A Modular Transportation Infrastructure for an Electric Future
The need to have a viable and consistent plan for powering the country’s transportation infrastructure is obvious. The path to create such a consensus is less obvious due to financial forces obscuring the way forward. There are several competing ideas for transportation and of late fuel cells have become the vision for the nation’s transportation future. This is mostly due to moneyed power preferring this technology. The reason the hydrogen economy has gotten this far is due to these forces. Moneyed power is forcing the nation to dilute its focus by continuing to advocate for the old transportation model.
The hydrogen economy allows the fossil fuel industry to continue its business model almost unchanged into the future. It is the financial benefits bestowed upon moneyed power rather than environmental benefits that have propelled the hydrogen economy forward. Libertarian-Socialists advocate that federally sponsored renewable sources should be mandated to produce electricity. Such a political mandate provides a consistent framework for transportation infrastructure development going into the future. It also helps curtail attempts to expand the old transportation energy infrastructure.
The generation of power for the country is too important to be put in the hands of for-profit companies. The potential for profit driving the course of energy generation in this country is too great. Otherwise how could hydrogen power and fuel cell technologies be touted as viable solutions. When examined closely science does not support climate-neutral claims for fuel cells and profiteering is revealed.
Individuals and corporations with a stake in building a hydrogen-based economy are behind studies that suggest hydrogen fuel cells can save the world from climate change. These fuel cells are often billed as producing nothing but innocuous water vapor. Every meteorologist knows that water vapor is a greenhouse gas and will cause climate change. Pumping industrial amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere will change the climate.
Additionally, the infrastructure that transports liquid or gas through pipelines to storage tanks to fueling stations is not the future. A hydrogen economy leverages existing infrastructure requiring its modification and expansion. This is the old model for how to fuel a nation’s transportation infrastructure. The national transportation infrastructure should transition to a mostly electric model. Currently, the nation is too dependent on fossil fuels for all manner of industrial and transportation infrastructure.
The fuel cell evangelists have obvious economic motivations. Oil companies are supportive of this technology. Hydrogen can be extracted as a byproduct of fracking. That means the whole fossil fuel industry can continue its drilling and extraction. The hydrogen economy is driven by profit hungry corporations. Hydrogen does not make sense if a climate neutral energy infrastructure in the future is the goal.
Of course, the fossil fuel infrastructure should be improved and modernized as we are likely to be leaning on it for some time. However, expansion of this model for powering transportation is a dead end. It is the fossil fuel industry that wants this model to be maintained and expanded. America needs to prepare her infrastructure for the future. The future is electricity.
Settling on electricity as the energy source of the future makes sense. It allows for some modularization of the transportation infrastructure. Decoupling transportation from the source of energy generation is important. In the same way that a software application is designed in a modular fashion to allow for upgrades and changes, American transportation infrastructure needs to move toward a similar modular design. Modularity facilitates flexibility in the future.
To continue with the software application analogy, a “data module” will exist in the software application that abstracts the data source away from the rest of the application. A software application is most often designed so that different data sources can be accessed, because there are many out there and there will be many more in the future. This modular design for data access means if a faster or better data source comes along in the future, the application can “plug-in” to a different database with minimal changes. Designing our transportation infrastructure in a similar fashion makes a lot of sense.
Agreeing that the future is electricity helps push the nation’s infrastructure toward this modularity. The first step to make American transportation more modular is agreeing that the goal is a electrically powered infrastructure, not a chemical fuel based one. Modularity means as the United States builds out alternative energy production, the current dirty fossil fuel back end generation can be swapped out.
The United States will be able to plug in any and all electrical generation sources to its transportation infrastructure. As other alternatives come online and become more viable, the transportation infrastructure will already be electrified and ready to plug in to the new source. The future will not have to evolve a completely new transportation infrastructure as energy generation capabilities evolve. America will just plug in the new electrical generation sources and the infrastructure just keeps humming along.
Electrical generation and easy transportation of that energy all over the national grid is a requirement for the future. Concentrating on building out, enhancing and expanding the nation’s electrical infrastructure is an absolute necessity. Instead of diluting efforts between chemically-powered transportation and electrical-powered transportation, a more robust electrical infrastructure should be built out.
An additional benefit of a modular transportation infrastructure bathed in electricity is that more electricity-dependent vehicles can be put on the roads as well. Current hybrid technologies involve lots of exotic metals for the batteries used to store the electrical energy like a gas tank. This is making current hybrid automaker’s green claims somewhat suspect.
A better solution would be a different kind of hybrid. These hybrids would have gasoline engines for around town but electric motors that could be powered on the interstates. This is an important part of the build out of a national transportation infrastructure that is based upon electricity. Small internal combustion engines coupled with electric motors are far more environmentally friendly vehicles due to the reduction in need for batteries and exotic metals. The electric motors will be powered in the “electric lane” of national interstates via wireless power transmission or direct connections embedded in the road rather than carrying batteries.
This different hybrid model eliminates the pollution-intensive batteries from the equation. This model allows an electric car to have a much larger range over an electrified interstate system. Small gasoline powered hybrids in town with the ability to couple to an electrified interstate system allows for the best of both worlds. It also allows for a gradual transition away from fossil fuels as more local infrastructure is built out.
The world needs immediate solutions more than ever. We as a nation need to have a clear and consistent plan into the future. Wasting our precious financial resources on things like building out a hydrogen fueled transportation infrastructure is dangerous folly. Such financial expenditures are more about lining the pockets of opportunistic profiteers with government connections, than actually building a new and practical energy generation infrastructure.
