A Common Sense Approach to U.S. Energy Independence

I would like to open this article by stating for the record that I am an Oil user. Not an Oil analyst. I am however a rational individual and as such I realize that it is much easier to get less people to do more than to get more people to do more. With this in mind I want to suggest an alternative fuel strategy to asking John Q Public to take a bus or a bike to work each day.

We are currently striving to solve our oil dependence problem by asking over 200 million people to reduce their daily consumption of fuel. Perhaps if instead, we might find a cost effective way to get the thousands of Manufacturing Plants to get their power someplace besides Fossil Fuels. While we have beat up our Manufacturers for many years with demands that they not pollute we have failed to help them do better. Now, their own organizations are screaming about rising fuel costs.

Power generation is currently accomplished by burning fuel (Fossil Oil products or Nuclear Isotopes) to cause water to heat to the boiling point, and turn to steam. The expanding steam pressure is constricted in pipes which direct this steam to push turbines around, and this movement creates electricity. The other means is to put this fuel into an engine like the one in our car and let the crankshaft turn the Turbine and thus create electricity. This is overly simplified but it is basically correct for our purposes here.

What are our alternatives though? The only efficient power generation sources that are in use by our country are Fossil fuel and Nuclear. One gives off greenhouse gases and bad smells, while the other gives off radiation and when ignored large holes in the ground. Neither is something anyone wants in their backyard.

In the early 1900's we built two great power sources: The Hoover dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) dams. These two behemoth projects have provide large quantities of this cheap, (compared to today's fuel operated power networks) dependable power. The problem is getting millions of folks to move so we can dam up large quantities of water where their house once stood. When coupled with the limited numbers of rivers that we can dam up, it makes hydroelectric power seem a far reach to solve our problem. That is until we look under the blanket.

The United States of America is virtually surrounded by powerful oceans. These oceans move millions of tons of water in toward our coasts at high tide, and away from our coasts at low tide. This action is caused by the Earth spinning and the Moon spinning around it. It happens regularly and on time. If you have ever been in the water it happens you know it does so with a tremendous powerful movement. If we moved some of those same turbines we used at Hoover and TVA into a close proximity to this flow and placed the vanes in the water the Earth could generate a tremendous amount of cheap power to our coastal regions and as far inland as our power grid can carry it.

Imagine if we placed these long vanes under all the rivers along the coasts, then enclosed them under ¼ inch steel mesh to keep Flipper from being fricasseed. We would reduce the Fossil Fuel power needed by most of the cities and lands from the Allegheny's to the Atlantic coast and the Sierras to the Pacific coast. If we dropped these vanes along the Mississippi and our other large rivers in the Mid America we could cut millions of our barrels of fossil fuel consumption. This is an ultimately reusable resource and the facilities would be low key and not an eyesore in our backyards.

Then if we continue to think along the same lines we naturally come to wind power. Not the wind from our Government is Washington, but from the other wind. The Earth spins and wind is kicked up all around our country. The problem with the current wind power devices is that Red robin is decapitated by the propeller s and this makes our Animal rights activists grow horns. However if we went to the rooftops of our major cities and used funnel tubes covered with the same wire mesh as the water vanes to divert the wind, which incidentally is such a problem in these cities that we have to engineer special buildings, down to turn turbines like those found in our Jet engines to produce power. We could just about make these cities power sources, rather than drains on the grid.

In our American southwest we have also have millions of miles of vacant unusable land. No water, over 100 degrees in the days and 60 to 68 degrees at night. The wind here is almost free of birds and if we put our Propeller Driven wind vanes into the same wire mesh brackets we could provide megawatts of energy to the power grid.

What I am suggesting is not a patentable idea, rather a new direction to think along. Instead of asking you, and me, to buy $42,000.00 hybrid cars that only get about 20 miles per gallon better than my Chevy Van. Why not use some of my Tax dollars to install some of these vanes in the tidal basins of the US coasts. In lieu of spending millions of dollars on Advertising campaigns that ask me to ride a noisy, smoke belching fossil Fuel burning bus to work and shopping, let's spend that money on putting a wind vane on every rooftop in Manhattan, Chicago, Detroit, LA, Dallas.

I (not an expert mind you) figure that using these two renewable resources in this manner will reduce our oil consumption to levels low enough that the Saudi's will only be able to drive Fords instead of Mercedes and BMW's. More important let's remember it will be easier to get a manufacturer to reduce use of an expensive resource for use of a cheap one, than it will be to get an American to stop Driving with inflated gas prices, and high Taxes.