Where does one start? Not any of the renewable energy technologies we have today will be enough to wean us off fossil fuels in the near future. Nor is any of it cost effective, in other words if my annual electric bill is less than one thousand dollars annually, and the cost of installing a solar and or wind energy system is easily thirty thousand dollars plus interest on the loan, and still not produce 100% of my energy needs. (Because these only work under the right conditions.) It would take over thirty years just to pay for itself and still have an electric bill to pay every month.

One of the hurdles is the ancient transmission grid, parts of which date back generations divided into many balancing areas, designed to help mange distribution of power and some are so localized they can’t communicate with the neighboring grid resulting in wasted electricity, rather than sharing it.

The idea of a smart grid, is to upgrade the transmission lines by install electric super highways, connection all of the renewable energy farms to cities and remote areas of the country and allowing home owners to sell their extra energy back into the system.

In California a company by the name of Konarka is developing printable solar ink making it possible to create flexible shingles and exterior paint capable of generating electricity for a tenth the cost of conventional solar cells. And there are plenty of wind turbine companies making smaller quiet residential wind generators. Hopefully the United States Energy Task Force (Process Used to Develop the National Energy Policy)

Could convince congress to subsidize the mass production of these technologies like they do with corn based ethanol, also subsidize the utility companies allowing them to purchase large quantities of these products, package them together and lease the equipment to home owners (much like the satellite companies install their equipment) and you would subscribe to the service. This would allow these renewable energy companies to mass product their product reducing the production cost per unit and also reducing the need to build more power plaints.

What about transportation? This is the second largest generator of green house gases in the United States, our use of gasoline & deisel in this country is unbelievable; we use so much fuel that one-penny per gallon ads up to over a billion dollars in a year’s time, and emits three hundred and thirty million tons of carbon into atmosphere annually. The gas mileage of domestically manufactured vehicles is the lowest in the world. How do we go about fixing this, Mr. T. Boone Pickens is for natural gas powered vehicle, this would reduce the importing of oil and apparently natural gas has the same B.T.U.’s as diesel fuel making it possible to run in our nations diesel trucking industry. But it still is a fossil fuel and it still puts green house gases in the atmosphere. And will need to distribute natural gas to every gas station. (A bridge until something better comes along.) GM is working on an electric car "again" this one though has a onboard generator that’s used to charge the batteries on long trips. If this generator ran on natural gas and if they added solar cells and even wind turbines under the hood where the radiator use to be. This would generator power even sitting in the driveway at home, as would the kinetic wind energy as you drive down the road, lowering the use of the onboard generator. By the way, Gm is not using natural gas, wind or solar in their new electric car that I’m aware of. The one I like is the Honda SCX hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, to bad there is no eas way to fill up the tank. Maybe someone will come up with a solar powered machine that generates hydrogen from tap water.

So here’s the question. If you had the ability to develop the nation’s renewable energy policy, what would you like to do? Thanks, for reading!