The election is over, but I want to talk about another type of democracy. After reading Al Gore's recent article "The Climate of Change", I started thinking about energy and how we use it. Today we get expensive gasoline from private conglomerates some who buy oil from state owned oil fields such as those in Venezuela. It's strange, to say the least, the way the profit is distributed among the populace in these "free markets", but that's not what I want to talk about. It's the coal fields buried under federal lands which are mined by private interests and this coal is then burned to produce electricity for a couple of hundred million Americans. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing in terms of providing electricity, but it's intended purpose is first and foremost to provide a profit for the private interests, remember ENRON. Now, some people may not understand this, and at the risk of stating the blatantly obvious, this electricity, which is produced in large part by coal, is brought to our homes over a grid system. Think of it as a web in which every home is connected to every other home. The electricity doesn't flow into each home to simply dissipate upon providing work through appliances, but is maintained at a relatively constant level over the entire grid 24 hours a day 7 days a week. The meter doesn't measure the amount of electricity a home uses. It instead measures the resistance to electric "flow". You might ask, "What does this have to do with anything?" Well for one thing, it's a shared resource. The other is that the many are at the mercy of the few, and it's a dependency based on finite production resources. To top in all off, much of that grid system was built with tax money or tax incentives. The bright side is we are all connected together, and that's a good thing.

What I want to remind you of, is that there is another way to live, while maintaining a similar if not better lifestyle. Forget depending on someone else to produce power. Imagine every home in America with a roof made of solar cells. Imagine all those homes connected to the national grid system. During the day while the populace are away at work, storage devices can be storing the energy being gathered by all the rooftop solar panels for use during the peak hours of the evening, when the workers come home. This would reduce the stress of the current power plants. Most importantly, it would also democratize the grid by turning end users into co-producers. Plus, adding energy storage devices would allow power plants to cut over all energy production. I estimate that if every roof in America were made of solar panels, 30 to 50 percent less energy would be needed from traditional means. The initial cost would be high but the long term saving would be huge. Not to mention, the solar maintenance and replacement industry would create millions of jobs locally. Distributive power production would be a revolutionary change in so many ways I can't begin to count them.