If you’ll permit me, I am trying something new here.
I am following up last Friday’s communication – my first journal entry in over three years – with a light-hearted piece of a different format.
I’ve been about as unplugged as one can be for the last five years. I would skim through the headlines on Zero Hedge… and I would update the plug-ins for Zenconomics.com, but that’s about it.
For all other extents and purposes, I have been disconnected from the world.
In fact, one of my crowning achievements came a year or so ago when my publishing network asked me to interview a gentleman they were considering hiring as an analyst.
After I agreed to do so, I guess they wanted to give this guy some background on me. Apparently, the common protocol for this is to send over LinkedIn profiles ahead of time.
I don’t think this way, but it makes sense. They figured this gentleman should have a basic picture of who he would be speaking with. And LinkedIn would provide that picture.
Except they couldn’t find me anywhere on LinkedIn. Or Facebook. Or any other mainstream social media platform.
So when I get on the call with this guy he gave me the full scoop. “Yeah, they said they were going to send me your LinkedIn info, but they couldn’t find it. They told me you must be pretty dark. I wasn’t sure what to make of that.”
I was so proud.
The joke’s on them though. Had they searched MeWe, they would have found me.
Anyway, I wanted to follow-up last Friday’s journal entry on the secret of green energy.
I am a big fan of solar as a means of personal energy independence. I also like the idea of electric vehicles (EVs). That’s because there are no belts, hoses, or fluids. And there are very few moving parts.
Logically, I have to think that means the car shouldn’t wear out or break down. The battery needs to be replaced every so often… but there shouldn’t be many other repairs necessary.
I reserve the right to be wrong about this. It’s not something I’ve researched extensively. But the concept makes sense to me.
That said, I find it laughable that .gov has this idea that it can force everybody to switch to EVs over the next eight or ten years.
Think about this – charging an EV requires roughly twenty-five times more energy than running a refrigerator.
So if we force millions of people to switch to electric cars… and if we assume an average of two cars per household… well, that’s the equivalent of every house running fifty refrigerators at the same time.
Good luck, power grid.
That is, unless nuclear fusion hits the scene. There’s an immense amount of R&D happening around fusion technology right now. And it has been funded almost exclusively with private capital.
Nuclear fusion involves taking two separate nuclei and combining them to form a new nucleus within a special reactor. This creates a plasma reaction that produces an enormous amount of energy.
And unlike nuclear fission, fusion reactions produce very little radioactive waste. In fact, certain approaches generate no waste at all. It’s 100% clean energy.
What’s more, fusion reactors are much smaller than their traditional counterparts. They could create a decentralized power grid with each reactor fueling 100,000 homes or so. That would make the grid far more robust than it is today.
And there are future investment implications here…
One company to keep an eye on in this space is Tae Technologies. This start-up has raised big money – over $650 million in private capital over the last eighteen months. And among its backers are Chevron and Google.
Clearly, Tae must be onto something. Perhaps there’s hope for their green revolution after all…