I found the Obama weekly address's proposal to invest more to make our government buildings more energy efficient quite interesting. It'd sure be swell if we can both create jobs and reduce our pollution and energy consumption all at the same time. Sounds great.
What I found even more interesting is the second part of this job stimulus proposal was to help state governments invest in infrastructure such as roads and bridges. But, let's not overlook the possibility of doing the same thing here, making our roads and bridges more energy efficient.
Huh? You don't plug a road into the grid... well, maybe the streetlights, and sure that could be part of the investment.
But, fundamentally, what are roads and bridges and how are they used? The federal highway system is nothing short of a river of energy flowing with millions of people and vehicles every day. So, just from a physics perspective and the law of conservation of energy, these rivers of energy can be protected and possibly even tapped. Why let the only product of the energy expediture of all that combustion be only the moving of objects & people from point A to point B?
Just like a hybrid car, where the entire energy equation of the car's momentum was inspected and ultimately tapped to conserve braking energy for later battery use, why can we not do the same with our roads? These rivers of energy create momentum. Can we build highway mills that harness that momentum for reuse elsewhere? Maybe. We'd need someone smarter than me to figure out just how, but the possibilities are there.
Furthermore, if we look at the collective energy expenditure of all the vehicles on a specific road, are there measures we can take to make that collective total of gas used smaller? For example, some roads are steep, some roads are perpetually windy and some roads are windy, all conditions which cause the crowd to use more energy when navigating the road.
If the government invested in making these roads more energy efficient for the vehicles, could those improvements have a broader impact? Could we build/grow windbreaks on gusty roads to cut down the drag on vehicles? Could we straighten unnecessarily windy roads or grade out steep inclines? Possibly.
I don't have the answer, but I sure do have the questions, and I would hope any massive federal invesment would not overlook these rivers of energy that just keep pouring the energy out with practically nothing being done to harness the resource.