I am for providing help for the Big Three assuming they come up with an intelligent plan for spending tax payer money. As stated in a prior column any such plan would include rapid conversion to selling a fleet that has an average 45 mpg and the developing of electric plug-in vehicles. What I would like to suggest is that if there is some $25 billion on the table, that the American taxpayer be given either alternative or additional ways to invest for America’s automotive future.

As I said in a prior column, at the beginning of the 20^th century there were dozens of car companies and by the end there were three standing.  That is a good metaphor for what is going in the electric car business today.  There are numerous small companies that manufacturing electric cars, converting internal combustion engine cars to also run on battery power and many other companies working flat out to create new types of batteries that might power our cars in the ...]]> The discussion about bailing out the Big Three has been couched in terms that imply that the Big Three represent the complete future of the automotive business in the U.S.  As I have suggested, if they are to be bailed out they should be given money based upon measurable metrics.  I have also suggested that they represent thinking from the 20^th century, the century of the internal combustion engine, which is not the future of automotive transportation this century.

I am for providing help for the Big Three assuming they come up with an intelligent plan for spending tax payer money. As stated in a prior column any such plan would include rapid conversion to selling a fleet that has an average 45 mpg and the developing of electric plug-in vehicles. What I would like to suggest is that if there is some $25 billion on the table, that the American taxpayer be given either alternative or additional ways to invest for America’s automotive future.

As I said in a prior column, at the beginning of the 20^th century there were dozens of car companies and by the end there were three standing.  That is a good metaphor for what is going in the electric car business today.  There are numerous small companies that manufacturing electric cars, converting internal combustion engine cars to also run on battery power and many other companies working flat out to create new types of batteries that might power our cars in the years ahead.

The most widely known electric car company is  Tesla Motors, who is currently selling 2-3 cars per week at $109,000 each.  These two seat roadsters go 0 -60mph in 3.9 seconds, get over 200 miles per electric charge and are completely quiet.  There is a long list of buyers.  At the other end of the price spectrum is the Aptera , which is selling a three wheeled futuristic looking vehicle at an expected price of $30,000.  You could go to their web site right now and put down a $500 deposit for a vehicle that will be delivered in 2009.

The U.S. and the world will enter the age of the electric car 2010-2015.  This will be the time that many companies will not only sell them but will be quickly ramping up production volume. There will be the electric hybrids and pure electric plug-ins.  There will also be many small companies – the 10,000 garage small scale businesses – that will partially or fully convert existing internal combustion engine vehicles to run on electricity.  As there were dozens of car companies 100 years ago making internal combustion engine vehicles, so there will now be a similar blossoming of entrepreneurship of limited production electric car companies all around the world.

If the federal government is thinking about $25 billion for the Big Three, why not set aside a couple of billion to seed and support innovation and ultimately production for the existing companies such as Tesla and Aptera and a thousand garage scale enterprises that are high in innovation but low on capital?  Fund the future, not just support the past.

Another interesting development that I have written about here is the compressed air car.  Here is a vehicle that is in the early stages of production but runs on compressed air and needs an oil change of vegetable oil every 50,000 miles.  Millions of dollars lent to a company willing to produce these in the U.S. would make a difference.

Another automotive investment that should be part of any large scale tax payer bail-out would be providing funds for  hydrogen internal combustion and hydrogen fuel cell cars. While the electric car will most likely get to scale first, hydrogen will soon follow, particularly if accelerated with federal funds. According to the National Hydrogen Association, it would cost about $9 billion to put 6,500 hydrogen stations into service over the next 10 years.  This is exactly the large scale type of endeavor perfectly suited for federal support as we move toward our new national goal of energy independence in the next 10-15 years.

If we as a nation are going to provide money to the Big Three, who represent our automotive past, why should we not also provide money, at no greater risk to companies and organizations that represent our automotive future?  The Big Three represent the special interests and constituencies of our past.  The companies that want to manufacture the electric car, the compressed air car and the hydrogen fuel cell car represent the national interest that is, and must be our future.

Facing and solving the multiple issues concerning energy is the single most pressing problem that we face as a species. There is a lot of media coverage about energy, alternative energy and global warming, but what has been missing is the knowledge and point of view of scientists, at least in the main stream media. If you have missed the first seven interviews, please scroll down the right side of the page and click on ‘Scientists — Interviews’.

Dr. Thomas Valone is a physicist and licensed professional engineer with 30 years professional experience, is a patent examiner, research engineer, instrumentation designer and also an author, lecturer, and consultant on future energy developments. He is President and founder of Integrity Research Institute and formerly a community college teacher and a Research Director for Scott Aviation-ATO, Inc. He helped design the HullCom® for naval intraship communication, a 60 Hz gaussmeter without harmonic distortion, two bioelectric therapy devices, and a dental mercury vapor ionizer-precipitator. He is editor of Future Energy, Energetic Processes Vol. I & II, Turning the Corner: Energy Solutions for the 21st Century and a few conference proceedings, as well as author of Zero Point Energy: The Fuel of the Future, Practical Conversion of Zero-Point Energy, Homopolar Handbook, Electrogravitics Vol. 1 & II, Bioelectromagnetic Healing, Bush-Cheney Energy Study, Clinton Administration Energy Study and about 100 ...]]> In this eighth installment of our on-going series of interviews with some of the leading thinkers and scientists on the subject of energy, we interview Dr. Thomas Valone.

Facing and solving the multiple issues concerning energy is the single most pressing problem that we face as a species. There is a lot of media coverage about energy, alternative energy and global warming, but what has been missing is the knowledge and point of view of scientists, at least in the main stream media. If you have missed the first seven interviews, please scroll down the right side of the page and click on ‘Scientists — Interviews’.

Dr. Thomas Valone is a physicist and licensed professional engineer with 30 years professional experience, is a patent examiner, research engineer, instrumentation designer and also an author, lecturer, and consultant on future energy developments. He is President and founder of Integrity Research Institute and formerly a community college teacher and a Research Director for Scott Aviation-ATO, Inc. He helped design the HullCom® for naval intraship communication, a 60 Hz gaussmeter without harmonic distortion, two bioelectric therapy devices, and a dental mercury vapor ionizer-precipitator. He is editor of Future Energy, Energetic Processes Vol. I & II, Turning the Corner: Energy Solutions for the 21st Century and a few conference proceedings, as well as author of Zero Point Energy: The Fuel of the Future, Practical Conversion of Zero-Point Energy, Homopolar Handbook, Electrogravitics Vol. 1 & II, Bioelectromagnetic Healing, Bush-Cheney Energy Study, Clinton Administration Energy Study and about 100 published reports and articles. He has also served as an expert witness, an expert declaration writer for court cases and appeared on CNN, A&E, and the Discovery Channels, besides a few commercial energy videos. Currently, Dr. Valone is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the Bioelectromagnetics Society, the National Space Society and the Union of Concerned Scientists. He is also a Fellow of the World Innovation Foundation. His works have been published in German, French, Korean and English.

I met Tom at the Foundation for the Futures’ conference on the future of energy and was taken with his positive outlook and the fact that he has been a patent examiner.

Evolutionshift.com:  As a scientist and patent examiner you are in superlative company.  Any other similarities with Albert Einstein?  Seriously, how does your work with the government patent office compliment your scientific work and research?

VALONE: Any comments that I make in this regard do not reflect the views of the US Patent and Trademark Office and are only my personal viewpoints as a private citizen. Of course, when a recent biography of Einstein was aired on the PBS channel, I was happy to watch, being a physicist and patent examiner. However, I learned from the narrator that “Einstein was employed at a dead-end job at the Swiss Patent Office” before he was freed by publishing three seminal journal articles and receiving other job offers. The work at the US PTO often feels like a dead-end, repetitive job since it is piecemeal, production work with no job security. However, I have tried to follow in Einstein’s footsteps, who was born in the same month as I was, by taking General Relativity as a physics graduate student years ago, using it for analyzing non-inertial reference frames in my physics Master’s thesis on the homopolar generator, and recently by buying the book “How to Think Like an Einstein”, and also writing a PhD thesis on zero point energy performance of useful work from the quantum vacuum. This last work, which I hid in my drawer at the Patent Office just like Einstein did, has evolved into the popular book, Zero Point Energy: The Fuel of the Future, which presents practical suggestions for converting ZPE into electricity. That’s where the ability to search the scientific and patent literature comes in handy…finding science and engineering inventions in a particular field and thus doing ‘due diligence.’

Evolutionshift.com: You presentation at the Foundation for the Futures’ future of energy conference was one of the more urgent presentations about the need for alternative energy sources.  How urgent is the global energy situation?

VALONE: To answer the urgency question, we have to realize just one of the IPCC findings. That is, with every single degree of global temperature increase, there is a whole category on the average of increase in hurricane strength. We have already experienced this in our lifetime. A category 5 hurricane now will suck enough energy from the ocean to become a category 6, etc. The melting of the Antarctic and most importantly, the Greenland ice sheets is not only inevitable, according to a climate chart published by MIT’s Technology Review in July, 2006, but roughly equals the 80 meters of extraordinary sea level rise that is predicted by that calibrated chart. As fossil fuels continue to push carbon dioxide levels past the 400, 500 and the expected 700 ppm levels, we are entering new, uncharted territory on an earth that has not exceeded such levels in 400,000 years. We really need to introduce a completely clean and inexpensive source of energy for electricity, such as a zero point energy diode generator, in the next ten years to have any hope of revolutionizing the climate and energy usage.

Evolutionshift.com:   Do you believe in Peak Oil?  When will we be passing through it and when might the planet run out of oil?

VALONE: Peak Oil is not a matter of belief. It is a fact that Hubbert established to everyone’s satisfaction by predicting the United States’ peak of oil production twenty five years before it happened. His prediction for the world oil production has all the experts arguing about the give-or-take of only a couple of decades! That’s how close the tolerance is for Hubbert’s Peak. In other words, we are actually experiencing the maximum oil production that the world can sustain at the present time: about 72 million barrels of oil per day. This black, dead fossil liquid consumption by living human beings is on the same order of magnitude as the water flow over the American Falls in New York State, where I grew up. The only direction for this rate is downward. The U.A.E. presently is preparing for their Peak Oil by investing heavily in tourism resorts near Dubai and by building islands in the ocean with mansions on them. Technically, to answer the second question, the planet will never run out of oil. However, as Nikola Tesla pointed out, we won’t be able to continue burning it for fuel for the sake of our future generations.

Evolutionshift.com:  What are the best sources of alternative energy for the next 20 years?

VALONE: The best sources of alternative energy for the next 20 years depends upon what application is in mind. The top of the list has to include photovoltaic solar electricity. I recently wrote an article in the Integrity Research Institute’s Annual Report about a “Revolution in Solar Energy” which summarizes the latest discoveries. The ability to generate more than one electron from a photon of light, has now been demonstrated by Los Alamos labs. Alan Heeger , who won the 2000 Nobel Prize for his co-discovery of electrically conducting polymers, and his colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), have recently created process for multiple layers of plastic PV material with flexibility and high efficiency. The company Konarka based in Lowell, MA is the one to watch. Their polymer PV cells can even generate electricity with background room lighting. Another source of alternative energy that is on my “best” list is the permanent magnet motor, utilizing the ‘magnetic gradient.’ IRI has a spiral stator design that improves upon the old Kure Tekko Japanese patents of the 1970’s with several innovative magnetic pulsing techniques. We can foresee the day when a magnetic car will compete favorably with the electric car, since it will not need recharging. Geothermal energy is another ‘best’ and ubiquitous source of energy that has been highly recommended for municipalities and centralized power. Another favorite of mine is zero point energy, since I have performed a feasibility study and found that ‘zero bias’ diodes are manifesting the rectified electricity which we all desire for a generator. The quantum vacuum continually generates random non-thermal noise (called ‘zero point energy’) in solid state devices, causing tunneling and electron flow. It is time to start using this free energy source in a big way. The end product will have a construction, much like the tiny LEDs in our flat screen televisions, with millions of diodes all transducing zero point energy into electron current. For the application of medium to large industrial plants, I recommend the conversion of waste heat into electricity. The company, Primary Energy, headed by Tom Casten, has a wonderful offer they cannot refuse: allow him to build the electrical generation plant on site and they save about half on all future electricity bills. Other promising alternative energy sources include off-shore wind generators, tidal generators, and ocean current electrical generators. For the transportation sector, I advocate compressed air cars and plug-in electric cars, which are making their debut in every other country but the US. The US, as you might remember, is the country and GM is the company “Who Killed the Electric Car.” This debacle of purposely crushing every leased EV-1 electric car by GM is now recorded on DVD (by SONY Classic Pictures) for historical posterity. As Europe, Iceland, and other countries become energy independent and non-polluting, our EPA has yet to declare CO2 an environmental pollutant.              

Evolutionshift.com: How soon do you these sources significantly impacting the world’s use of fossil fuels?  What can be done to accelerate the timelines?

VALONE: As mentioned above, the US EPA is at fault, just as the California Air Quality Board was in 2002, for not standing up to the most problematic greenhouse gas and limiting its emission rate. Once legislation has been passed, the industrial sector has proven its ability to adapt, which will accelerate the timelines. As was the case in the 1970’s after the first Mid-East Oil Embargo, the US has the will power and the resourcefulness to put into practice the conservation mandates that are recommended by government. For example, conservation has not been advocated recently but back then it was and the US responded by almost a 50% savings in energy consumption. Today the Alliance to Save Energy here in DC is famous for “Energy Efficiency” forums, awards and programs. As Amory Lovins points out, it is easier and cheaper to save energy than to generate it. Therefore, to answer the question, in the short term, we can significantly impact this country’s use of fossil fuels, while the 5 to 10 year lag of development of zero-fuel devices takes place.

Evolutionshift.com:  What might be the sources of alternative energy longer term?  What do you see that is promising?

VALONE: As mentioned above, for the longer term, zero point energy devices will be developed and are foreseen by many experts to permanently solve the energy problem, also making practical space travel possible. Cold fusion devices will also become available, along with other exotic sources of energy, such as the pB-11 plasma focus fusion under development at the University of Illinois. Still, the biggest breakthrough for the future has to be the Konarka multi-layer polymer solar cell which is predicted to be inserted into almost everything, since it generates electricity from ambient room light.

Evolutionshift.com: Why is cold fusion so promising?  Hasn’t the scientific community at large ridiculed it?  Please explain to my readers why significant resources should be directed toward developing this type of energy?

VALONE: The International Conference on Cold Fusion is scheduled for Washington DC in 2008 for the first time and I look forward to participating in it. My nonprofit www.IntegrityResearchInstitute.org has sponsored one cold fusion seminar (LENREW-2000) and has consistently featured one “token” cold fusion speaker at both Conferences on Future Energy (COFE and COFE2). Suffice it to say, nature creates transmutation of elements at the cellular level, well documented in peer-reviewed journal articles, and reported by Dr. Ed Storms at COFE in 1999 and elsewhere. Cold fusion also achieves similar transmutation of elements through tabletop electrolysis, which is not so strange once we realize that nature does this consistently. It is so promising because the fact that transmutation means a nuclear reaction has to take place. Repeatable experiments of cheap, efficient heat production have been demonstrated in over a dozen government labs, which also indicates its promise. To answer the second question, we only have to thank the American Physical Society for creating enough obfuscation in 1989, mainly by Dr. Robert Park who for years fulfilled the role of public affairs director. He took it on himself to raise the skeptics flag and has waved it ever since. My removal from the Patent Office in 1999 was credited to him by the arbitrator who reinstated me. He acknowledged the bad publicity he created for my first COFE and the phone calls he made to the Commerce Department to discredit me, all for having one cold fusion speaker at COFE, which might have taken place at the State, Energy or Commerce Department. The ridicule mainly comes from a lack of understanding and, as my arbitrator pointed out, the fear that if successful, cold fusion will draw from the same limited pot of funding that hot fusion now enjoys. I know that once we become aware of the billion-dollar fusion boondoggle called “magnetic confinement” or the “tokamak,” which the DOE admits will not become commercially viable for electricity generation even by 2050 (always 30 years or more in the future), the urge to include plasma focus fusion, cold fusion, electrostatic confinement fusion, and even bubble fusion becomes much more defensible.

Evolutionshift.com:Are you optimistic that humanity can replace fossil fuels in time to avoid an environmental cataclysm?

VALONE: Every time there is an administration change in DC, I generate great optimism for energy policy change. I have given several slide shows for Congressional staffers and even advised Senator Kerry’s office when he was running for President. The question of avoiding the inevitable tidal wave from a number of likely causes (including the Canary Island landslide), the inevitable eruption of the Yellowstone caldera, or the unavoidable increased heat waves and stronger hurricanes due to global warming, as well as the inevitable sinking of most of Louisiana and Florida as the sea rises in the next century, all depend upon the next 20 years of preparation. If we as private scientists and entrepreneurs can break through the development and production barriers, while China manufacturing is still cheap and their currency has not been devalued, then the world will hopefully receive the cheap, inexpensive, one cubic foot box which I have repeatedly envisioned as the container powering the local home or business. Yes, I am optimistic, mainly from my belief in a benevolent Higher Power. However, some environmental changes are necessary, just like Katrina, to replace the impotent government agency leaders (e.g. FEMA) who often stop progress and instead, maintain inefficiency.

Evolutionshift.com: Any final thoughts or comments?

VALONE: Everyone can do his or her part to conserve energy and reduce their personal carbon dioxide emissions, including recycling their waste, installing passive solar in their homes and buying a hybrid, if they can afford to do so. Writing their Senator and Congressman to include green legislation like the 10% renewable portfolio for each state is vital. Right now, Europe has a 20% renewable portfolio for their energy production and the US lags behind, even though we are the biggest consumer (20 million barrels per day) of oil and the biggest polluter in the world. It is up to the US to change its ways if we believe the world can change for the better. Supporting and buying stock in Planktos, Inc., which has a wonderful plankton-feeding program for the ocean to sequester millions of tons of CO2, is also very important for the short term. The world’s temperature and sea level are being driven (thermally forced) by the present heat-trapping 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. Planetary wide modifications by the human race united for a common cause will solve this problem for the better.

Evolutionshift.com: Thank you Tom.

Today we are using the energy source discovered 150 years ago to get us to work and to the grocery store.  Do we use candles to light our homes?  Do we use tubes to power our radios and TVs?  Do we cool our houses with blocks of ice?  No, no and no!  So why do we continue to blindly define transportation energy on an 150 year old discovery that we know is causing climate change, funding terrorism and is in finite supply?

In the last few decades, Western Science has, as it has penetrated ever smaller particles, come to the conclusion that everything is energy.  Taking a look at energy from this point of view it strikes me as incredibly narrow to think of fuel, or energy as fossil fuel. That is just a small slice of what is available. If everything is energy then let’s look elsewhere, everywhere.

There are people around the world who are doing just that.  A ...]]> It is important to realize that the way we power our vehicles today is based on the legacy of energy discoveries of the 1800s.  Oil was first taken out of the ground in Pennsylvania in the 1860s.  When the automobile industry came into being some four decades later, petroleum was the first candidate for the energy source.  Even though the quintessential American inventor Thomas Edison did build an electric car, electricity was not as wide spread as it soon would be, so the power of the Rockefeller oil cartel won the day.

Today we are using the energy source discovered 150 years ago to get us to work and to the grocery store.  Do we use candles to light our homes?  Do we use tubes to power our radios and TVs?  Do we cool our houses with blocks of ice?  No, no and no!  So why do we continue to blindly define transportation energy on an 150 year old discovery that we know is causing climate change, funding terrorism and is in finite supply?

In the last few decades, Western Science has, as it has penetrated ever smaller particles, come to the conclusion that everything is energy.  Taking a look at energy from this point of view it strikes me as incredibly narrow to think of fuel, or energy as fossil fuel. That is just a small slice of what is available. If everything is energy then let’s look elsewhere, everywhere.

There are people around the world who are doing just that.  A French company called MDI has partnered with an Indian company Tata Motors, to bring to market a car that runs on compressed air.  That’s right, air.  The power source is air and the waste product is air.  A visionary inventor and entrepreneur, Guy Negre, the founder of MDI, has developed a compressed air engine that has the potential for being one of the great inventions of this century.

Negres’s compressed air car can travel 120 miles between refueling.  That is significant because more than 50% of Americans live 20 miles or less from work, and the average daily mileage per car is less than 40 miles a day.  The cost to operate is low, about one dollar per hundred miles.  The compressed air only car will need to go to compressed air fueling stations for a compressed air refill.  Once these retrofitted gas stations are in place, a refueling will take 3 minutes, will cost about $2 and will allow the driver to drive 125-175 before needing to refuel.  Alternatively, there are engines being developed that either switch over to electric or gas power allowing the car to continue to be driven, while at the same time operating the compressor to refill the tank with compressed air.  This model car could be driven from L.A. to New York on a single tank of gas.  Because there is no heat generating combustion in the engine,  changing the oil, vegetable oil at that, needs to be done only once every 30,000 miles.

What is not to like about this?  Cars that are pollution free, basically petroleum free, low cost to purchase [estimates are less than $20,000], low cost to operate and capable of handling most of our driving needs.  Sure if you want to pull a boat or rumble around in a big SUV or pick up this vehicle is not for you, but for commuting and running errands, the overwhelming amount of vehicular use in the U.S., the compressed air car is just fine.

What the compressed air car points to is the fact that humanity has the technological capability of solving our energy problems as they relate to transportation.  Combined with the coming electric cars in the next few years, it is possible that by 2020 we could primarily be free of our reliance on the internal combustion engine.  Now that is the potential and clear possibility.  Do we have the social and political fortitude to make this a reality?  Will our government see the clear opportunity or will it succumb to historical habit and inertia and cave to the well funded industry lobbying efforts that have influenced energy and transportation policy for the last 100 years?

The presidential candidates in 2008 could campaign on an “Energy Independence by 2015” platform, calling for government supported mass production of electric cars, compressed air cars and basically create a nation-wide Apollo project for the replacement of the internal combustion engine in a decade.  The technology is soon to be in place, so it is up to us, all of us, to  utilize the compressed air car and all such emerging new technologies to make it a reality.  

If you are interested in learning more about the compressed air car, here are some links: http://www.gizmag.com/go/7000/ , http://www.cyber-media.com/aircar/ , http://www.theaircar.com/