“Can the energy crises be overcome?” – I say yes!

I think that the public, the government and corporate America should treat these energy crises as a danger to our way of life.

During World War II, the America we know unified in a common cause. Everyone rolled their sleeves to chip in and Americans produced an enormous amount of hardware for the war effort. “I see a solution within 36 months”.

If we as a nation can really appreciate and understand the severity and enormity of the energy crises, the catastrophic impact on our economic stability and civilization,

we must unite and do whatever is necessary to produce other forms of energy and overcome this energy and economic crises “by putting all politics and egos aside and look for the good of our nation”.

Jay Draiman, Northridge, CA

PS

ENERGY

Soaring gas prices, record oil company profits, unsustainable trade deficits, soldiers dying in Iraq’s deserts and catastrophic climate change— conservative energy policy is running us toward ruin. We urgently need to stop subsidizing dirty fossil fuels and start investing in a clean energy economy. In 1961, President Kennedy challenged us to send a man to the moon within a decade and launched the Apollo plan to make it happen. Now we need a similar vision—an Apollo initiative for energy independence, mobilizing science and technology and investing in energy efficiency and alternative energy.

The benefits are immense. We can create jobs, capture growing global green energy markets, eliminate our dependence on Persian Gulf oil, reduce our trade deficit, improve our children’s health and end the catastrophic threat of global warming. It’s time to act.

THIS IS MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAN SENDING A MAN TO THE MOON.

“Determination and perseverance will bring your goal to fruition” – never give-up

HOME ENERGY AUDIT

What does it take to make your home more energy-efficient? An audit will show you problems that may, when corrected, save you significant amounts of money over time. During the audit, you can pinpoint where your house is losing energy. Audits also determine the efficiency of your home’s heating and cooling systems. An audit may also show you ways to conserve hot water. You can perform a simple A home energy audit is the first step to assess how much energy your home consumes, and to evaluate what measures you can energy audit yourself, or have a professional energy auditor carry out a more thorough audit.

A professional auditor uses a variety of techniques and equipment to determine the energy efficiency of a structure. Thorough audits often use equipment such as blower doors, which measure the extent of leaks in the building envelope, as well as infrared cameras, which reveal hard-to-detect areas of air infiltration and missing insulation. The following is a discussion of do-it-yourself as well as professional audits.

Do-It-Yourself Audits:

You can easily conduct a home energy audit yourself. With a simple, but diligent, "walk-through," you can spot many problems in any type of house. When auditing your home, keep a checklist of areas you have inspected and problems found. This will help you prioritize your energy efficiency upgrades.

Locating Air Leaks:

First, make a list of obvious air leaks (drafts). The potential energy savings draft reduction may range from 5% to 30% per year, and the home is generally much more comfortable afterwards. Check for indoor air leaks such as gaps along the baseboard or edge of the flooring, and at junctures of the walls and ceiling. Check to see if air can flow through electrical outlets, switch-plates, window frames, baseboards, weather-stripping around doors, fireplace dampers, attic hatches, and wall- or window-mounted air conditioners. Look for gaps around pipes and wires, electrical outlets, foundation seals, and mail slots. Check to see if the caulking and weather-stripping are applied properly (no gaps or cracks), and are in good condition.

Inspect windows and doors for air leaks. See if you can rattle them, since movement means possible air leaks. If you can see daylight around door and window frames, then the door or window leaks. You can usually seal these leaks by caulking or weather-stripping them. Check the storm windows to see if they fit and are not broken. You may also wish to consider replacing your old windows and doors with newer, high-performance ones. If new factory-made doors or windows are too costly, you can install low-cost plastic sheets over the windows.

If you are having difficulty locating leaks, you may want to conduct a basic building pressurization test. First, close all exterior doors, windows, and fireplace flues. Turn off all combustion appliances such as gas burning furnaces and water heaters. (Remember to turn them back on when you are done with the test.) Then turn on all exhaust fans (generally located in the kitchen and bathrooms) or use a large window fan to suck the air out of the rooms. This increases infiltration through cracks and leaks, making them easier to detect. You can use incense sticks or your damp hand to locate these leaks. Moving air causes the smoke to waver, and you will feel a draft when it cools your hand.

On the outside of your house, inspect all areas where two different building materials meet. For example: inspect all exterior corners; where siding and chimneys meet; and areas where the foundation and the bottom of exterior brick or siding meet. You should plug and caulk holes or penetrations for faucets, pipes, electric outlets, and wiring. Look for cracks and holes in the mortar, foundation, and siding, and seal them with the appropriate material. Check the exterior caulking around doors and windows, and see whether exterior storm doors and primary doors seal tightly.

CAUTION: When sealing any home, you must always be aware of the danger of indoor air pollution and combustion appliance "backdrafts." Backdrafting is when the various combustion appliances and exhaust fans in the home compete for air. An exhaust fan may pull the combustion gases back into the living space. This can obviously create a very dangerous and unhealthy situation in the home.

In homes where a fuel is burned (i.e., natural gas, fuel oil, propane, or wood) for heating, be certain the appliance has an adequate air supply. Generally one square inch of vent opening is required for each 1,000 Btu of appliance input heat. When in doubt, contact your local utility company, energy professional, or ventilation contractor.

Insulation:

Heat loss through the ceiling and walls in your home could be very large if the insulation levels are less than the recommended minimum. You should check to see if the level of the attic and wall insulation of your home is at least at the minimum recommended amount. When your house was built, the insulation recommended at that time was installed. Given today’s energy prices, and that future prices probably will be higher, the level might be inadequate, especially if you have an older home.

If the attic hatch is located above a conditioned space, check to see if it is at least as heavily insulated as the attic, is weather-stripped, and closes tightly. In the attic, determine whether openings for items such as pipes, ductwork, and chimneys are sealed. Any gaps should be sealed with an expanding foam caulk or some other permanent sealant. If you have recessed light fixtures, determine if they are IC rated fixtures. It is strongly recommended that only air tight-IC rated fixtures be used. Other types allow large amounts of your heating dollar to escape into the attic. If you do not wish to purchase new IC rated fixtures, be certain to allow a three-inch space around any recessed lights. This will prevent the recessed light from overheating.

While you are inspecting the attic, check to see if there is a vapor barrier (retarder) under the attic insulation. The vapor barrier might be tar paper, kraft paper attached to fiberglass batts, or a plastic sheet. If there does not appear to be a vapor barrier, you might consider painting the interior ceilings with vapor barrier paint. This reduces the amount of water vapor that can pass through the ceiling. Large amounts of moisture can reduce the effectiveness of insulation and promote structural damage. Make sure that the attic vents are not blocked by insulation. You also should seal any electrical boxes in the ceiling with flexible caulk (from the living room side or attic side) and cover the entire attic floor with at least the recommended amount of insulation.

Checking a wall’s insulation level is more difficult. Select an exterior wall and turn off the circuit breaker or unscrew the fuse for any outlets in the wall. Be sure to test the outlets to make certain that they are not "hot." Check it with a lamp or portable radio. Remove the cover plate from one of the outlets and gently probe into the wall with a thin, long stick or screwdriver. If you encounter a slight resistance, you have some insulation there. You could also make a small hole in a closet, behind a couch, or in some other unobtrusive place to see what, if anything, the wall cavity is filled with. Ideally, the wall cavity should be totally filled with some form of insulation material. Unfortunately, this method cannot tell you if the entire wall is insulated, or if the insulation has settled. Only a thermographic inspection (discussed below) can do this.

If your basement is unheated, determine whether there is insulation under the living area flooring. In most areas of the country, R-25 is the recommended minimum level of insulation. The insulation at the top of the foundation wall and first floor perimeter should have an R-Value of 19 or greater. If the basement is heated, the foundation walls should be insulated to at least R-19. Your water heater, hot water pipes, and furnace ducts should all be insulated.

Heating/Cooling Equipment:

Inspect heating and cooling equipment annually, or as recommended by the manufacturer. If you have a forced air furnace, check your filters and replace them as needed. Generally they should be changed about once every month or two, especially during periods of high usage. Have a professional check and clean your equipment once a year. If the unit is more than 15 years old, you should consider replacing it with one of the newer, energy-efficient units. This would go far to reduce your energy consumption, especially if the existing equipment is in poor condition. Check your ductwork for dirt streaks, especially near seams. These indicate air leaks, and they should be sealed with a duct mastic. Insulate any ducts or pipes that travel through unheated spaces. An insulation R-Value of 6 is the recommended minimum.

Lighting:

Energy for lighting accounts for about 10% of your electric bill. Examine the wattage size of the light bulbs in your house. You may have 100 watt (or larger) bulbs where 60 or 75 watts would do. You should also consider compact fluorescent lamps for areas where lights are on for hours at a time. Your electric utility may offer rebates or other incentives for purchasing energy-efficient lamps.

Professional Energy Audits:

All professional energy audits should, at a minimum, include a "walk-through" similar to the one above and a blower door test (discussed below). Most will also include a thermographic scan (also discussed below). Professional audits generally go into great detail. The auditor should do a room-by-room examination of the residence, as well as a thorough examination of past utility bills.

Before the auditor visits your house, make a list of any existing problems such as condensation and uncomfortable or drafty rooms. Have copies or a summary of the home’s yearly energy bills. (Your utility can get these for you.) The auditors use this information to establish what to look for during the audit. The auditor first examines the outside of the home to determine the size of the house and its features (i.e., wall area, number and size of windows). The auditor then analyses the occupants’ behavior: Is anyone home during working hours? What is the average thermostat setting for summer and winter? How many people live here? Is every room in use? Your answers may help uncover some simple ways to reduce your household’s energy consumption. Walk through your home with the auditors as they work, and ask questions. They may also use equipment to detect sources of energy loss, such as blower doors, infrared cameras, furnace efficiency meters, and surface thermometers.

Blower Door Tests:

A blower door is a powerful fan that mounts into the frame of an exterior door. The fan pulls air out of the house, lowering the air pressure inside. The higher outside air pressure then flows in through all unsealed cracks and openings. The auditors may use a smoke pencil to detect air leaks. These tests determine the air infiltration rate of a building. Several reasons for establishing the proper building tightness are: to reduce energy consumption due to air leakage; to avoid moisture condensation problems; to avoid uncomfortable drafts caused by cold air leaking in from the outdoors; and to make sure that the home’s air quality is not too contaminated by indoor air pollution.

There are two types of blower doors: "calibrated" and "uncalibrated". It is important that auditors use a calibrated door. This type of blower door has several gauges that measure the amount of air pulled out of the house by the fan. Uncalibrated blower doors can only locate leaks in homes. They provide no method for determining the overall tightness of a building. The calibrated blower door’s data allows the auditor to quantify the amount of air leakage and the effectiveness of any air-sealing job.

Thermographic Inspection:

Energy auditors may also use thermography infrared scanning to detect thermal defects and air leakage in building envelopes. Thermography measures surface temperatures by using infrared video and still cameras. These tools see light that is in the heat spectrum. Images on the video or film record the temperature variations of the building’s skin, ranging from white for warm regions to black for cooler areas. The resulting images help the auditor determine whether insulation is needed. They also serve as a quality control tool, to ensure that insulation has been installed correctly.

A thermographic inspection is either an interior or exterior survey. The auditor decides which method would give the best results under certain weather conditions. Interior scans are more common, because warm air escaping from a building does not always move through the walls in a straight line. Heat loss detected in one area of the outside wall might originate at some other location on the inside of the wall. Also, it is harder to detect temperature differences on the outside surface of the building during windy weather. Because of this, interior surveys are generally more accurate, as they benefit from reduced air movement. Thermographic scans are also commonly used with the blower door is running. The blower door helps exaggerate air leaking through defects in the building shell. Such air leaks appear as black streaks in the infrared camera’s view finder.

Most energy audits take from four to eight hours and cost between $300 and $500. Any retrofit work would of course cost additional money.

PAY AS YOU SAVE Energy conservation financing program

The program will allow participants to purchase and install energy efficient products

And equipment (or “measures”), with no up-front cost. These measures can include modifications to lighting, heating, cooling, other energy efficient electric, gas and non-electric equipment and systems. Major measures promoted: lighting, weatherization, water saving devices and clock thermostats in both electric and non-electrically heated homes and businesses.  We should also accept a variety of measures (provided they pass the Program qualification. This can apply to any conservation method, renewable energy systems (solar, photovoltaic, geothermal, wind), electric, gas and water.

Primary goals should be lighting retrofits, motor retrofit, HVAC efficiency, insulation and attic fans, windows, energy efficient appliances, water conservation equipment and techniques, utilization of gray water, landscaping for energy conservation.

HOW DO WE PROPOSE TO FINANCE THE COSTS: There is no up-front cost to the participants? Instead, the utility pays all initial costs associated with the purchase and installation of approved measures. (We must keep the costs competitive and reasonable)

Then, an Energy Finance Charge (EFC) is calculated and added to the ember’s/customers monthly utility bill until all costs are repaid.

A fund will be set up and the payments will reimburse the fund monthly.

Calculating the Term: Financing charge amounts itemized on the monthly utility bill should be based on two thirds of the estimated savings that will come from the measures installed.

This way, the monthly charge should be designed to be less than the savings realized on each bill once the new measures are installed and implemented.

If customers wish to pay off their Financing charges balances quicker (which in some cases they do), up to one hundred percent (100%) of the savings can be used to form the basis of their monthly Finance charge amount.

Payments Linked to Meter (not customer): The payments are always linked to the service location, not to the customer. So if an Energy Financing Charge (EFC) participant moves or sells, the new owner continues making the payments for the duration of the payment term, unless the previous owner/tenant chooses to pay off the obligation before selling or moving.

Also, the payments include a small percentage risk mitigation adder (5%) to protect the utility from bad debt risks associated with some portion of participants’ failure to pay.

To protect the utilities and their broader membership/customer base against other potential risks, three key requirements are included in the EFC program for those that choose to participate:

• Maintenance: All measures must be maintained in place and in good working order during the entire repayment period – the utility will help arrange for repairs, but any associated costs will be added to the EFC on the utility bill, or will extend the payment term to ensure recovery of these additional charges.

• Disconnection: All payments must be made on time – EFC charges are treated like other charges on the utility bill that are subject to service disconnection for non-payment.

• Disclosure: If the home or business is sold or rented, disclosure of the remaining monthly EFC payment amounts must be made to the potential purchaser or tenant (since they will be taking over the remaining payment obligation), unless the current owner chooses to pay the balance off before the sale or rental.

This proposed program – managed efficiently, will advance and expedite our reduction in the use of energy and resources in an expedited manner and reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources.

It will also promote an economic boom in the geographical areas where such program is implemented.

Compiled by: Yehuda Draiman, Energy analyst – 1/1/2008

Competition in Health Care:
Both Health Insurance and Provider Markets Need to Function Competitively

As in other markets, the goal for health care markets should be to ensure that consumers benefit from a competitive marketplace where neither the buyers nor sellers unlawfully exercise market power. Policy should focus on ensuring that there is a competitive marketplace where neither health insurance plans nor health care professionals are able to obtain or exercise market power to distort the competitive outcome. Any other result inevitably will lead to governmental regulation of the health care market -- an outcome that is not likely to produce desirable results for consumers. We have learned this lesson over time from other industries and we should be sure we continue to apply it to health care markets as well. The injection of competition into quality health care markets over the past decade should have helped hold down increases in health care costs. But not enough.

1.     Consumers/patients should get the cost of services, prior to providing any healthcare services.

2.     Consumers/patients should not be forced due to emergency medical condition pay exorbitant fees and costs. (No price gouging)

3.     Consumers/patients should have a government agency where they can complain when charges are exorbitant and way above the cost of the competition.

4.     Just because the Health Insurance Company pays the bill, it is not permitted for the healthcare service provider to bill exorbitant billing, The consumer/patient pay a percentage of the services, therefore price and costs are important, not to mention that if healthcare costs and billing to the Healthcare Insurance is exorbitant, this will increase the costs of health insurance to the employer and employee.

5.     Uninsured/consumers/patients should not have to pay higher prices for healthcare services than insured consumers/patients.

6.     How do you treat a healthcare provider who were found to abuse and charge exorbitant prices for its service, were fined by the government and now continues to charge exorbitant charges for its services? The penalty should be that the consumer/patient bill should be nullified. (plus other appropriate penalties).

7.     Any provider found to be over-billing, inflating billing, gouging prices and billing, or billing for services not rendered – should have severe civil and criminal penalties.

8.     Much more to come (can you justify $1000 for insulin shot)

By: Yehuda Draiman, Billing auditor

Cut Your Utility Bills

Appliances do not use energy, people do! The best way to reduce your monthly utility bills is to concentrate on the biggest energy hogs. Hot water is the biggest energy user in households. Refrigerators and freezers often come in a close second. If you use electric heaters and window air conditioners, they will use a lot of electricity during the months you use them. Read on for some energy-saving tips:

Appliances do not use energy, people do! The best way to reduce your monthly utility bills is to concentrate on the biggest energy hogs. Hot water is the biggest energy user in households. Refrigerators and freezers often come in a close second. If you use electric heaters and window air conditioners, they will use a lot of electricity during the months you use them. Read on for some energy-saving tips:

Insulate your hot water tank.
Many utilities offer free water heater wrapping. Set both top and bottom elements of your electric water heater to 120°F. You can measure hot water only. Take a temperature reading before you make the adjustment. Wait six hours and take another reading.

Showers
If your family takes mostly showers, buy a water-saving showerhead rated at 3 gallons per minute or less. You can buy a good one for as little as $5. New showerheads give spray and deliver water with plenty of pressure. Water-saving pulsating shower massage models are also available. A water-saving showerhead could save you up to two cents every minute you shower!

Clothes washing and Dishwashing
Another major use of hot water is clothes washing. Take two simple steps to cut most of the energy wasted: First, do not run partial loads, or, if you must, set the water a smaller load. Second, use the warm wash/cold rinse setting for most of your laundry loads. Only diapers and oily work clothes need a hot water wash. Using only full loads is a good rule of thumb for automatic dishwashers. If you wash dishes by hand, use the two sink or basin method - one for washing, one for rinsing. Do not leave the faucet running. That can use as much water as a shower or bath.

Refrigerators and Freezers
Take your refrigerator's temperature. The ideal setting is 40°F; 0°F for freezers. Combination refrigerator/freezers usually have only one control, in the refrigerator thermometer inside the refrigerator section. Take a temperature reading after a half hour. Adjust the setting higher or lower to achieve 40°F. Wait one hour before checking the temperature again. Re-adjust if necessary.

Lighting and Entertainment
The easiest way to save on lighting and entertainment energy bills is to turn off lights, TV sets and stereos when you're not using them. Here are some other lighting tips ceiling fixtures with lower wattage bulbs. Or replace two 60-watt bulbs with one 100-watt bulb. Place floor, table and desk lamps where you read and work. Use only the wattage you need.

How Much Can You Save?
Estimate your energy costs again after making these recommended changes. Fill in the chart below and compare it with the chart you made on page 4. How much you can reduce energy bills for hot water and appliances also depends on how old your hot water heater and appliances are. Newer, energy-efficient models cost less to use.

How to achieve energy independence  (Space)

Whenever the subject of excessive dependence on oil imports comes up, someone always calls for achieving energy independence, but then the discussion gets diverted into such remedies as energy conservation, wind farms, geothermal and ocean thermal sources, ground-based photovoltaic arrays, biofuels, coal, ocean deposits of methyl hydrate, and, of course, the big ones -- nuclear or fusion reactors.

However, there are problems will all of those. No reasonable amount of conservation is going to keep our economy going if energy supplies are cut off. Wind farms, and geothermal and ocean thermal sources, can help in some places, but one can't depend on them as a replacement for fossil fuels. Ground-based photovoltaic systems are still somewhat expensive, although the cost is coming down. Biofuels turn out to cost more energy and other resources than they save, at least if corn is used instead of sugar cane or switchgrass. Coal and methyl hydrate will just accelerate the global warming problem. Nuclear presents the problems of waste disposal and proliferation, and fusion reactors don't work yet.

The one alternative that is seldom mentioned is space solar power: putting photovoltaic arrays in orbit and beaming the power to receiving antennas on the Earth. It is not a new idea. It is estimated that about 40 satellites in geosynchronous orbit could meet the needs for energy of the entire world, and it it was the United States who puts them up and operates them, we would be the energy exporters to the world instead of importers. Once in operation, it is estimated the cost of energy from them would be less than half the cost from other sources, and that it could pay off the investment to put up the system in less than a decade. It requires little new technology, other than ways to bring down the costs for vary large systems. It has much support from leading engineers and scientists, including a team within NASA. And nations like Japan are moving ahead to do it without waiting for us.

So why aren't we doing it? The answer, as usual, is politics. The alternative is opposed by the proponents of nuclear power, who keep making the argument that Earth-to-orbit lift costs are too high, when the proposal has long been to use materials mined from the Moon or an asteroid rather than lifted from Earth. The real problem for them is that such a proposal doesn't make them a lot of money. It would be creating an industrial system in space that they would not control and from which they could not profit.

The idea of collecting solar energy in outer space and beaming it to earth is one that is well developed conceptually, and research on its feasibility has been funded by Congress.

"Ottinger and Nader are against it, so the idea can't be all bad," writes a reader. But it's not that simple. Both of these energy scholars are so unreliable that one cannot even rely on them always being wrong. They don't like two things about the solar satellite:

Unlike rooftop cells producing piddling amounts of energy at exorbitant costs, it would give thousands of megawatts indiscriminately to everybody (not just sensitive, aware and affluent suburbanites); and it would require advanced technology managed by a corporation of shareholders instead of spending taxpayers' money on wheelbarrows and treadmills.

On the other hand, many of the SPS's vehement promoters want to go into space for everything and at all costs, including the taxpayers' costs.

So let's judge the idea on its merits rather than on the company it keeps.

Unlike energy in space, which can be beamed to other space vehicles by laser beams (requiring only small reflectors), energy from space must transverse the atmosphere, which leaves only microwaves as the carrier: Laser light would not penetrate the cloud cover, and longer radio waves would require unreasonably large antennas, for any antenna (or reflector) must have a diameter several orders larger than the wavelength of the transmitted radiation if it is to concentrate it into a narrow beam.

The Luddites who found it possible to brainwash people into fearing nuclear power on objectively indefensible grounds would find it even easier to scare them with the dangers of an aircraft flying into the beam, or the beam moving off target (the receiving antenna on the ground) due to a malfunction of the transmitter antenna on the satellite. That beam would transmit a power of several thousand megawatts ¾ and The Zapping of America screamed murder about this type of radiation at the microwatt level.

But far more important than this incidental aspect are the technical and economic considerations. The technical advantage over solar-electric plants on earth lies ultimately only in the constant (and just slightly higher) illumination of the collectors ¾ no night or cloud cover. But that is an advantage over a system that is not very good in the first place. The dilute flow of solar energy remains; in particular, the area for the collectors, though not owned by anybody, is very much harder to come by.

As for economics, we are talking about tens or hundreds of square miles of collectors, to be put up at a cost of tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars over many years, to produce the power that could be produced by tens of nuclear or coal-fired units on earth.

The cost of an installed kilowatt, claim the supporters, is close to "competitive" with nuclear or coal, and will look better as the cost of oil goes up. No, object the opponents, it comes to two or three times the cost of a conventional kilowatt. But without calling either side a liar, take a look at the oft repeated story of oil shale, synthetic fuels, and other energy sources. OPEC oil prices were to catch up with the high cost of these sources in a year or two. And by Jove, in a year or two they did catch up ¾ with the cost of a year or two ago...

So all things considered, we believe there are a million good reasons to go forward into space; but a vulnerable, overpriced energy source is not one of them.

Space solar power gets a boost

After spending weeks in information-gathering mode, a Pentagon analyst says the idea of putting satellites in orbit to harvest solar power and beam it down to Earth has lots of merit - and a test of the concept could be set in motion by 2015.

First word of the thumbs-up came from Col. M.V. “Coyote” Smith, who is heading up the National Security Space Office's study on feasibility of space-based solar power, via a presentation in the Second Life virtual world. Smith's comments were passed along on the Web by the Frontier Spaceport blog - and are due to be repeated today at a U.S. Air Force Academy conference on space solar power.

Frontier Spaceport's Robin Snelson quotes Smith as saying he'll extend his study and deliver an interim report on Oct. 11. Based on the posting, it sounds like Smith is sold on the idea:

"He spoke eloquently of the need for fleets of spaceplanes and reusable rockets to accomplish the baseline goals of the study, which envisions 40 powersats in geosynchronous orbit producing 10 percent of U.S. energy needs by the year 2050. (Hey, isn’t that the year Gerard O’Neill predicted way back in the 1970s? it sounded so far away then…)

"A first demonstrator project in, say, the year 2015 might power a military base, be capable of sending power to disaster areas, or transmit energy to troops abroad. The cost of petroleum fuel, not only money but lives lost in wars fought over oil, is a big driver of the Pentagon’s interest in space solar power. Coyote has gone from skeptic to enthusiast since the study began. ..."

That's music to the ears of space solar power fans, but will the idea really fly? There are several futuristic energy strategies out there, ranging from fusion power fueled by lunar helium-3 to Earth-based solar power, the hydrogen economy, the bio-hol economy and beam-power nirvana. It could come down to which pie-in-the-sky strategy makes the most economic sense.

Compiled by: Yehuda Draiman