For years, I have been trying to encourage Americans to think about the benefits of a worldwide electrical grid. But major American media have not yet been receptive to this idea.
A worldwide grid is necessary because the availability of locally-generated solar energy varies immensely between summer and winter in much of the world.
The PV panels on my roof generate only one fifth as much monthly electricity mid-winter as they do in the summer. There is no way economically to store enough locally-produced power during the summer to get us throught a whole winter.
But a worldwide grid will allow solar energy produced where conditions are favorable to be used wherever it is needed, without the need for massive storage. Winter in the U.S. is summer in South America, so electricity produced there can be used here. During U.S. summers electricity can flow in the opposite direction.
The idea of a worldwide grid apparently has suffered from being outside the "Overton Window" of ideas that are considered important enough for public discussion.
The idea of a worldwide electrical grid, proposed as far back as the 1930s by Buckminster Fuller, is not just some weird idea of mine. Many organizations and individuals, including Yukinori Kuwano, a prominent Japanese industrial leader, have pushed for a worldwide grid for decades.
In 2015 Clark Gellings, an expert on grid technology, proposed a worldwide grid in the prestigious engineering journal, the IEEE Spectrum.
And led by Indian prime minister Narenda Modi, a movement called "One Sun One World One Grid (OSOWOG) has attracted support from many governments and is working to move the planet towards a worldwide grid for the distribution of solar energy.
The world was already been moving toward a unified electrical grid without quite realizing what it was doing — international connections in Europe, Africa to Europe, and the like.
But to have a movement intentionally pushing for a worldwide grid is very helpful. OSOWOG is a very big deal. When I just googled OSOWOG I got 14,400 hits. I got 73,800 hits when I googled the words themselves.
So how much attention has OSOWOG gotten in the United States? I checked three leading newspapers to see how often either OSOWOG or the words it refers to showed up.
Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post published either of these terms, ever. Total zilch!
When I checked The Wall Street Journal I, therefore, did not have high hopes, since the Journal's opinion pages never waste an opportunity to badmouth green energy and electric vehicles. To my profound surprise, I found a reference to the words represented by OSOWOG at the Journal, in one major well-written article.
Apparently, to its vast credit, the Journal keeps the news division independent of the opinion division.
But my short survey was dismaying. Here we have a major movement aimed at rapid conversion of the planet to solar energy at a time when this goal is very urgent, and the leading U.S. media are paying almost no attention to it.
Few journalists appear very savvy about technical matters. Editors often publish articles confusing the critical difference between kilowatts and kilowatt-hours, for example. Expertise in electrical technology evidently doesn't get journalists up to the top ranks of editors, and editors — generally very able people — are probably aware of their ignorance here.
So perhaps it is natural for them to hesitate to publish discussions of major new opportunities in future technology.
But it is high time that the Overton Window open up to allow widespread discussion of the contribution that a worldwide grid can make to keeping the world climate from getting out of control.
I hope that future surveys of major American newspapers will find plenty of references to OSOWOG.
Paul F. deLespinasse is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Computer Science at Adrian College. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1966, and has been a National Merit Scholar, an NDEA Fellow, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and a Fellow in Law and Political Science at the Harvard Law School. His college textbook, "Thinking About Politics: American Government in Associational Perspective," was published in 1981. His most recent book is "The Case of the Racist Choir Conductor: Struggling With America's Original Sin." His columns have appeared in newspapers in Michigan, Oregon, and other states. Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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