Infrastructure Investment: The Key to Energy Dominance & Economic Prosperity

January 7, 2025

Kevin O’Rourke

History may not always repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And throughout America’s history, infrastructure investment has driven many of the nation’s significant economic leaps forward.

Whether it was James Monroe’s advocacy for new roads, canals, and bridges; Abraham Lincoln’s leadership enabling transcontinental railways; or the federal highway system championed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, public-private infrastructure partnerships have reliably served as an economic catalyst.

The nation’s infrastructure is once again at a critical juncture. Strategic competition with China on artificial intelligence is straining the U.S. power grid, as new data centers are struggling to come online due to challenges in connecting to new power generation. Persistent inflation and gaps in wealth and income have left many Americans struggling to pay their bills. And recent extreme weather events have left millions without power — and disrupted operations at military bases.

A common thread among these seemingly disparate challenges is a lack of adequate transmission lines connecting America’s balkanized power grids. That lack of infrastructure is contributing to generally rising energy costs, preventing consumer savings on electricity, specifically.

Read in T&D World

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Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy Concepts Can’t Violate the Laws of Physics

Published

18 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Alice Rush

In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.

I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what we was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy that you added to it.”

“Exactly.”

I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.

He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”

Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.

“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.

“No. Not only would not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”

—

I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.

Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.