President Barack Obama has made it so clear that he intends to double the amount of renewable energy produced in the U.S. that environmentalists dubbed his trillion-dollar “stimulus” package the “Green New Deal.” So why does it contain a fraction of what’s needed to build the new “super grid” that is absolutely essential to move electric power – including that generated by all those new wind and solar sources – to places where it’s needed most?
Experts estimate that it will cost anywhere between $50 and $75 billion to add a 21,000-mile, high-voltage overlay to the existing power grid, which is dangerously close to capacity and increasingly vulnerable to devastating terrorist attacks. But instead of making the electrical equivalent of the interstate highway system a top national priority, the conference committee stimulus bill contains just $11 billion for this purpose – even though building the super grid would create 238,000 new jobs and provide vital capacity, to say nothing of protecting national security.
The current, industrial-age grid is simply not sufficient to power the server-dominated digital workplaces of the future. Without a significant upgrade now, future brownouts will become regular Third Worldly features of daily life in America. Peter Huber, a senior analyst at the Manhattan Institute, estimated that the U.S. could eliminate the need for 70 percent of imported foreign oil simply by electrifying its transportation and heating sectors. Installing new million-volt transmission lines would automatically boost the efficiency of existing power plants by 50 percent, Huber added, because it would allow them to operate round the clock instead of sitting idle half the time.
Building a super grid would not only assure reliable power transmission for the 60 percent of the U.S. economy dependent on electricity, it would also lessen the chances that a natural disaster or terrorist attack could cause large-scale blackouts in a nation even more dependent on electricity than oil. Indeed, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is currently partnering with Con Edison in New York in the first secure super grid demonstration project in the U.S.
If we’re going to slap a trillion-dollar debt on our children, we should at least invest in a critical nationwide project that will promote national security, lessen our dependency on foreign oil, and provide the next generation – who will have to pay for it – a more efficient way to transmit electricity. The super grid should have been a top priority all along, not just a slice of pork in the stimulus bill.
