The Energy Revolution…
I want to talk about something that is so very important to me, and to the rest of the world. It is energy. The western world has moved through the industrial revolution, the electronic revolution, and also the internet revolution. I have been talking about the next revolution since 1999. It should have already happened. The energy revolution needs to change the way we interact with the world the same way that the internet did. I still don’t see how, but I know that America needs to grab the bull by the horns and change how we use energy. It is strange to me, as an avowed financial conservative, that we would spend a trillion in Iraq (without getting some free oil out of it) instead of spending it on infrastructure to power fuel cell cars. There is no doubt in my mind we should have been here already. This is not a political post, so I will move on, but there are numeous things that should and could be addressed today, and our government does little to nothing to encourage it. These are not political-driven items. Just for fun, I am going to start a list here of new technologies that I think should be pushed, and I would like you ingenious people of America to add to the list. I am not looking for celebrities washing their hair less, or fred flintstoning your car down the street, but be ingenious, but limit it to available technology. Here are just a few items that I think should be at the top of the list.
1. Geothermal-My dad in a small town in the middle of nowhere, has a geothermal heating and cooling system. The technology is not overly expensive, and it is ingenious. It has been around since roman times in simpler form. Look it up in wikipedia. Basically you sink some wells in the ground, run some heat exchange coils, and use the temperture of the earth to “warm” the coils in winter, and cool them in summer. If the outside air is 20 degrees, heating 50 degree air is a lot to cheaper, right? And the same radiated air is cheaper to cool in summer too. The temperature of the ground doesn’t change much at depth, and this system works incredibly well in certain locations. I haven’t even heard of it in arizona yet.
2. Biofuels, but particularly biodiesel. Okay, internal combustion should be on its way out, but it is probably necessary for heavy duty engines. Hydrogen Fuel cell tech, as I understand it, will not likely be great for large earth moving equipment, so we will have internal combustion around for quite a while, so don’t write off the diesel just yet. The beautiful part about biodiesel is that we don’t have to change current engine tech much to use it, and as we all know the biggest obstacle to changing over is infrastructure, not the tech. If you have a 1985 mercedes diesel, you can use biodiesel with very little modification. Ethanol is a little more complicated, but manufacturers are stepping up and making e85 Vehicles. Biodiesel is not the long term solution to passenger car use, but it is the best stepping stone. It provides great economy, and soy is one of the easiest things for farmers to produce. Canola is even better as a biodiesel fuelstock, but rapeseed (that’s what they call it in europe) grows in North Dakota and parts of canada and not much of anywhere else. Biodiesel has its gelling problems in cold weather states but nothing that can’t be overcome with blending. Still, we don’t need to eliminate oil use immediately, we just want want to cut it back to where our foreign imports is cut as much as possible. We still produce oil here, we just use so much. If you are interested in the subject, check out this biodiesel trade site.
I salute minnesota for its efforts to increase the use of biofuels. It is really pushing it. They have other reasons, of course. They are pandering to their voter base in Minnesota, and rightly so. The other upside of Biofuels is that even if it is as expensive to produce as buying foreign oil, what nobody seems to mention is that the money stays here with american farmers, american processing plants, and american companies that market it. When we buy foreign oil, we are paying for gold plated Mercedes among our friends in the middle east, and AKs and RPGs for our enemies. What do the TV pundits and academians not understand about that? Every time they interview one, they talk about the excessive cost to produce ethanol, and the tax incentive. Bottom line is, even if is not particularly cheaper, at least the money isn’t draining away to the middle east, Chavez, or Russia. Macro Econ will tell you that the more money we keep in our system, the richer we will be and the less influence the chavezes and putins have in the world. The higher price we pay for corn-related food is a trade off, but there are always trade offs. Maybe someone would then figure out switchgrass or burning cornstalks if corn got too high.
3. Hydrogen fuel cell. I know nothing about this except for two things: 1. We are not working hard enough on it, so it is not ready for general consumption yet. Two. The cost of the infrastructure to install hydrogen fuel tanks at gas stations is a massive investment, and will only be done if the government encourages it with incentives. The clearest explanation I found was also on wikipedia.
Those are my top three. I will compile the list from your entries in a couple of weeks. I am so interested in hearing from you about this topic!
