All aboard the Silver Bullet Express
Hi! We're back and feeling spry after making the switch to an every-other-week publishing schedule.
Before we jump in: last week I mentioned the possibility of Green Juice merch... Well, look what Dr. Aarati's cooked up for ya! It's a poster with all our dudes on it!!
Purchase your museum-quality poster on thick matte paper HERE, or buy a high-resolution digital download in a variety of file formats HERE. Proceeds go towards paying off our utility bills.
Right. Now, for a little thought experiment.
POV: You are the President
Imagine you're the President of the United States. Not the current one—God, no—but the next one. Perhaps a 40-year-old Latinx Democratic Socialist from the Bronx, maybe. Just to name a random persona.
You have been elected President in a landslide victory. You've got a supermajority of Democrats in Congress and a mandate from the people to fix this broken country before it collapses into utter ruin.
What is your first priority? Tax the rich? Obviously. Abolish ICE? Day one. Universal healthcare? Don't mind if I do. Expand the Supreme Court? Show me where to sign!
What about taking on the twin energy and climate crises? Longtime Green Juice readers know what I'm gonna say next: wind, solar, and batteries are the cheapest forms of new energy on the planet, and the next President must go all in on advancing the clean energy revolution.
But... how, specifically, will you go about doing that? Can you maximize the natural resources available in this vast land? Where do you look first?
Personally, I've never been to the Southwest, but I hear they get a whole lot of sunshine. And I've only passed through Kansas City briefly, but they say the Great Plains get awfully windy.
Mightn't it make sense for you, Madame President, to build an absolute shitload of solar panels in the sunny Southwest and wind farms in the mighty Midwest, and use those to supply power to the whole country?
It would.
The Sunny Southwest
The Southwestern states have the potential to generate many times more electricity than the entire U.S. uses today—tens of terawatts (TW) of capacity and tens of thousands of terawatt-hours (TWh) a year. (The U.S. today uses ~4,000 TWh a year.)
I'm on record saying solar is a good call just about anywhere in the world, no matter your weather. And that's true! But solar becomes particularly effective in certain climates and at certain latitudes where the sun shines brightest. The Southwest, for example.
Your predecessor's administration (not the current one; the other old guy before him) figured out exactly where these panels should go: the Bureau of Land Management's Western Solar Plan identified 31 million acres of public land available for imminent solar development. Easy peasy!
The Windy Midwest
There's enough wind whipping around the Great Plains to provide 10 times the power of our current electric grid. Kansas alone has an estimated 952 gigawatts of untapped wind energy potential.
Sheesh! We could power our country forever just by building mad wind turbines in a few boring states, where right now they're most likely growing subsidized corn to be turned into useless ethanol. It wouldn't even take that much land: studies have shown we could fully transition to renewables by using less than 1% of land in the lower 48 states.
It's kinda weird we haven't done all this already... But, whatever. Let's do it! Solar socialism, baby!
Except... there's a catch.
The Catch
The issue is that electricity isn't like WiFi. It cannot be beamed directly into your home. Electrons must be physically transmitted via metal wires from where they're generated to where they're demanded. This is why we've got power lines strung up all over the dang place.
There's another catch: when electricity travels over power lines, some of it naturally burns off into the air, escaping as heat, so you end up losing a bit of the energy you initially generated.
It's like if your grandma mailed you a check for $50, but it loses pennies here and there, all along the way, so that when it arrives it's only worth $46.50. Not the end of the world, but when everyone's grandma is mailing out checks all day every day, those losses add up.
Thankfully, we have a way to reduce electricity losses: we can build High-Voltage Transmission Lines (HVTL). Voltage is a tricky concept—we unpacked how it works in this article—but just know that with HVTL, we only lose about 2% of electricity to heat, whereas lower voltage power lines lose 4–6%.
This video provides a good visual explainer:
Anyway, these losses aren't such big a deal! We can just build a little more wind and solar to make up for it. The hard part is that we've gotta put poles into the ground and string up wires between them all the way from NYC down to the Sonoran Desert.
Seems like a lot of work, but also... pretty doable?
Except there's a third catch: building the poles is the easy part. The hard part is getting thousands of small landowners to agree to let you hammer transmission lines into their property. Many of these landowners are, presumably, of a conservative persuasion, and therefore may be skeptical of government-funded renewable energy projects. States still have rights in this country, damnit, and landowners can't be giving the milk away for free!!
If even one little landowner refuses to let you build, it's back to the drawing board.
This is all pretty inconvenient.
Let's pause for a moment and return to your nascent presidency.
You're doing stellar work! But there's so freaking much to do. A galaxy of things to unfuck, bequeathed to you by the outgoing administration. You're working overtime, but it's slow-going and nobody appreciates nuance. The people grow restless. You were elected to do big things.
What you need is a national project. One that's not just shiny, but impactful. Something widely felt. Something that will get the people to believe again.
One day, a centenarian Senator from Vermont pays you a visit in the White House. "BACK IN MY DAY," he inexplicably begins to bellow at the top of his lungs, "DAMN NEAR EVERY TOWN IN AMERICA HAD ITS OWN COMMUTER TRAIN STATION. AMERICANS TOOK OVER A BILLION PASSENGER TRIPS A YEAR IN 1920. THAT WAS WITH A POPULATION OF 100 MILLION, BY THE WAY. WHAT WE'VE GOT TODAY IS FARCICAL. 30 MILLION AMTRAK RIDES A YEAR WITH A POPULATION OF 342 MILLION? THAT'S A JOKE. ARE YOU AWARE, MADAME PRESIDENT, IN CHINA THERE'S A TRAIN FROM SHANGHAI TO BEIJING THAT TAKES 2.5 HOURS? THOSE CITIES ARE 750 MILES APART! BURLINGTON IS ONLY 500 MILES FROM HERE, BUT IT'D TAKE ME 13 HOURS TO GET HOME BY AMTRAK. AND THAT'S IF NO DELAYS, WHICH OF COURSE THERE ALWAYS ARE. AMTRAK STOPS FOR THE FREIGHTS, EVEN THOUGH IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE THE OTHER WAY AROUND. THE COMMUTER TRAINS HAVE THE LEGAL RIGHT-OF-WAYS, BUT IT'S NOT ENFORCED..."
You zoned out for most of his tirade. You were thinking about lunch. You're getting kind of sick of American food, frankly. Maybe they can order in Chinese today?
But that last line hits you like... well, like a runaway train.
"Eureka!" you cry, banging your fists on the gold-plated desk you haven't figured out what the hell to do with yet.
It's so simple! So obvious! You could kill two birds with one stone... or even more birds! Yes, you could kill upwards of 10 birds with this one stone!
"WHAT'S THE MATTER, MADAME PRESIDENT?" the Senator shouts.
"Follow me," you say, jumping up from your gilded throne (inherited) and racing to a nearby chamber filled with old maps and mapmaking instruments. The Senator lumbers in after you. You dig through piles of maps, throwing rolled up parchment everywhere. "They've got to be here somewhere..." you say. "Aha!"
You unfurl two large maps onto a broad table, arranging them side-by-side. "Do you see, Senator? Do you see it?!"
"WHAT I SEE IS A MAP OF ALL THE AMTRAK TRACKS IN THE U.S. NEXT TO A MAP OF WHERE NREL SAYS WE NEED TO BUILD A MULTI-TERMINAL NETWORK OF HIGH-VOLTAGE DC TRANSMISSION LINES."
"Check this shit out," you say, and carefully you slide one map over the other.
"GOOD GOD, THEY'RE DAMN NEAR IDENTICAL!" the Senator exclaims.
"That's right. If we build a mesh network of High-Voltage Transmission Lines alongside our existing railroad tracks, we can use the railroads' federally granted right-of-ways to ignore all those pesky Evangelical landowners! What's more, we can utilize the transmission lines to electrify all our trains and seamlessly transition to high-speed rail!!"
"ASTONISHING! HOW HIGH-SPEED ARE WE TALKIN'?"
"By making a few upgrades to our existing track network, electric passenger trains can reach speeds of 125 mph, while freight rail can hit 90 mph."
"NOT EXACTLY THE SHANGHAI-BEIJING MAG-LEV."
"True. For Very High-Speed Rail (VHSR) trains, we would need to lay down new, specialized track, which is prohibitively expensive. But why start there when we've got 160,000 miles of steel railroad track in this country that just needs a little spit shine?"
"ELECTRIC RAIL IN AMERICA! I CAN'T BELIEVE IT."
"It boggles my mind that just 1% of mainline railroad track in this country is electrified. The automotive industry really did a number on us."
"I CAN'T WAIT TO RIDE THE ELECTRIC TRAIN ALL ACROSS THIS VAST LAND."
"The benefits don't end there, Senator. By co-locating transmission lines with clean, high-speed electric rail... why, we could...
- Unleash the power of the sunny Southwest and windy Midwest
- Connect our three almost totally isolated energy grids
- Bring economic development and renewable energy to tribal lands
- Revitalize small farms by giving them access to new markets
- Create thousands of union jobs and improve labor conditions for rail workers
- Shift shipping away from road-crushing, polluting diesel trucks to clean, electric freight trains
- Clean up our highly polluted freight yards
- Reconnect rural Americans with city folk by ushering in a new Golden Age of American Railroading!"
"JESUS CHRIST, YOU'RE A GODDAMN GENIUS, MADAME PRESIDENT," the Senator exclaims. "BUT WHAT WILL YOU CALL IT?"
"The Silver Bullet Express," you say. "A national project that solves a dozen problems in one fell swoop. I just hope there aren't any major obstacles to overcome."
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