Economic recoveries are like Indiana Jones movies. The best ones have a Nazi to fight. It’s widely accepted that World War II brought us recovery from the Great Depression by putting the New Deal spending on steroids. That spending happened because we had a vision of victory. We knew we must win, and the Nazis must lose.
As it stands today, we have no metaphoric Nazi, and we need one. Such a touchstone embodying victory will unify us. We’ll know what we’re working to achieve. It will motivate us to revive the economy with our own version of the Manhattan project.
So what will it be? What’s our Nazi, and how will the battle against it save, yes save our economy? Take the jump with me...
Our Nazi is our electric bill. Or more precisely, the electric grid. The grid distribution model is an outdated notion that leaves us vulnerable to enemies, hurricanes, ice storms, and squirrels in substations.
Okay, follow me on this and you’ll find it transforms our world.
Our goal—our Manhattan project—should focus on local generation of electrical power. I mean VERY local—right out your back door. Each home, each office, each neighborhood should generate its own electricity. As a plus, this goal even has a catchy rhyme. "Get rid of the grid".
Imagine your home got its heat from a giant furnace 100 miles away. Vast ducts and vents from this massive furnace traverse the countryside, flying over streets and roads in unsightly clusters until finally one arrives at your home, delivering warmth. Of course, most of the heat would be lost in transmission, so the furnace would have to overproduce heat to be sure there’s enough left in the duct by the time it reaches you. "That’s ridiculous", you’d think. "I can just have my own furnace, and make heat here." Precisely. Yet, we accept this unwieldy setup to deliver our electrical power.
Instead, imagine your home had a fuel cell about twice the size of your air conditioning unit. This fuel cell would create your electricity from hydrogen it gleaned from natural gas—a resource we have in abundance in this country. Pollution is nil. Other neighborhoods band together to own their own wind turbine to deliver their electricity. Instead of a grid that is vulnerable to attack, we have a model that is more like the Internet—a headless beast that continues to work as a whole even as individual components go offline.
A note about fuel cells. They sound complicated. After all, they power the shuttle. In fact the technology has been around since the 1800’s. Using natural gas as the source of hydrogen is existing technology as well.
Now let’s backup and consider what we need from our modern day New Deal. Unlike its predecessor, it needs to engage a more diverse workforce. While the WPA or CCC helped put largely uneducated men to work for steady pay, the landscape is different today. First, 46% of our workforce is female. "Shovel-ready" road projects won’t help them. We’re also a much more educated nation than in 1941. Handing chemical engineers and computer specialists shovels to build infrastructure is a squandering of our resources. Transforming our homes and businesses to generate power locally will engage men and women at all educational levels.
The investments we made to fight the Nazis paid off with 30 years of growth. The Manhattan project led to the Space Program, which led to the computer age. By transforming energy technology to a fuel source we hold in abundance, and then exporting that technology, we’ve shifted the balance of power from nations with oil to nations with natural gas. That would be us.
Think of the downstream effects. When people have electricity that is nearly free, what will they want to use to power their cars, for instance?
The grid is our enemy. It’s time to liberate us all from it.