A story of panels and plug-ins

 

          This is what is going to happen.

          Energy is the single most important question facing our planet and its residents. Finding effective sources of energy without harming the planet is the most difficult and controversial question before us. Combating the impact each energy source has on the planet is our greatest challenge.

          Generating electricity is a dirty process. The big push toward electric automobiles in the name of clean energy is laughable for that reason. We are not helping the planet.

          In order for electricity to effectively power cars, it must be stored in onboard batteries. The same is true in order to power homes. Want to power your own home? You’ll have to be able to store the juice somewhere.

          Therefore, the single most important thing we can do is to learn how to safely repurpose batteries. All batteries fail and they are environmentally filthy. If we look ahead, building batteries for safe and clean reuse is a science that will be very important. The resulting industry will be highly profitable.

          But how can we make generating electricity a clean industry? The answer, of course, is solar power. The science exists now to generate solar energy at your home. Put solar panels on your roof. The industry is constantly developing better and better panels. But creating enough energy to power both homes and automobiles in a home application will take a while. It will be expensive. It will probably have to be accomplished by private industry.

          Eventually, every family home will have solar panels on the roof. We’ll almost certainly go through an era where homes are powered by both traditional sources (read that to say ‘oil’) and solar. Generation and storage capacity will take a while to match need. But we’ll eventually reach the point where single-family homes are energy independent.

          We’ll also need to put solar panels on the roofs of every school, factory, governmental building and parking lot cover, that contribute to the power grid. Churches will need to have solar panels if they want to continue their tax-exempt status. Airport parking lots will start covering every spot in order to place solar panels on those covers. Southern California’s deserts will become solar farms and the landowners will rake in tremendous profits. Cities like El Centro and Brawley will become technical hubs.

          Sooner or later, someone is going to figure out how to infuse into windows the ability to generate and store solar energy.

          And the thing driving all of this will be science. Universities have drifted away from the engineering sciences in the last four decades. That will have to stop. Electrical and mechanical engineers are needed now to begin the research that will drive the development. That means math and the sciences will have to be emphasized in schools, starting with the primary grades. And that means teachers will need to get more training in the basics of those fields, which means more effort from the universities. Yes, I said effort from universities.

          The trades will play a significant role is all of this. When something goes wrong with your solar equipment, the local university won’t send a professor over to re-wire something. Electricians are going to be pretty important in this new solar society. Someone is going to have to install, maintain and repair all this equipment. Architects will have to design buildings that support panels on the roofs and can handle the increased electrical activity. The construction trades will have to adjust as well. Junior colleges used to be havens for developing tradesmen. That’s going to have to happen again.

          Yeah, yeah, you say. That’s in the future. Who cares now?

          Well, in order to make this stuff happen in the future, we’ll have to start now. We need a culture change. We need to think about building the future. That will not happen just by developing machines capable of running on electricity. It will happen by building an entire energy structure.

          Yeah, that means effort, lots of it. Industry, education and the trades will eventually take positions of leadership and drag us, kicking and screaming, into the future. But the first to make the needed advancement in each field figures to rake in the dough. As Steve Martin once said in a film, it’s a profit deal.

Americans usually respond to that.