Energy luminaries pick up government slack

Gary Musser, Las Vegas

Thursday, July 24, 2008 | 2:03 a.m.

While the president fiddles and Congress twiddles, some prominent Americans are trying to pull us out of our fossil fuel addiction.

First, Al Gore gave an important speech recently in which he challenged us to end our oil addiction in 10 years — electric cars will play an important role.

Second, T. Boone Pickens proposed a plan to build windmills from Texas to North Dakota to replace the natural gas we use for energy production and use the natural gas for cars instead. (Natural gas-powered cars may pose a huge challenge and the energy is still a fossil fuel on the decline. However, Texas just agreed to build a huge, improved web of transmission lines to feed windmill-generated power to its major cities.)

Third, Andy Grove, who built Intel, is urging a massive move to electricity and wants 10 million cars retrofitted to become hybrids.

What is most interesting is that these leaders in their fields are proposing energy independence for three different, but very important, reasons: Gore to fight global warming, Pickens to free us from Arab oil, and Grove to head off a resource war with China.

It is clear we need to modernize our grid. Much as the interstate highway system was built with federal and local funds, we need a similar program to rebuild our electrical transmission system nationwide to support the soon-to-be-available plug-in cars.

With unemployment growing, workers across the nation could be put to work building this system. The way to the future seems clear. The Southwest can play a huge part in building solar plants.

There are places that could use windmills and other locations that can produce geothermal energy. Wind power and wave power like those used in Portugal can be developed on the coasts. This can be an exciting era. But first we need to get the politicians to discover how to lead.