A better use for the highway system

Every generation since the middle of the 19th Century has had its defining national infrastructure projects. America started with the harbors and canals, then the railroads, Interstate Highways, airways, and most recently, the internet. The millennials are due for one.

Our patchwork grid network needs an audacious new vision to keep up with the green energy transition. A more encompassing name for the millions of potential electric producers would be something like a distributed network (millions of green microgenerators and household level linking wires). Energy is ubiquitous; the grid should be the same. Currently America’s electrical grid links major coal, gas, nuclear and hydroelectric power plants — all environmentally suspect. Green energy producers need a dispersed, diverse, and rapidly expandable network to connect them together.

I cringe at the spectacle of high-tension wires strung across the land, especially through forests, open meadows, and farms. But what to do with them? A shared vision is to convert the interstate highway system into four alternative uses: a nationwide grid for electric power, an automated rail transport corridor, an aqueduct, and a contiguous farm. Together they would unify the country and perhaps save wildlife. As a vehicular transportation right-of-way, the interstate highway system is not only marginal but ugly.

It is not enough for our government leaders to come up with innovative funding ideas for green energy. We have enough financial and economic wizards to gag a maggot. Government people need to abandon the office, roll up their sleeves, and build it!

EMIL BRUCE LESTER, JR. Point Breeze North