Repower America!

It's time to get on board and Repower America! Yeah! Time to get all pumped up to meet the challenge of powering our great nation with clean electricty within 10 years. Think it's a pipe dream? Think again.

Our country is in serious crisis mode. The economy is in shambles and people are losing their jobs and homes. The environmental challenges we face can be met with new green jobs and freedom from fossil fuels, and the economic stimulas plan should help us meet this bold challenge.

Repower America was inspired by a speech given by Al Gore last year, where he talked about creating new industries that are powered by clean energy. By replacing dirty burning fossil fuels with clean domestic sources, we not only end our dependence on foreign oil, but we also clean up the environment. This is turn will help solve the global climate crisis, while creating new jobs for people who need work.

But we need a plan, don't we? A plan that covers everything from soup to nuts, from A - Z, etc. According to the Repower America site, the plan includes:

Energy Efficiency: A national upgrade to eliminate waste, save money, and improve comfort. Make every bit of energy we produce work harder for us.
Renewable Generation: Accelerate the ramp-up of clean, renewable electricity sources through policies that support increased private and public investment in technologies that work, like wind, solar, and geothermal.
Unified National Smart Grid: Modernize transmission infrastructure so that clean electricity generated anywhere in America can power homes and businesses across the nation; Build national electricity 'interstates' that move power quickly and cheaply to where it is needed; Establish local smart grids that buy and sell power from households and support clean plug-in cars.
Automobiles: Transition to efficient plug-in cars that 'fuel' with clean electricity. In combination with the unified grid, a nationwide fleet of plug-in vehicles also provides a key source of electricity storage.

Sounds like a big challenge, but we are up for it, aren't we? We can do it and we must do it. Log on to http://www.repoweramerica.org/ to read the analysis of the plan and to become a member of this great movement. There are 2,117,929 members as of today and the number is growing by leaps and bounds.

One more thing to do while you're on the site - check out how your state is helping to Repower America. We live in Illinois and when I clicked on our state I was pleasantly surprised to see that there are almost 54,000 members. Yeah!

* We also rank 8th in existing wind capacity.
* In 2006, our state produced nearly 600,000-megawatt hours of electricity from biomass - that's enough to power almost 65,000 homes per year!
*We have a renewable portfolio standard (RPS) that requires all public utilities to generate 25% of their electricity from renewable energy resources by 2025, with at least 18.75% from wind by 2013. *The wind turbine industry is bringing more jobs to Illinois and one engineering company is developing a second plant to manufacture mechanical drives for the wind turbine industry. This will create 300 new production jobs and 55 new office jobs.