Three Years After Massive Blackout Ex-Motorola Chief Calls for Action
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
2006
Contact:
Crystal Borde
cborde@vancomm.com
(202) 331-4323
Three Years After Massive Blackout Ex-Motorola Chief Calls for Action
Three years after the massive East Coast blackout, as summer power outages continue to be business as usual, the former head of Motorola Inc. is calling for an end to apathy about the deterioration of our electric power system.
“Our electric power system is inefficient, unreliable, insecure and insufficient to meet the needs of a global economy,” Robert W. Galvin, founder of the Galvin Electricity Initiative, said. “We have an analog system in a digital world and it is crippling American business and endangering American lives, ” said Galvin, who headed Motorola for more than 30 years, building it into the Fortune 100 company of today. “Three years after the blackout, it is time to start thinking outside the grid and beyond the so-called impossible.”
The Galvin Electricity Initiative has brought together the nation’s leading electricity experts and charged them with wholly re-imagining the electric power system as we know it. Now in its second year, the Initiative is in the process of creating the business and technological blueprints for the perfect power system. While other groups and government agencies are in the process of researching the necessary changes to the power grid, the Galvin Initiative plans to build prototypes of that system around the country.
Leading the project is Kurt Yeager, an internationally recognized energy expert. Yeager retired in 2004 president of the Electric Power Research Institute, the business and technology think tank of the electric utility industry. Today, convinced that the industry alone cannot make the necessary change, Yeager is pushing for public understanding of the urgency of transforming our electric power system that will support the innovations and break down the barriers to the perfect power system. “The electric power system is the greatest engineering triumph of the 20th century. Let’s not allow it to be the 21st century’s greatest failure,” said Yeager, who chairs the World Energy Council Study on energy and climate change.
Built largely in the 1960s, with technology from the decade before, the electric power system was not built to serve today’s markets or power a digital economy. Power sags and blackouts cause approximately $150 billion in lost productivity a year. While socieity is dependent on power for everything from medical to transportation and national security, we cannot count on the power supply to hold up through even the most routine summer storms. In a world increasingly concerned about both greenhouse gases and our dependence on foreign oil, today’s power system wastes two-thirds of the fuel it burns.
Much of the technology exists to create a perfectly reliable electric power; system that uses far less fuel, is safe from terrorist attack and natural disaster, and never fails the consumer.
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