One of Gore’s main points today was to stress that the Congress needs to pass “the entirety” of the Obama borrow-and-spend plan. That’s because it includes the funds to build a new grid that a renewable-powered electric system needs. Now, as it happens, a “smart grid” is probably a good idea, and I’ll get back to that, but not for the reasons that Gore espouses. He needs to listen to William Tucker:

I think the country needs a basic lesson in physics. You can’t power an electrical grid with intermittent sources. The requirements for storage are immense – you essentially have to double capacity and even then no real technology has emerged. All this started off with “Small is Beautiful.” Now we’re talking about covering whole states with windmill farms and building an entirely new electrical grid to move all this elusive energy around.
On the other hand, Hyperion, a California company, just introduced a 70-MW nuclear reactor the size of a gazebo that can power a city of 15,000. And it wouldn’t require any new transmission lines. Is it possible that nuclear is really “small and beautiful?”

A smart grid would be a good thing nevertheless for the purposes of conserving electricity by allowing for variable pricing, amongst other things. The utilities would probably build it themselves if they were allowed to, but such obstacles as environmental opposition to new lines and regulations that forbid smart prices get in the way. So government has to do it.

In fact, it seems that the model we are following is this one: government and lobbyists use regulation and innovation to stop the market from innovating; government and lobbyists perceive need for that market innovation; government pays market to implement innovation by paying costs of regulation and litigation from taxpayer funds; government and lobbyists finally say the market has failed and only government can provide genuine progress.

What a brave new world we live in!