Power and storage are the ideas that matter. They help each other, and need each other. They both need lots of labor, as well as lots of innovation, customized for local conditions, as well as benefiting from large-volume economies. And they make everything else, from health care to national security, easier to achieve.

I was doing some arithmetic and found that I consumed, in my high-demand months, about 20 Kwhr/day. If I have 4000 peak watts of solar and wind, and five hours of sun or equivalent wind, I'm there. That would cost about $20,000 for parts, plus a couple thousand more for batteries, not including labor, since I could in principle do my own work.

If we have a trillion bucks with which to stimulate our economy, that would provide $20,000 for every single-family home in the country. And the demand for solar panels would call for ramping up production hugely, which would invite lots of competitors into the market, so that the next generation of photovoltaics would be much less expensive.

The next generation of solar would cover the garages of those homes, and the parking lots of malls, or the Pentagon, and would sell power to cars that parked there. If I include my usual commute, in evenings for shows (daytime is light rail), I would need an additional 8 Kwhr or so per round trip in a Tesla running at about half its max efficiency. (Ads claim 4 Kwhr would yield the 20 miles I need.)

Covering a parking lot costs, but it also saves some maintenance costs for the pavement, and snow-clearing in winter. If a parking space of roughly fifteen by eight feet or 120 square feet is generating power you would get about 2500 watts peak output, and a few hours would yield enough for most personal-commute round trips.

I like thinking about the 3 square kilometers represented by the Pentagon and its parking. That is approximately 600 megawatts of peak output with existing solar. True that small-order prices imply it would cost 3 trillion dollars at $5/watt installed (I think, hoping I kept my zeros under control), but that is a pointless exercise, since a large installation would not likely use photovoltaics, but thermal-solar, and even if photovoltaic was used the huge dedicated order is going to be priced in a different way.

Now we come to the other half of the issue--storage. Essentially the entire biological world stores power, not depending on constant input. We have become good at managing the charge level in our phone or laptop batteries, just like we pay attention to the fuel level in our cars. It would be no problem to pay attention to the charge level in our home system, and defer doing the laundry until the sun rose tomorrow and brought our reserve back up.

But the ubiquitous lead-acid car battery is not suited to this kind of use. It is best at very slight discharge and recharge, maintaining the large capacity only for emergency use, when the engine is balky, or the generator failing. What is needed for houses is a system that doesn't mind full discharge. Fortunately, it need not be either compact or lightweight, only usefully priced. The best candidate is called the flow battery, a cousin to the fuel cell. One system is in use to power an entire town on King Island, Tasmania. It uses two chemicals that meet at a membrane, release electricity, and get stored as discharged. When charging the reaction runs backward. The chemicals do not get consumed or contaminated, and have indefinite lifetime. The system scales up or down easily, either in capacity, via tank size, or in output, via membrane size. Running a house for a week could be done with four 55-gallon drums, according to an engineer friend.

The task for cars is more demanding, and the lithium batteries in our cell phones are the leading design now. More practice in manufacture and use will improve reliability and safety. But advances are likely with the new market screaming for designs that offer lightweight, fast charging, and high capacity. Ultra-capacitors will probably be part of the newer systems, to allow fast charge at a filling station. But it may be that fast fill becomes less of a problem, if many places we park offer power, and fewer people travel long distances by car now. If we can get to a battery that allows driving for 8 hrs that will be enough for most, since we will want a motel by then. We can recharge from the motel's stored power overnight.

All the above would require labor as well as design and manufacture. While there are existing products from foreign companies like the large wind turbines from Denmark, what I am talking about is either domestic by nature, or better produced here, and much of it will be partially custom. Home installations, either power or battery, will be labor-intensive, and will call forth many small businesses or new hires at existing businesses. Manufacture of those systems will be domestic, in the way that home furnaces and central air conditioning are largely domestic manufacture.

And is there any question about the activity yielding actual value? Instead of jobs selling unhealthy hamburgers or imported products from China, these jobs would leave the purchaser better off, a producer instead of consumer of power. It would not be merely a temporary employment uptick, since all home systems need maintenance, and replacement or upgrading. But we would stop being the world's consumer, and become self-reliant producers, always seeking out efficiency improvements to get the most out of our systems.