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Developments in the electric power industry, as well as others, could make a near zero emission vehicle a reality long before 2050.  These developments would also reduce the pollution associated with electric railway locomotives, since they too draw power from the nation's electric grid.Around the middle of the 1880s the Head of the U.S. Patient Office recommended that it be closed.  He said that all of the things that were worth inventing had been invented.  He was wrong.  I don't know exactly which chickens will have hatched by 2050.  But I am sure that there will be a great number of them, many of which we cannot even envision at this point.  As I write this post my former colleagues are laying the groundwork for new nuclear generating units.  They will be better, safer, and cheaper than existing units.  And like the current ones they will be relatively pollution free.  Today the U.S. gets approximately 20 per cent of its electric power from nuclear energy.  By 2050 there is a good chance that it will produce a significantly higher percentage of the country's electric power.  And the industry will resolve the waste issue, which is more about politics than technical issues.    I never heard an electric utility executive - I spent half a lifetime in the business - claim that the industry could give away the electricity generated by nuclear fuel.  We knew from the beginning that our company would have to build a containment plant, install pricey generators and control rooms, lay in switch yards, and enhance the transmission facilities to get the power from the source to the user.  There was no way that it was going to be free.  What the industry did not fully grasp was the huge cost of building and licensing nuclear power plants in the United States.  Our plant, which produces 2300 megawatts of power, has run without a serious blip since the first unit went on-line in 1989.Wind power is playing a larger role in the generation of electric energy.  Texas is the largest wind producing state in the country.  Wind farms are being built as fast as the turbines can be manufactured, shipped, and installed.  Although wind generates only one per cent of the power used in the U.S., it will probably produce a significantly higher percentage by 2050.The U.S. is sitting on an estimated 250 years worth of coal at present use rates.  It is a dirty fuel.  But the engineers are experimenting with a variety of techniques to store the emissions under ground.  They look promising.  Construction of an experimental plant is getting underway in Illinois.  And another is likely to be built in Texas.  Many power specialists believe that renewable energy will be competitive with the traditional forms of generating electric energy.  The driver will be the continuing rise in the cost of natural gas and coal, our two primary boiler fuels.  They tend to move with the price of petroleum, which will continue to rise as world demand for it accelerates.  Claiming that hydrogen powered vehicles would raise the humidity level of a community to a point where it would create a widespread push back is a new one on me.  If vehicles are powered by clean technology, a major source of oil drip on the roadways - the internal combustion engine - will be removed from the roads.Constructing highways in some densely populated sections of the U.S. is becoming prohibitive.  This is not the case, for the most part, in Texas or its neighboring states.  In densely populated areas passenger rail makes sense.Adding capacity to existing railway lines is a good idea if they go where the people are and where they want to go.  The problem, however, is that the rail lines frequently don't go where most people live and work.   This is the case in Dallas, where the light rail system and Trinity Railway Express used existing rail line or the rights-of-way of abandoned lines.  To lay new rail lines would have been cost prohibitive.  As it is, upgrading the existing rights-of-way is breaking the piggy bank.  Because of the inflexibility of rail, at least in Dallas, only a relatively small percentage of Metroplex commuters use the systems.The DART light rail system carries about 60,000 riders per day.  The TRE carries approximately 8,000 riders per day.  The HOV lanes, which can accommodate rapid bus technology and are the third leg of DART's major transport systems in the Metroplex, carry more than 115,000 people per day.  Moreover, this figure will jump significantly with the opening of new HOV lanes on I-30 and U.S. 75 this month.  I understand that the PRWG was a sub-committee.  But I would not have known it from reading their report.  They took a silo approach to transport problems and recommended a one dimension solution.  As I said in a previous post, they should have at least obliquely recognized that rail is not always the best way to solve the nation's transport problems. As I have said, trains are a viable solution in relatively short high density corridors.  They are not a viable solution for medium to lightly populated areas, and they are clearly not an economically viable long distance transport mode.
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