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Bos
HUNTER

AS ONE geets older and wiser, one becomes less immediately

enthralled with all-purpose, one-answer, quick-fix solutions

to longterm problems.

As 2 jaded Ottawa bureaucrat
once told me: ‘Every man has a
great vision that won’t work.”

Accumulated wisdom not-
withstanding, here's one all-pur-
pose, one-answer, quick-fix solu-
tion to our environmental! dilemma
that intrigues me anyway. It is just
such a damned great idea!

It’s not quite brand-new. The
late Buckminster Fuller, the genius
who invented the geodesic dome
(there are 300,000 of them around
the world now) and who has been
called the Leonardo da Vinci of
our time, came up with it many
years back. Before he died, he in-
corporated it into what he called
the World Game.

This is the opposite of war
games, which are played by milita-
tists to develop strategies to win
wars in the shortest time with the
least casualties.

The purpose of the World
Game, according to Fuller, is *‘to
make the world work for 100 per
cent of humanity in the shortest
possible time through spontaneous
cooperation without ecological of-
fence or the disadvantage of any-
one.”’

The main feature of the World
Game is *‘to develop a world
energy grid, an electric energy grid
where everybody is on the same
grid. All of a sudden, there would
be no problems any more, no in-
ternational problems. Our new
economic basis wouldn’t be gold
or dollars; it would be kilowatt-
hours.”’

I don’t know about there being
“no problems’’ — that doesn’t
sound like the human condition to
me — but the notion of an
economy based on energy rather
than bucks sure makes sense.

In any event, Fuller’s vision has
been thrust on to the agenda for
public debate by the setting-up of
an organization called GENI,
which stands for Global Energy
Network International, the Cana-
dian head to which is a young man
named Greg Lyttle, who wants ‘‘to
get the bright minds working on
the idea.”’

GENI proposes the creation of a
global energy grid that would let
the day-half of the planet use the
dormant power of the night-side of
the planet, which has shut down
most of its operations while people
sleep. At a stroke, we would vir-
tually double our energy capacity,
while giving have-not nations a
gigantic boost in terms of their ca-
pacity to produce.

The scheme involves the con-
struction of a series of Ultra High
Voltage (UHV) transmission lines
that would gird the globe, with

special high-voltage direct current
cables spanning the oceans.

There would be a link across the
Bering Sea pulling together the
transmission grids in North
America ancl the U.S.S.R. Inter-
estingly, the North American
power grid is very close to being a
reality already, with power being
bought and sold across the
Canada-U.S. border on a regular
basis.

(A bizarre side-effect of this is
that Ontario Hydro, which has

been ordered to reduce its acid gas
emissions from coal — and oil-
fired generating stations, has been
forced, due to the various failures
of its nuclear plants, to purchase
power from Ohio and Michigan,
which use coal-fired stations, thus
producing acid rain that falls on
Ontario anyway. C'est la vie
Canadienne..)

The Soviet Union has an in-
tegrated power grid of its own
which could relatively easily be
hooked up to North America and
Europe alike.

Politically, this might have
sounded like a fantasy just a year
ago, but the dramatic political
events in Eastern Europe and now
inside the Russian empire itself,
suggest otherwise.

How better and faster a way to
help pull the East Bloc, and the
Soviet Union itself, up out of the
Communism-created economic
quagmire than ro plug them into a
global energy pool?

The same thing goes for Africa,
South America and Asia — not
that the Southeast Asian
economies particularly need help,
but China is certainly a case in
point. The Chinese have a horren-
dously ambitious energy plan in
place which involves mostly burn-
ing coal.

if the plan succeeds, China’s
billion people will soon be
generating more greenhouse gases
than the industrialized world can
possibly cut down on, thereby
negating the effects of even the
most vigorous Western efforts to
reduce pollution.

The advantage of a grid is that it
allows one section of the grid to
sell power to another when it has a
surplus, which occurs during off
hours. This is both the most effi-
cient and economical use of a
power system.

Electric power is the common
denominator running through
every facet of our daily lives in an
industrialized society. There are
four important things about elec-
trical energy, according to Greg
Lyttle:

(1) Electricity travels along
transmission lines at the speed of
light — 186,000 miles per second.
The Earth is a mere 25,000 miles in
diameter, so moving it from one
section of the globe to another
isn’ta problem.

(2) Large amounts of power
can’t be stored. Generators are ci-
ther ‘‘on” or ‘‘off.’’ Turning them
off is simply # waste of power.

(3) Power generators are most
efficient when run 24 hours a day.

(4) The demand for power varie:
according to the time of day.
When people are asleep, the de-
mand drops. When they are awake
and working, the demand rises.

Thus, with a global energy grid,
the available power could simply
be following the rising sun around
the planet, keeping everything
humming, while, not incidentally,
reducing the need for new dams,
reactors or other generation plants
because we would be using what
we have at twice the level of effi-
ciencyve

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