Green Day news

No this is not a post about the band (though since I discovered a 15 year period of music that I seemed to have missed, from the mid 90's till now, Green Day has become one of my favorite bands), but instead about an ambitious project announcement that I read about tonight. It seems that PG&E and FPL, two of the largest power companies in the nation (FPL is my local power company in Florida) are teaming up with a company called Ausra, Inc. that is based out in the valley and venture backed by Kleiner, Perkins and Vinod Khosla to build several state-of-the-art solar power plants that when complete will provide 2,000 megawatts of clean, renewable solar power.  Enough to power about a million homes!  I say what has taken so long? 

This announcement made at the Clinton Global Initiative in NY is just the sort of undertaking we have to do as a country and for the world for so many reasons. It will negate all of the greenhouse gases that would have been used producing this much power with coal fired plants.  It decreases our dependence and therefore the influence of some of the oil producing countries, who use the wealth generated for extremist, terrorist or other undesirable ends.  It helps to create new jobs and technologies here in the US, which allows us to maintain our lead in these areas. But it also allows other jobs to be outsourced and migrate in a "flat world".  It is being done without government subsidies and at market competitive prices.

We need to find similar types of technology to make our cars run clean, green and lean.  In the coming years whoever can develop and bring to market new alternate clean energy will claim the mantle of economic leadership for this century. I wish as a country we were more focused on this and had more success stories such as this to announce. 

This story brought to you by Al "Gore" Shimel, the man who did not invent the internet ;-)