After watching Jason Calacanis test-drive a Tesla Roadster last week, I've been thinking a lot about electric transportation. He said he's buying one of these awesome electric-powered sportscars for $110K, and is going to power it with the solar panels at his house. That brings him closer to being off the grid, and away from dependence on oil. Which is really, really cool.
So, naturally, I want one of these fancy Tesla Roadsters too. But not for another few years, when the prices will hopefully come down after they start mass-producing them. I want solar panels on my roof and to replace all the gas burning appliances in my house. I'll be able to do this after working at Google for some time. And then, once I have that all set up, I can save up for an Electric Sports Car.
Enough about me though, here's the big picture I've been thinking about: Oil and Gasoline is getting ever more expensive. Alternative energy is getting more efficient and cheaper. Eventually, solar electricity will be cheaper than gasoline, and everyone will start moving to plug-in electric vehicles at increased rates.
Instead of mining the earth for fossil fuels to power our dirty, polluting current methods of transportation, we'll be turning to alternative forms of transportation that are both cleaner, more environmentally responsible, easier, and cheaper. (cheaper being the most important factor for mass adoption)
But it's not only going to be cars. We'll start seeing electric trains, electric buses, electric taxis... and even electric airplanes. (see BBC article) Yes, I said airplanes... Imagine if it were easier, faster, and cheaper to get to work in a personal auto-piloting air-taxi. I said it here first. You live in San Francisco, for example, and you walk outside and hail an air taxi that's driving around with it's wings tucked in (folded up)... and it drives you (there's no driver of course) out of the city limits and takes off up into the air. This whole time you're on your laptop with WiMax, (or surely something cooler like a 3D computing system we don't know about yet). In 15 minutes you're touching down outside San Jose, and your air-taxi folds up its wings again and drives you to your office.
There's a lot more space in the air, and it doesn't cost anything to build roads up there. It might really not be all that far in the future. If you look at that BBC article, there's already an electric glider that you can buy, that has similar fuel efficiency to an electric car, and similar range. Soon, you may look up into the sky in suburbia and see little white planes whizzing around.
Oh, and of course you already know how solar-power is the future. How it's going to save our planet and all that. Like, when electricity is cheap enough, we can produce clean drinking water for the world's people. We can afford to recycle everything. Transportation will be cheap. Computing and the Internet will be ubiquitous. Oh, anyway, what I wanted to say, was that we don't have to wait for solar panels to get cheap enough (though there's some pretty cool new advancements)... there's some other really promising alternatives like this solution for harvesting wind power:
Here's the company that's making those. Put them up in the jetstream and we've got a free source of electricity. It's genious... using a blimp to keep it up.
Anyway, cheers to a cleaner future. Let me know what you think in the comments.
