Author’s Note: This is a republished historical post after the Feb08 relaunch of Soulincode:
The concept:
ELECTRIFIED HIGHWAY NETWORK, COVERED IN SOLAR PANELS, ABLE TO CHARGE ELECTRICITY-POWERED CARS RIDING ON ITS SURFACE
The context:
Leonard C Lewin wrote in Report from Iron Mountain On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace, “It is an incorrect assumption that war, as an institution, is subordinate to the social systems it is believe to serve…War itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire. It is the system which has governed most human societies of record, as it is today.” Subsumed within this category are economics, government, politics, and any category we might assume to take precedence.
Please keep this idea in mind as this post moves through the relationship between potential energy and the way we store and consume it, leading into the history of the United States interstate highway network and a cool way to radically transform it.
WHITE GOLD
The radical transformative properties of electricity on society and economics became clear to me while studying the growth of micro-hydro power electricity grids years ago in the Annapurna region of Nepal. Where natural wood or gas/fossil fuels once served to provide everything from light to motive power, electricity is a new energy source delivered via wire. The difference between these energies is that sustainable electricity comes from a renewable source, ecologically friendly sources such as wind, water, and solar energy, whereas wood is over-forested, causing erosion, and oil is non-renewable. In micro-hydro, solar and wind generated electricity, the natural energy bursts and flows of the earth are harnessed and converted to electric form, whether stored in battery or moved along lines directly to technology which converts it to light or heat.
While the world boasts immense levels of potential energy to make electriciity, whether via its rivers or exposure to the sun and wind systems, most electricity today is created via polluting substances in often dangerous facilities: nuclear power plants and coal-burning electricity factories. Nuclear power yields immense energies yet it is incredibly dangerous in the case of meltdowns and/or terrorist targeting, along with a byproduct of toxic radioactive waste. There are no new nuclear plants build these days because of these problems. Coal-burning factories produce a massive amount of carbon dioxide, among many other problems.
This brings us to industrial and post-industrial societies’ dependence on fossil fuel-driven vehicles to move people, products and military supplies. Movements are afoot to create electric or hybrid vehicles, which may help in terms of fossil fuel dependency, yet we are still faced with the problem of our current means of electricity generation killing the environment. The idea presented in this post ironically harkens back to one of the biggest defense projects in modern history, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s National Defense Highway System, aka the US Interstate Highways. Further information on this initiative can be found at Wikipedia. Like the Internet network’s dependence on defense funding for ARPANET’s original R&D, the highway system was funded by the military industrial complex primarily to move military equipment and personnel efficiently.
ELECTRIC HIGHWAYS
On top of this highway network now travel the cars and containers that help make the American economy so fluid and strong. Yet the vehicles running goods and people depend on fossil fuels (gas), a substance not only bad for the environment, but more importantly, whose guarantee of supply puts immense pressure on global politics and warfare; 9/11 and the American invasion of Iraq are primary examples.
Here’s an idea to literally reinvent the roadmap of energy consumption, creation, and transportation. Imagine a road that is always electric, able to charge your car as it moves across it, a national network of solar panels plugged into the greater electricity grid.
This remixed concept of the highways are simultaneously electric generators, transmission lines, and perhaps batteries. Ideally, solar panels are somehow made from some kind of flexible, spray or spread-friendly material that only needs to link up with its neighboring cell and is very resilient so motor vehicles can run over it many times. Spread out across the nation’s highways like a new coat of asphalt, this new surface would provide a large amount of energy to add to the road as electricity grid.
American highways follow the same paths as electrical lines, usually a combination of the most simple and straight path between major urban centers and surrounding areas. So the idea of making the highway a networked grid is not too far-fetched; the roads are essentially an electrical grid extended onto the ground as asphalt. On top of that asphalt ride cars, always in contact with the road. With the right technology in both road and car, imagine a 5-lane highway on which 2 lanes are essentially “charging lanes”. These charging lanes can take the place of the power lines we see along the road, with the double duty of transmitting energy and also feeding it into “plugged in” cars.
The ability of the car to intake electricity while on the move requires an interface design that allows the car to connect, like a rolling AC plug, charging up batteries in the engine. Some part of the car hangs down and makes contact with the road, either a metal part which falls into a highway groove like a turntable needle…or maybe the wheels themselves. When the driver enters the charging lanes, s/he either engages the “charge” button or the car automatically senses the electrical connection and begins charging.
Car gauges would measure electrical intake and charge for its use by the kilowatt hour, much like we pay for electrical use in houses. It is likely electrical utilities could tie in highway electrical use to your monthly home electrical bill, much like local, long distance and Internet now merge on a phone bill.
This project is not just about automotive makers and nationalized highway policy change; it goes deeper into the production of energy itself. In this case, with an electrified highway, electrical demand skyrockets while oil demand tanks. Cars might need to remain hybrids (retaining some ability to run on gas), to ensure reliability due to blackouts and momentary grid failures.
Experts will argue endlessly about the feasibility and extraordinary costs of developing an electrified highway system and/or alternative energies. Yet most of these arguments will never show the other side of this unbalanced equation, the heavy side of oil dependency, wars for energy, military build-up and expenditure to ensure energy supplies from abroad, political control mechanisms and bureaucracies in place to keep the “pipeline” working. These expenditures are so vast as to boggle the mind, yet within logic of war as primary organizing factor of society, this is a self-regulating process. War expenditures are the only critically large section of the total economy which exist outside free market forces; these massive amounts of capital are arbitrarily and centrally controlled. They control inventory and guarantee industrial production.
Yet another world is possible; this much is clear, it is for the ambitious and brave-hearted to make that world a reality.
Here are some idea along similar lines found on Google:
Wired article on treating electricity grids as networks and concept of distributed generation: Taming the Electricity Beast
Memes: Electric Highways, distributed generation
Popularity: 1% [?]
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