Energy Economy

The Pure Electric Vehicle is just what we need. If this car actually gets built, it has the simplicity, low cost, and small size that could potentially win millions of buyers. The designer is promising to sell it for $9,999, meaning it will only cost the equivalent of four tanks of gas 8^). Kidding aside, for the price, a lot of households could quickly justify the cost of this vehicle as a second or third car.

The car is exactly as it is named, a "pure" electric vehicle, meaning it runs on batteries--no complicated hybrid gear trains, fossil fuel engines, or esoteric batteries. The car uses off the shelf sealed lead acid batteries, meaning they are cheap and easy to make. The car has a top speed of 65 mph, which is fine for around town errands and commuting, and could easily be recharged while sitting in the company parking lot from a cheap solar panel in the back window.

VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, are fast becoming a major issue with respect to broadband. A VPN is a way for a remote user (e.g. from home, traveling) to be connected to the corporate or business network as if he or she was in the office. It gives the home-based worker or business traveler complete access to all the documents and services he or she would normally have sitting at their desk.

But here's the rub: VPNs work best over high performance, well-designed broadband networks. I'm on vacation right now, and have to connect through a wireless signal. The VPN barely works. I can connect, but transferring files is painfully slow, and I keep getting time outs.

As more and more people start working from home part time to avoid the high cost of driving, community broadband efforts will begin hearing more and more about VPNs. If we are going to save energy, community broadband networks have to support business class connectivity and bandwidth. Neighborhoods are going to be business districts in the Energy Economy.

Chicago ComEd electric power customers may end up paying an extra $3 per month to help fund a Smart Grid data network that will allow ComEd to better control power use and to speed diagnosis and identification of power outages.

That's a lot of money when you think about extending across millions of customers for many years. A better approach would be for the community to build a high performance, service-oriented broadband network and sign up the electric company to use that network to do its power management. Instead of building two networks, build just one and use it for many different kinds of services and applications, instead of just Internet access.

Spend less and get more--not a difficult concept, but few places are thinking about converging networks and electric service needs. Once stand out exception is Danville, Virginia, where the city electric utility has already started doing that with its nDanville network. Joe King, the Assistant City Manager for Utilities, recognized this was a better way to do things years ago (Design Nine provides services to the nDanville project).

Expect to see lots of these around town in the next several years: the Smart Car is a gas-sipping commuter and errands vehicle that would fill the bill nicely as a second car in a lot of households. Next: let's see the electric version of this car, and I don't want some complicated "hybrid," I just want a cheap electric motor and some batteries. I'll plug it in at night, and stick a solar panel in the back window to get free charging during the day while it sits in the office parking lot.

Dan Rogers, an economic developer from Kendall County, Texas, just told a story about a conversation that just occurred last week. A middle manager who lives in Kendall but commutes about an hour to work out of the region related to Rogers that he had negotiated an agreement with his firm to let him work two days a week from home to save on the cost of commuting. He was able to do that because he has fiber to the home and can access the corporate network as if he were sitting in his office at the main company location.

Gas prices are going to start changing the way we make decisions about where we live and where we work. Communities with fiber have a better chance of weathering those changes successfully, as it gives both workers and businesses more options.

The sharp increases in gas and diesel fuel are raising the cost of commuting. Even if fuel prices recede (as they did after the '73 oil crunch), it seems likely that we will never see $2 gas again, and it may be that $3 gas becomes the new normal.

While the cost of fuel affects everyone to some extent, rural communities may be at most risk. Many workers in rural towns drive long distances to work, and a doubling of the cost of such drives may make it too expensive to make those commutes for a $12 or $14 per hour job.

Like the Chinese ideogram that can be read both as "danger" and "opportunity," the fuel crisis may, over the long term, be an opportunity for some rural towns, and could be the end of others. If it is too expensive to drive long distances to work, some workers and families may move closer to the work, further reducing the viability of some rural communities that are already struggling with long, slow declines in population.

But some businesses may decide to move closer to workers, and rural communities with the right economic development strategy to attract such businesses may have an edge--if they have good quality of life, attractive and vibrant downtowns, and .... broadband.

Community broadband projects can have a double impact. Properly designed community networks that extend affordable broadband into residential neighborhoods and along rural roads can bring new kinds of work from home opportunities to a rural workforce--getting them off the road completely and eliminating long commutes entirely. Fiber in business and industrial parks can attract businesses, which won't even consider some communities unless fiber services are available.

Rural communities will have to respond to the fuel increases with well thought out, long term strategies to help reduce commuting costs for their residents. Those that don't will see more workers and families moving away--reluctantly, but leaving nonetheless.

Look for "fuel surcharges" to rapidly increase the cost of certain kinds of services. Our last Fedex bill included a $10 fuel surcharge on top of the normal $48 delivery charge for a single package. It's hard to imagine, given the volume of packages that Fedex handles, that every package now requires a 20% surcharge.

This little gadget would be a useful addition to any home emergency kit. It is a small, folding solar panel that fits in almost any bag or briefcase and has a variety of adapters to charge cellphones, iPods, GPS receivers, and other small portable devices. The best thing about it is its USB port, so it will charge almost anything that can be powered via USB.

Electric cars don't produce emissions, but the batteries have to be charged up by something. If that something is fossil fuel, you still have pollution and potentially high energy costs. A new generation of nuclear power plants, which emit virtually nothing into the air, may be part of the long term solution to the ever increasing cost of fossil fuels.

The new plants are smaller, safer, and loaded with safety features that make them easier and safer to manage.

If there was not already enough to worry about, the CIA has indicated that the agency has credible evidence of terrorist cyber-attacks on electric power grids outside the U.S.

The terrorist hackers are breaking into the computer systems used to manage electric power grids and, according the CIA, successfully causing blackouts. This kind of threat will likely increase the interest in decentralization of IT facilities in the U.S., making rural areas with reliable electric power and well-designed business parks attractive relocation prospects. A "well designed" business park would some Class A office space available for immediate lease and fiber and telecom duct throughout the park.