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Superpower: One Man's Quest to Transform American Energy
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About Superpower: One Man's Quest To Transform American
Product Description In the ever more urgent quest for sources of renewable energy, meet the man boldly harnessing the natural forces that could power America’s future. The United States is in the midst of an energy transition. We want to embrace renewable energy sources like wind and solar, and rely less on dirty fossil fuels. We don’t want to keep pumping so many heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. Any transition from a North American power grid that uses mostly fossil fuels to one that is predominantly clean requires a massive building spree—billions of dollars’ worth. Enter Michael Skelly, an infrastructure builder who began working on wind energy in 2000, when many considered the industry a joke. Eight years later, Skelly helped create the second largest wind power company in the United States—which was sold for $2 billion. Wind energy was no longer funny; it was well on its way to generating a substantial percentage of the electricity in the United States. Acclaimed journalist and author of The Boom, “the best all-around book yet on fracking” ( San Francisco Chronicle), Russell Gold tells the story of this pioneer whose innovations, struggles, and persistence represent the groundbreaking changes underway in American energy. In Superpower, we meet Skelly’s financial backers, a family that pivoted from oil exploration to renewable energy; the farmers ready to embrace the new “cash crop”; the landowners prepared to go to court to avoid looking at overhead wires; and utility executives who concoct fiendish ways to block renewable energy. Gold also shows how Skelly’s innovative company, Clean Line Energy, conceived the idea for a new power grid that would allow sunlight where abundant to light up homes thousands of miles away in cloudy states, and take wind from the Great Plains to keep air conditioners running in Atlanta. Thrilling, provocative, and important, Superpower is a fascinating look at America’s future. Review “With propulsive storytelling, Russell Gold presents one of America’s most ambitious and groundbreaking projects for renewable energy. Following larger-than-life men and women seeking to reshape the current energy landscape, Superpower is an essential, compelling look into the future of the nation’s power grid.” —Bryan Burrough, author of Public Enemies and The Big Rich "Russell Gold is among the most thoughtful writers on energy, and while this compelling book is about one man’s battle to remake America’s power grid, it's also a fascinating contemplation of renewable energy in America." —Bethany McLean, author of The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron About the Author Russell Gold is an award-winning investigative journalist at The Wall Street Journal. Gold’s reporting has taken him to five continents and above the Arctic Circle two times. In 2010, he was part of the award-winning Wall Street Journal team that covered the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill. His first book, The Boom, was longlisted for the FT Goldman Sachs Business Book of the year prize in 2014. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and two children. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Superpower ?1?? No Man’s Land When Michael Skelly first visited the Oklahoma panhandle in the summer of 2009, he had a good idea of what he would find. He expected lots of sunbaked and windswept open space, and he wasn’t disappointed. It was a hot day as he drove west from Guymon, the largest town in the panhandle, into a landscape that was pancake flat and dry. There were only a handful of trees. For mile after mile, the two-lane Highway 3 ran straight as a matchstick. Every mile, a dirt road intersected the highway and headed off toward the horizon at a 90-degree angle. The land was a giant grid containing squares of corn, milo, and grassland. There were few houses, one every mile or so. Half had been abandoned decades ago by h
