  But where to start?


      A Look at American Oil Consumption

      The first step in any journey is to have a good map showing where you are and where you want to go.  Here, then, is a map of American oil consumption...

-- Approximately 7% of America's total annual oil consumption is used to heat and cool residential & business properties.
-- About 1.75% of America's total annual oil consumption is used for rail freight and rail transport fuel.
-- A little over .75% is used for public transport and short-range official vehicles fuels.
-- About 4.5% is used for construction and farm equipment fuels.

Total for above: about 14%

I've broken the above out from our total oil consumption to clearly identify where we can immediately begin reducing our consumption through an aggresive, national "Moon Shot" program of electrification (more on this shortly).

-- Ships and aircraft are more problematic, accounting for about 9% and 16% respectively of our total annual consumption.

-- The petrochemical industry accounts for roughly 12%.

I will address the approximately 4% of our total annual oil consumption to produce electrical power in a later section entitled "A New Kind of Powerplant^*1".  For now, if we tally all the above uses of oil (55%), we are left with 45% - close to half - of our total annual consumption going to private and commercial vehicle fuels.  Now, here's the $64,000 question...

What percentage of America's total annual oil consumption is imported?

Answer: about 65%

      Shocking, isn't it?  Combine the 45% consumed by private and commercial road vehicles with the rail, public vehicle, and farm/construction consumption and nearly ALL our imported oil - 52% of our total annual consumption - is accounted for by ground vehicles of one form or another!  So, where do we go from here?  The answer is electricity.


      A New Kind of Power Grid

      If we are to reduce our foreign oil consumption significantly, we will need a LOT of electricity; TERRAWATTS of electricity.  Our aging power grid is already groaning under current demand.  I think we all remember the rolling blackouts in the West and the BIG blackout along the entire East Coast.

      Converting all heating ventilation and cooling (HVAC), public transport, rail, and farm/construction equipment to electricity, (in addition to other demands I'll cover shortly), will require a system that can readily handle a 30% increase in load near term, with a flexible enough architecture to handle a 60-70% increase within 15 years.  Our current hodge-podge of interconnected carriers cannot possibly service those demands.

      As a nation, we have learned (often the hard way), that some ventures are best left to private enterprise while some are of a scale and a strategic importance so great that only our national government can be entrusted with the task.  In light of the Enron scandal and other energy sector misdeeds, I firmly believe we need a comprehensive PUBLIC program, on a scale with our Interstate Highway System, the Manhattan Project, or the Apollo Lunar Program, to rebuild our electrical transmission infrastructure.

      The "secret in the sauce" of the system I propose is not only in HOW MUCH energy that system can sustain, but also WHERE that energy comes from.  In the computer networking world, every device capable of connecting to a network has its own, unique "MAC Address".  This is a constant value built right into the hardware, not an "IP Address" which can change as needed.

      A truly 21st Century electrical grid will be an "intelligent" system which can identify every "consumer" and every "producer" of energy by a built-in hardware address.  If properly defined by a national technical committee such as the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), such a system could handle real-time charges AND credits for hundreds of millions of devices.

      Initially, the newly refurbished grid would continue to be served by traditional commercial and co-op producers of power.  But as an intelligent system, a "PROSUMER" (producer/consumer) could be as small as an individual home, farm, or apartment building with a windmill, solar array, or biofuel generator.  Since each device is identified by it's own unique hardware address, it need not even be stationary.  Even VEHICLES could be prosumers!

      Some will say "Wait a minute!  Aren't there already systems which allow individual homes, etc. to both consume AND produce power?" There are, indeed.  But those are all smaller utilities with relatively new infrastructure and proprietary technology for implementing such a bidirectional power system.  The grid we need intrinsically supports bidirectional power via an open, nationwide, standardized interface scalable from the smallest prosumer to the largest.

      SIDE NOTE: I know Alan Toffler and others have put their own spins on the portmanteau word "prosumer", but my use of the word is the same as Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt used in their 1972 book "Take Today", Page 4, to describe a simultaneous producer/consumer of electrical energy.

      A final element of such an advanced electrical grid is a means of STORING energy during off-peak periods.  SuperCapacitors are the solution.  Recent advances in this technology have yielded capacities tens of thousands of times greater than regular capacitors.  UltraCapacitor prototypes currently in development promise capacities a hundredfold greater still.  Our grid would need UltraCapacitor "farms" at locations throughout the nation close to high-demand centers such as industrial parks, steel mills, etc.  Unlike batteries, "SuperCaps" and "UltraCaps" pose significantly less threat to our environment than batteries, last longer, and can actually provide much higher energy densities.

      How much might such a "Moon Shot" program cost?  I estimate $32 Billion would cover an initial buildout of a central sub-grid with another $24-26 Billion over a ten year period to complete eastern and western sub-grids. Rail electrification would account for an additional $10-12 Billion in line construction as well as subsidies and other financial incentives to convert rolling stock.  Subsidies would also be needed to incentivize property owners to convert all HVAC to electric as would farms and other heavy equipment operators.  Altogether, I estimate the costs at roughly $70 Billion on the low end to $80 Billion on the high end over a ten year period.

      Part of that cost could be offset by thinking of the new grid as an electric road and by the federal government charging the energy equivalent of tolls, with slightly higher tolls for consumption than for production "traffic".  Still, even with such an electric equivalent of the federal gasoline tax (dedicated to maintenance of our Interstate Highway system), we're looking at a pretty large electric bill.  Are such expenditures defensible?  I think they are.

      Consider the obscene quarterly profits of the major oil companies (Exxon ALONE reported $11.7 Billion just for the 4th Quarter of 2007) and the devastating costs to our economy of $120+ per barrel foreign oil.  Consider, also, the obscene costs in lives and treasure in Iraq to keep those quarterly profits high.  Even the Pentagon's own auditors are unable to account for TENS OF BILLIONS in taxpayer dollars.  Finally, keep in mind that such a massive DOMESTIC program translates directly into DOMESTIC JOBS (as long as our legislators insist on DOMESTIC contractors for such a program).

      Like it or not, ours is an energy-based economy.  China, India, and many of the other developing nations realize this and are now in direct competition with us for the world's energy resources.  OUR greatest resource is between our ears and the sooner we apply that resource to wean ourselves off of foreign oil, the safer and more prosperous our nation will be.

      So far, I've addressed roughly 14% of our total annual oil consumption in the above proposal.  There remains nearly 45% of our oil consumption going to private and commercial vehicle fuels.


      A New Kind of Car

      Serendipitously, private enterprise has already put (if you will excuse the pun), the wheels in motion for the first seriously driveable electric cars.  I can hear you groaning from here.  Oh, boy!  Electric cars!  There's a reason they've never caught on... they're BORING!  In rebuttal, I present you with the Tesla Roadster.  Of course, it's currently a rich man's toy with a sticker price well over $100,000, but many of today's consumer products such as Personal Computers, DVD players, flat panel TV's, and cell phones all began as status symbols with prices well above what most folks could afford.  Now, they are all ubiquitous accessories to our daily lives and affordable due to the economies of scale.

      Moving into the realm of cars you or I might afford is an ingenious new "plug-in hybrid" which General Motors plans to bring to market by 2010 called "The Volt".  What makes GM's car unique is that unlike most current gas/electric hybrids, the Volt's gas engine is not directly connected to the powertrain (transmission, drive-shaft, axles, wheels).  The small, flex-fuel (E85) engine is little more than a generator to replenish the batteries when driving beyond the base 40 mile range of a full charge.  This engine gives the car a total range of a little over 400 miles on a full battery charge and a full fuel tank of about 6-7 gallons.  GM engineers are also looking at an equally small bio-diesel engine as an option.

      Obviously, the Volt and equivalent vehicles won't allow us to break completely free of oil as a transport fuel, but over a five to ten year period, we could see a reduction of that 45% of total annual consumption to something more like 18%.  With E85 Flex Fuel and bio-diesel becoming more prevalent, that figure might fall even further to around 11-13% of total consumption.

      You may now begin to understand the need for a major rebuild of our electrical grid.  Over time, such plug-in hybrids from GM and other automakers will place ever increasing demands on that grid and it makes financial as well as practical sense to prepare for that kind of demand now.


      A New Kind of Powerplant ^*1

      Efficient and intelligent delivery of huge amounts of electricity is one thing... generating it is another.  Windmills and solar arrays are rapidly evolving as viable sources of energy, but our nation would literally need to be carpeted from coast to coast with windmills and solar arrays to generate the TerraWatts of power needed by a 21st Century Nation.  And we're going to need that real estate for growing biomass for flex fuels and bio-diesel, not to mention FOOD.

      So, where do we currently get our industrial levels of electrical energy from?  2005 data from the Edison Electric Institute tells us:

-- 49.7% of our nation's electricity was generated from coal.
-- Nuclear FISSION reactors (I'll clarify that distinction shortly) produced 19.3%.
-- Natural gas supplied 18.7%.
-- Hydropower provided 6.5% of the supply.
-- Fuel Oil accounted for 3.0% of our electrical power.

Biomass produced 1.6% while other renewable resources, such as geothermal, solar, and wind, provided the remaining 1.2% of the supply.

      As a short-term solution to both a growing electricity demand and reduction of that fuel oil consumption from 3% to 0%, I see little choice but to expand both coal-fired and nuclear fission production.  For the long haul, however, these are not solutions.  They are suicide.

      Coal, while relatively abundant, is an environmental nightmare; regardless of the spin energy lobbyists put on "the clean coal initiative".  It's extraction devastates our land, as its use devastates our air and water.  If global warming has a poster-child, it's coal.

      The "nuclear option", at present, means building new fission reactors at an alarmingly breakneck pace.  Alarming, because such reactors cannot have ANY mistakes.  Even if such plants are built quickly, with zero defects, and in quantities sufficient to match demand, let me just mention the year 9500 AD.  That's 7,500 years from now; a period of time FAR longer than recorded human history.  It is also the amount of time necessary for the TONS of spent fuel rods and other radioactive waste from fission powerplants to cease being LETHALLY radioactive.

      Think for a moment how much has happened in the last 7,500 years and you'll get some sense of the collosal hubris of our government assuring us they can safeguard this stuff at Yucca Flats for that long.  7,500 years ago, simple agriculture was just getting started in the Nile valley and along the Euphrates.  Ancient Sumer had yet to exist and the pyramids were still about 2,400 years in the future!  Now here's the kicker... 7,500 years is a CONSERVATIVE estimate on the deadliness of this stuff.  Depending on storage density and quantity, the real figure could be in excess of 10,000 years!

      So, if coal and nuclear fission are both - quite literally - dead ends for America, what IS the long-term solution?  Nuclear FUSION Power.


      A Nuclear Fusion Primer

      What is fusion power and how is it different from the nuclear powerplants we're all familiar with?  A fusion reactor harnesses the same sort of reaction that takes place in our sun.  A fusion reaction "fuses" atoms of lighter elements like Hydrogen into atoms of heavier elements like Helium. In the process, a great amount of energy is released.  Fusion reactions can only occur in an environment of unimaginable heat and pressure; a superhot, superdense, stew known as a "plasma".  This plasma can be used to bombard a surrounding jacket of lithium with neutrons to, in turn, heat water to drive steam turbines, or might be passed through a magnetic harness to generate electricity directly.

      Existing nuclear reactors are more like the original atomic bomb.  They rely on the "fission" (or splitting) of extremely heavy elements like uranium with many-layered shells of electrons (much like the layers of an onion).  When placed in close proximity to each other, atoms of such elements bang their outer electron shells together and some of the electrons are knocked free.  These in turn bang into other shells, knocking more electrons free.  With each collision, radiation and heat are generated, making the unstable atoms even more unstable.  This is known as a "chain-reaction".

      Fission reactors use a controlled chain-reaction with fuel rods of such elements just close enough together to sustain a low-level reaction, but not so close as to create a "critical mass" and allow a runaway reaction to take place.  The heat generated by this controlled chain-reaction is absorbed by a surrounding jacket of water and the resulting steam is used to drive turbines to generate electricity.

      Current fission powerplants must employ active measures to cool and keep fuel rods apart to avoid a runaway chain reaction.  Fusion powerplants, by contrast, would need to employ active measures to sustain the dense, hot, fusion plasma.  If controls were disabled in a fission powerplant, a meltdown or even explosion could occur.  If controls were disabled in a fusion powerplant, the reaction would simply stop.  In both types of powerplants, high levels of radiation are produced while in operation, but once the reaction ends in a fusion plant, those high levels rapidly dissipate and there are no long-term storage issues as with current fission plants.

      Considering all the benefits of nuclear fusion power over conventional fission power, you may wonder why we still don't have a viable fusion powerplant?  Certainly, the technological challenges are daunting, but as you can see from the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) and Lawrence Livermore Lab's National Ignition Facility (NIF), progress is being made.  To understand why we're being told it will take 30 years or more, you need only scroll up to the previous chapter and read off the top three providers of electrical power today.


      Epilogue

      Energy is at the core of every major issue facing America today.  Our economy, our security, our environment, our way of life, ALL depend on the choices we make as a people and our resolve to see those choices through to solve our energy challenges.  In 1961, our President challenged us to dream the impossible; to put Americans on the Moon and return those daring souls safely back to Earth and to do so within a decade.  Well, we DID it!  In the process, WE generated thousands of new AMERICAN industries; employing tens of thousands of AMERICAN workers.

Regarding American security, the equation couldn't be simpler:  American dependence on foreign oil = American dollars paying for that oil = those dollars funneled to terrorists = those terrorists buying weapons to kill Americans.  Nuclear Fission presents its own dangers by producing a cocktail of radioactive byproducts known as transuranics.  These byproducts include Plutonium which could be used by rogue nations to build nuclear weapons.  Fusion power, by contrast, renders the "excuse" of building fission powerplants for "peaceful purposes" truly moot.  Fusion power, is intrinsically peaceful power.

      In the end, it really comes down to a contest of wills; the will of the people versus the will of the energy lobbyists.  I have high hopes that THIS election cycle, we may actually elect a President who cares more about the American People than the bribes of the energy lobbyists.  The proposals I've made above to electrify our nation can be started TODAY.  We have the technology and the American ingenuity to make it happen NOW.  All we lack is the political leadership and that, I pray, will soon change.

      Fusion powerplants may be a bit further down the road, but when they're available, they will dovetail perfectly into a 21st century power infrastructure.  I believe we can make fusion power a reality within a decade, but even if it takes 30 years of lobbyist-sponsored foot dragging, fusion power IS coming.  The European Union, Russia, South Korea, Japan, India, and China are are all aggresively funding fusion research.  If we are to remain a 21st Century nation, we dare do nothing less.