The Butterfly Princess and the Lazy Old Dragon

The argument is often made, by friends and foe alike, that solar and wind are great, but that when the sun isn't shining or when the wind isn't blowing, you need to kick in back up power, coal, oil or nuclear. The Utilities contend, especially the nuclear power driven Utilities, that for every windmill, for every solar array, you must still provide emergency back up power to handle the peak loads, in effect spend twice as much money erecting additional electrical production facilities than is necessary if we could just build all the nuclear power plants we wanted.

The hole in this argument would be the existence of unlimited cheap storage of electricity, making it possible for solar and wind generated electricity to be stored when the weather isn't cooperating fully. Now many will tell you that no such thing yet exists, that it's still in the realm of science fiction fantasy, that batteries are expensive, heavy, impractical and a silly proposition. Now, if only that were true. So I beg to differ, for I know this first hand, that things are not as they seem in this great land.

For you see, back in 1995, a bright professor at MIT developed a new protocol (that's way of doing things) to make cheap, affordable super-efficient batteries. But he was but a lowly professor, working in a grand institution, and did not end up owning his own invention. The patent fell in the hands of the evil MIT licensing office, a side arm of the military-industrial complex, with little intention of bringing this wonder to the world. Instead, the little invention was silently, quietly, exclusively licensed to a dummy front company out in California, who for ten years, never produced a single cell.

Now, our good professor, in his deep despair, isolated and frustrated by the citadel of science's lack of vision and flair, heard from a little magazine, dedicated to electric cars. Its webmaster, an unemployed ex-waiter living with his aging mother, befriended the great man, and proposed a subterfuge, a way to turn MIT around, turn it inside out, sway MIT to release the patent so the people of earth could save their planet.

Our ferret scout sought out the CT Technology Council, and suggested inviting the professor to Yale, where he would present his dilemma, to a body of dumbfounded environmental scholars, who at least in theory, would understand his plight. The ex-waiter then sought the help of Native Americans because they are making money head over heels with their casino earnings, and we all know, Native Americans, at least some of them, respect mother earth and Gaia.

Back at the California ranch, a bodybuilder runs for governor. He's a big fan of Hummers... yet in 1997, when Hummer made a hybrid prototype Humvee, which the ex-waiter enjoyed a thrill ride in... being at the right place at the right time I guess... GM swooped in to buy the company, making sure the hybrid Hummer would never to be heard from again, at least not until now. Our bodybuilder got a hydrogen powered monstrosity instead...

The little electric car magazine published an open letter to the bodybuilder online... written by the ex-waiter, which laid out a crafty master plan to mass produce a super powered electric car, modeled after a lonely prototype, called the tZero... a nothing... a spec of dust on the automotive horizon... nobody was paying attention to this ugly yellow shoe box going from 0 to 60 in under 4 seconds... nobody. GM, in its great wisdom, boasting at the seams, crushed 1000 EV1s, spending a billion dollars to prove to the world that electric cars didn't work, that nobody wanted them.

Then a few from the Bioneers for billionaires club, all Internet kings, king of Google, king of eBay and Paypal and Yahoo... got together with someone named Ted, and conspired to transform the little ugly yellow thing, into a car so amazing, so fast, so thrilling, every Hollywood star would want to own one... So the prototype cocoon quietly transformed into a wonderful butterfly. Somehow, nobody is quite sure, a little voice rose up and said, why don't you call it the Tesla? And they said why? And the little voice said, because there is a cult of Tesla, tales of conspiracy, of inventors silenced, threatened, some even killed, because they discovered ways to produce electricity that didn't cost anything.

So the great men, of great wealth, who want to save the world, to leave behind a legacy of good, after wiring the whole globe into one huge electronic brain, said OK... Tesla it is... we'll call it that, and boy did Detroit and the good oil boys now take notice... but they still scoff, because 250 miles on one charge? You can't even drive to Las Vegas and back with that, so what good can it be, right?

But the poor ex-waiter was still hard at work... orchestrating a meeting of the minds... convincing the engineers building the Tesla to meet with the MIT professor prisoner of his ivory tower... The Tesla men came out of the meeting, knowing, realizing, that the old institution of scientific learning had done wrong, suppressed a solution to everything; the chemistry for a polymer (that's plastic to you) solid-state lithium-ion battery that would take the Tesla 600 miles on one charge, so light they would make swap-out batteries possible, and be so easy and cheap to mass produce, it would be like making sheets of mylar (the mirror plastic stuff you use at Christmas) coming out of great big machines full of rollers, same way they print newspapers.

MIT, in its great concern, still says nothing, does nothing, after all the engineering wing of Yale... The Yale Journal of Industrial Ecology published at the MIT press... all our future leaders rising from the Yale Skull & Bones ranks... still no news of whether or not, these batteries, which would give cheap electric cars to the world, could make huge battery farms possible and safe, to store wind and solar electricity by the MegaWatts... to power our homes, our industries, our cars... no news... even though great journalists like Thomas Friedman at the New York Times, and Juliet Eilperin, environmental editor at the Washington Post, were given entire case files, revealing the truth of the whole sordid affair.

So the butterfly princess still waits for her knight to slay the lazy old dragon, this will be for another day children... for it's getting late now, and you must go back to sleep.

Post-scriptum:
ALL lithium-ion batteries currently in production and on the market are liquid chemistry based, gels... this is why they have grave scaling up and mass production problems. Solid-State changes "everything"... the A123 chemistry, by far the best and most stable li-ion pack out there, is from the same inventor... they used one of his outdated protocols to gear up the company.

Conclusion by Royce Penstinger:

This is the world we live in... where the titans of the oil, coal, and nuclear economy will stifle technology, silence all voices until they themselves can control and own the processes that fuel a new economy. We have the vehicles, the technology and the production capabilities in the wings to end our dependence on oil, coal and nuclear...the ability to save our planet, to create a green economy. Problem is, that would mean a paradigm shift, a changing of the guard in the proverbial towers of power...the old guard titans cannot, will not let that occur unless they are not only at the helm, but OWN THE SHIP that drives this new green world.

They realize a new age is trying to be born, that with batteries capable of driving vehicles 600 miles at a clip, with batteries that can store energy in vast amounts, with global warming destroying huge swaths of the earth while changing global climatic patterns, that the time for change is upon us...but they want to own it all, so they still stifle workable alternatives, and instead hatch George Bush's 2010 Nuclear run by the DOE, and Entergy with the creation of NuStart is trying to make Nuclear the driving force of this change that now has to happen, as it is the only way the old guard money can continue their oppression of the masses, continue to own the Golden Goose that lets them control the wealth of the entire planet.

Nuclear is not, and never will be green, and bright minds, Green Thinkers the world over such as Tesla, such as that silenced professor at MIT need to stand up and speak as one...the masses are ready to listen, ready to follow those who can lead the way.