Van Jones Promotes Smart Grid, but is it Really Smart?
Apr 14, 2009 at 10:51PM 
If ever you need to push a progressive agenda, you’d do well to have Van Jones on your side. The first time I saw him, at a conference in Oakland speaking about his work with incarcerated youth, he transfixed an audience of six-hundred for forty-five minutes of laughter and tears and applause. The Yale-educated civil rights attorney is a heavyweight orator: Who else gets a round of applause after their congressional testimony?
So naturally I was excited when Jones joined President Obama’s green-team, but he’s going to have his hands full with the big utilities and their so-called “Smart Grid” program. You see, anytime I’m told something is smart, I just have to check, and in this case, my worst fears were realized. So when Jones told Congress that building the “Smart Grid” would create benefits on the level that building our interstate highway-system did, I cringed. When he said that consumers would save money due to improved energy efficiency, I sighed. Here’s the problem:
Reader Comments (1)
How about Megatons for Megawatts. Just in case your readers are not aware, US nuclear bomb materials are being used to produce almost 10% of US electricity or almost half of US nuclear electricity production. This USEC, Inc. web page only refers to "Russian" nuclear material:
http://www.usec.com/megatonstomegawatts.htm
However, I heard a discussion of the issue on NPR this pm. During this 4.5 minute segment a Harvard professor admits that the Tennessee Valley Authority is using US nuclear weapons program materials for electricity production: click here for a listen.