Forward Looking Infrastructure

December 23, 2008

   

We're getting ready to do lots of infrastructure. But exactly what "infrastructure" is has become a loosely defined, elastic territory at the critical juncture of being made firm. And while the shovel ready stuff is needed to create jobs quickly, more important for long term success is the transformative undertakings listed below. Some don't create lots of jobs right away, but they don't require as much capital either, and it makes sense to get them (and their big, long lead times) rolling now.

Here are some good bets for infrastructure that could unleash untold (and as of yet unimagined) waves of innovation and progress by creating abundant energy and transport (as computing and the internet created easy, abundant information):

• Smart Grid
• Urban renewables (to include enhanced geothermal)
• More transmission from the sunny, windy and watery places that can produce industrial scale solar and wind power
• Infrastructure needed to implement the Mileage Fee
  • at Gas Stations
  • the standard inclusion of GPS in vehicles
• the Electric Recharge Grid
• Batteries for hybrid and electric vehicles, at production scale
• Electric Rail

Photo: Steve Kelley on flickr

Dawn of the New Energy Order

October 26, 2008

How will America change the way it uses energy? Last month we offered a draft speech that would let the new US President to tell us how. Here's the speech updated with the most excellent insights of our readers.

Googlethermal

August 20, 2008

Wind and solar-based power sources are intermittent (at best), and that makes them sub-optimal replacements for "always on" fossil fuel power plants.  Enter Google. Enthusiastic about the potential of what the DOE calls Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS), Google just sunk $10M into two leading EGS start-ups.

Underground water tends to be much hotter in the western US than the eastern, but if you drill down a few kilometers, the differences even out. And where non-EGS geothermal is a passive approach that works primarily along fault lines, EGS systems are man made structures that can be deployed almost anywhere. 

Clearly, if EGS proves to be cost effective and scalable, wind and solar's temperamental nature can be mitigated by this third zero emission power source. You could call it the Earth, Wind and Fire approach to renewable energy.

Image courtesy of the DOE's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) division