Power Surge

by Ben Bova

  “When I came back to the States I asked myself why American homes don’t use solar energy. So I put together a little company and we started making and installing solar systems for individual homes.”

  “And shopping malls,” Jake interjected. “And factories.”

  Nevins grinned. “You’ve done some homework.”

  “But I don’t understand your attitude.”

  Sighing like a patient teacher, Nevins said, “Look. Solar is inherently decentralized. One house at a time. Not big centralized power stations. Not utility companies that distribute the electricity they generate. Decentralized. Solar-powered homes generate their own electricity; they don’t need anything but sunshine.”

  Jake started to object, but Nevins went on, “What we’re doing is bringing solar energy to people from the bottom up: individual homes, individual shopping malls and other facilities. What the government does is from the top down: Washington decides who gets solar and how much solar gets installed. That’s not for us,” he said, shaking his head.

  “But we can help you.”

  “Sure you can. The way you helped Solyndra. The way the Department of Energy backed half a dozen half-baked ideas that never panned out. No thanks. Just leave us alone and let us go on working from the bottom up.”

  Jake took a sip of cream soda. Nevins didn’t seem angry or bitter, just determined to bring solar energy to the nation one home at a time.

  “We’re doing just fine,” he went on. “Have you taken a look at the stock market? Solar firms are hot investments. People have bought more solar installations this year than they did for the past decade.”

  Almost as a challenge, Jake said, “You’ve benefited from tax deductions homeowners get for installing solar panels.”

  Conceding the point with a nod, Nevins countered, “Yeah, and when people started moving toward solar enough so that the electric utilities started to feel threatened, the tax deductions disappeared.”

  “We could reinstate them. Write them into the overall program.”

  “Try it. See how far you’ll get.”

  Jake felt a mixture of resentment at Nevins’s know-it-all attitude and admiration for his stubborn insistence on going his own way.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll write a tax deduction for private home solar installations into my plan.”

  “Fine,” said Wilmer Nevins, with a knowing smile. “Look me up again when you get it through Congress.”

  Jake smiled back at him. “You’ll be the first to know.”

  Summer of Discontent

  Congress adjourned for the summer. The weather became really hot. Jake had never experienced such humidity. Just walking a block or so felt as if he were swaddled in a wet towel. Back home, in the foothills of the Rockies, the summers got hot but never so blastedly, energy-sappingly sticky, clammy, muggy.

  He began to understand why in the old days Washington emptied out almost completely during the summer. Built on a swamp, the city was a hotbed for yellow fever and other tropical diseases. That was before modern medicine. And air-conditioning.

  Now the politicians went home, leaving the city to the bureaucrats, the workers, and the tourists.

  Day by day, Jake built his comprehensive energy plan, working desperately to make it come out revenue neutral. Try as he might, though, the plan would cost billions to implement. It needed federal funding up front; the benefits would come years later. Jake saw no way around that fundamental fact. He was firmly committed to keeping the cost and benefit figures honest: no “massaging” them, in spite of Brogan’s advice.

  He had sent his outline to Senator Santino’s office, as the old man had requested. It disappeared without a trace. Jake didn’t even know if Santino had bothered to look at it. Just as well, he thought. Once I’ve got the cost picture under control, I’ll send him a fuller draft.

  Doggedly, he plowed ahead. MHD power generation to increase the efficiency of utility power plants, while using coal or natural gas from North American resources. Solar energy, including rooftop solar panels for individual homes that could become energy-independent and disconnect themselves from the power grid. Windmills. Electric automobiles. Replacing existing nuclear power plants with new, fail-safe designs. Hydrogen fuels. New electricity transmission lines. He even added a few pages about space solar power systems, after Knowles delivered a three-volume tome on the subject.

  The plan was revenue neutral—in ten years or more. Brogan insisted that no politician would look beyond the next election day.

  “Look what they did to the Affordable Care Act,” he warned.

  Still, Jake plowed doggedly ahead.

  His social life was minimal. He realized that Tomlinson had talked Connie into bedding him. Every time he met with the senator, Tomlinson grinned knowingly at him, as if Connie had provided him with video of their brief times together.

  He dated a few women he’d met, mostly fellow workers at the Hart S.O.B. No one from Tomlinson’s staff, though. Jake kept scrupulously free of entanglements in his workplace. But he never got past the first date with any of them. The one woman he brought back to his own apartment was pleasant enough, but Jake worried that they might disturb his landlord, overhead.

  He couldn’t help thinking of Louise and their years of marriage. It was all so easy—effortless, almost—being with her. He saw her smiling at him, heard her murmuring his name while they made love. Stop it! he commanded himself. She’s dead, she’s been dead for nearly three years now. Our marriage ended when that idiot trucker plowed into her car.

  He buried himself in his work. He wanted to have a complete, detailed, comprehensive, and revenue neutral energy plan for Tomlinson to present to the energy committee in September, when Congress reconvened. But the cost figures kept plaguing him.

  He managed to take a quick trip back to Montana, to see Bob Rogers at the university and visit dour-faced Tim Younger at the big MHD experimental rig in the dusty town of Lignite. Eighty-eight megawatts for three hundred hours, Younger crowed. Jake nodded pleasantly, but he knew the utilities people weren’t going to budge until they saw a hundred megawatts for a thousand hours. And maybe not even then.

  He didn’t even ask to see Glynis Colwyn; she was now Mrs. Tim Younger. He didn’t see any of his former acquaintances from the old neighborhood, either. Thanks to Leverett Caldwell, he had left that life behind him. Lev was the only person he had been close to other than Louise, and they were both in their graves.

  Driving Jake from the MHD facility back to the airport in his gas-guzzling SUV, Bob Rogers asked, “Jake, does your plan include methanol?”

  “Methanol? That’s wood alcohol, isn’t it?”

  Keeping his eyes on the road, Rogers chuckled. “It’s not good to drink, but it makes a good, clean fuel. Race cars use methanol.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You know how we plan to capture the CO2 in the generator’s exhaust stream.”

  “And sequester it deep underground,” Jake said. The costs of burying carbon dioxide, so it wouldn’t add more greenhouse warming to the atmosphere, was one of the factors that was killing Jake’s plan.

  Rogers went on, “Yeah, well, there’s some work going on out in San Diego, a group there claims they can take the CO2 from a power plant and turn it into methanol, which can then be sold as fuel for cars and other vehicles.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Maybe you ought to contact them, see if what they’re doing is practical.”

  Jake conceded, “Maybe.”

  * * *

  Back in Washington, Jake plowed ahead with his work, trying to bring the costs under control. Until the day that Steve Brogan phoned him.

  Surprised that the paranoid Brogan would call him at his office, Jake picked up the phone and asked, “Hello, Steve. How may I help you?”

  “Lunch,” said Brogan. “At Ebbitt Grill.”

  Old Ebbitt Grill was much less crowded now, in the dead of summer, but it was still a lively place. Men
in the gray suits that were sort of an unofficial uniform in official Washington filled most of the places along the bar. Many of the booths were occupied by couples. Office romances? Jake wondered. A lot of the men looked faded, middle-aged. A lot of the women looked much younger and more ambitious.

  Brogan was nowhere in sight, so Jake took a booth toward the back of the room and ordered a club soda. No drinking in the afternoon: that was one of his rules.

  Before his club soda was served, Brogan showed up, looking as disheveled and unhappy as usual. He nodded to one of the bartenders as he shuffled toward the booth where Jake was waiting for him.

  Sliding into the booth opposite Jake, Brogan announced without preliminaries, “I’ve been transferred.”

  “What?”

  “To Dayton,” Brogan growled. “Dayton effing Ohio.”

  “When did this happen? How come?”

  The cocktail waitress arrived with Jake’s club soda and a tall pilsner glass of beer for Brogan.

  “I think Santino had a hand in it. The son of a bitch must have figured out that I was working with you.”

  “Can they do that? Just push you out of Washington? This is your hometown, isn’t it?”

  Brogan nodded morosely. “Technically, it’s a promotion. I’ve been kicked upstairs. I’ll be working at the lab that the Energy Department runs at the big Air Force base in Dayton. Better pay. The department’ll pay all my moving expenses, even put me up in a hotel until I can find living quarters.”

  Feeling bewildered, Jake objected, “But you don’t have to go, do you? I mean, they can’t just push you out the window like this. Can they?”

  “It’s a done deal. Either I go to effing Dayton or I get riffed.”

  “Reduction In Force,” Jake muttered. The government’s version of a layoff.

  “Santino found out I was helping you. That’s what’s behind this.”

  “Why would he object to you helping me?”

  Brogan raised a stubby finger. “One: he doesn’t want your comprehensive plan. If somehow it gets through his committee, it diminishes his power.”

  “Just because he didn’t originate it—”

  “You think he wants Tomlinson grabbing the spotlight?”

  “Oh.”

  “Two: the coal and oil guys won’t like it. Not one bit. Remember, first thing I ever told you was—”

  “If it goes against the fossil fuel lobbies, it’ll never get passed.”

  “Right.”

  Jake took a sip of his soda. It tasted flat. “So now what happens?”

  Sighing, Brogan said, “So now I go out to effing Dayton and look for a house for my wife and kid.”

  “Damn.”

  Jabbing the same finger at him, Brogan said, “You just watch your butt, kid. Santino’s out to get you. No way he’s going to let your plan get through his committee.”

  “That means he’s after Frank, too, doesn’t it?”

  “Tomlinson?” Brogan squeezed his eyes shut in thought for a moment, then said, “He won’t have to worry about Tomlinson. Once your senator sees what happens to his plan, he’ll pull in his horns and toe Santino’s line.”

  “No,” Jake snapped.

  “You’ll see. This is all an exercise in power, kid. Santino’s showing Tomlinson who’s boss.”

  Jake felt like throwing up.

  The Tomlinson Residence

  For several days after his lunch with Brogan, Jake worked blindly, uncertain how he should proceed. What’s the sense of finishing the plan if it’s just going to end up in Santino’s wastebasket?

  Then he realized, the Little Saint is afraid of Tomlinson. He sees Frank as a threat to his own position, his own power, and sees the energy plan as the embodiment of Frank’s challenge. How do we handle this? What should we do?

  The first thing to do, he decided, is to let Frank know what I know. He punched the phone console’s keyboard. The flinty red-haired chief of the secretarial staff appeared on the screen.

  “The senator is at the airport,” she told Jake in her nasal twang. “His father’s arriving for a visit.”

  Jake cut the connection. He had Frank’s private cell phone number, but they had agreed that Jake would use it only in an emergency. Well, Jake told himself as he tapped out the number, this is an emergency.

  Tomlinson answered on the second ring.

  “Jake, what’s wrong?”

  “I’ve got to talk with you, just the two of us.” Jake didn’t want O’Donnell or any other of the staff in on this. They’re all Washington insiders, lifetime Beltway people; maybe they’re in Santino’s pocket. Christ, he thought, I’m getting just as paranoid as Steve. But then he remembered that even paranoids have enemies.

  He could hear the frown in Tomlinson’s voice. “Just the two of us? What’s up?”

  “It’s important. I’ll tell you all about it when we meet. Just the two of us.”

  A hesitation, then, “My father’s plane is arriving in ten minutes. How about you come to my house for dinner? We can talk then.”

  Jake thought swiftly. His father. And Amy, of course. That should be safe enough.

  “Okay. Your house.”

  “Six o’clock.”

  “Right.”

  * * *

  Tomlinson had bought a “modest” twelve-room Georgian brick house set well back on a perfectly clipped lawn decorated with flowering bushes on a quiet, tree-shaded street not all that far from Jake’s apartment. Almost within walking distance. Jake parked his battered gray two-door Mustang on the street, walked up the bricked driveway, and pressed the doorbell button.

  A young man in a dark suit opened the door, with a deferential smile.

  “I’m Jacob Ross, here to see the senator.”

  “You are expected, sir,” said the butler, with just a trace of a British accent. Jake realized that Frank—or one of his staff—must have hired the young man. Local talent. All the servants at the Tomlinson mansion back home had been older, and solidly middle-American.

  The butler led Jake through the modest foyer and down a corridor that appeared to run the length of the house. The furnishings were quietly luxurious, the paintings on the walls mostly reproductions of old masterpieces. Frank hasn’t been here long enough to fill the place with family stuff, Jake thought. Or maybe he’s leaving it to Amy to decorate the house.

  Through a half-open door he could hear Alexander Tomlinson’s strong, imperious voice: “You shouldn’t take a stand on immigration policy. Whichever way you vote, you’ll make enemies.”

  “But I’ve got to vote, Dad,” Tomlinson replied.

  “Abstain. Be out of town when the vote comes up. Or at least vote with your party’s leadership. Don’t stick your neck out. Not on that issue.”

  The butler pushed the door all the way open and announced, “Dr. Ross.”

  Jake stepped into the room. It was apparently a library, lined with books. Frank Tomlinson stood in his shirtsleeves and plaid suspenders, a cut-crystal glass of whiskey in one hand. His father, tall and stern, wore a gray checkered sports jacket over darker gray slacks, with a drink in one bony, liver-spotted hand, his other still pointing emphatically at his son.

  Amy was sitting on the sofa, beneath a portrait of some Revolutionary War officer in knee breeches and powdered wig. She was wearing a sleeveless powder blue cocktail dress that set off her honey blond hair perfectly. She gave Jake her cheerful cheerleader’s smile.

  “What would you like to drink?” Amy asked, getting up from the sofa.

  The discussion between Tomlinson père et fils hung suspended while Amy went to the rolling cart that held an array of bottles.

  “Club soda, please,” Jake said to her.

  Senator Tomlinson broke into his patented smile. “Come on, Jake. The sun’s over the yardarm. You can relax and have a real drink.”

  Jake shrugged and said, “Okay. Some white wine.”

  As Amy poured wine for Jake, Senator Tomlinson said, “You sounded pretty mysteriou
s over the phone. What’s this all about?”

  Glancing at Tomlinson senior, Jake replied, “The energy plan. Santino’s out to scrap it.”

  The senator’s smile vanished. “Scrap it?”

  Nodding, Jake accepted a stemmed wineglass from Amy and began to explain what he’d learned from Brogan.

  “Some lower-level paper shuffler,” the elder Tomlinson scoffed. “And paranoid, to boot.”

  But the senator asked, “Why would Santino want to scrap the plan? Why not take the credit for bringing it to the Senate floor?”

  “Because he’s afraid of you,” Jake explained.

  “Me? I’m just a junior member of his committee.”

  Amy spoke up, “But this energy plan could make you a very visible new senator. A very popular one, especially with the news media.”

  Tomlinson glanced at his father, who was still standing in the middle of the room, his austere face frowning.

  “What is this plan you’re talking about?” the old man asked.

  “It’s the comprehensive energy plan,” said his son. “I told you about it. It could be the basis for a sound, rational energy policy for the nation.”

  “But isn’t that the White House’s job, to set policy?”

  “The Senate could offer it to the administration as a guideline,” said Senator Tomlinson.

  “The president would see it as a Republican plan to upstage her during next year’s reelection campaign,” his father humphed. “Is that a smart thing to do?”

  “We could present it as a nonpartisan plan,” said the senator. “Beyond politics.”

  “Nothing is beyond politics,” Tomlinson senior said sternly. “The Republicans control the Senate by just one seat.”

  “And the House, since last year’s elections,” the senator pointed out. “The president’s already on very thin ice.”

  “Santino wouldn’t mind upstaging the president,” Amy said. Then she added, “Would he?”

  Tomlinson put his empty glass down on the table at the end of the sofa. “The way I see it, we can present this plan as a bipartisan offer. If the president accepts it, we can take credit for it. If she fights against it, we have an issue to use against her in her reelection campaign.”