[tahoevalleylines]

Christopher Swan is an early advocate of renewables electicity generation applied to transport. His "ELECTRIC WATER" is a compendium of off-the-shelf technical and policy steps suggested to bring clean energy independence without needing a crisis or nuclear fission to make it happen. Local effect; regional and national application without massive transmission lines. Energy (night time) storage is largely via Hydrogen, not entirely in batteries.

The utilization of solar and wind power is his working platform, and he brings us fresh water, along with a "Systems" approach to transportation. The phrase "Transportation Transformation" is used, with merit. Linking together transportation & clean energy to provide mobility, community cohesion, and local control of fresh water and residential power seems too utopian to contemplate, but Swan makes it compute.

Swan's transprtation element connects front door with shopping and electric railway connection, calling this full-service systems approach the "Retail Railway". An attractive feature is his insistence on scaled down maintenance support, so the smaller community has at hand an operating shop with employees living locally, people in your neighborhood who know how to build & fix things. Old timers may recall the fire department or school district or railway shop. Later on, the independent car repair shop was much like this before time got too valuable to share with people in the neighborhood.

Water comes in as part of Hydrogen Generation and use, and is produced in amounts plenteous enough to supply potable and basic residential needs. Nuts & bolts are in the room with ELECTRIC WATER, but Camelot actually comes within grasp here, moreso than in the medieval styled village dream.

[tahoevalleylines]

Planning for the future includes books on the shelf with compendium of at hand/off the shelf tech. This is more for a group or even a community of Peak Oil savvy people with some ability to make political waves. But it requires one interested party in the group to make the first reading.

Same vein, having to do with maintaining "Societal & Commercial Cohesion": (peakoil.net) articles 374 & 1037.

Anyone in view with working knowledge of US Army/Guard Railroad Operating & Maintenance Battalion? Useful as garrison elements at junctions of operating rail line, and strategic, dormant rail branchline (Agricultural traffic) candidates for rehab. Rail logistics units on large scale also enable dispersed medical care facilities, at first response, initial care level. Handy in biological attack, civilian medical system collapse! Convenient, if you find yourself in a quarantine zone with a branchline rail unit in there too.

Please see the James A. Van Fleet rail doctrine book from Association Of American Railroads librarian (202-639-2100). Dated, but prescient, warns of homeland attack and folly of reliance on import oil. Accumulate some information even if you are a skeptic; we need to get railway technology savvy people back in the culture. See also the GCOR, operating rules.

Serious map work, get "US RAIL MAP ATLAS" volume for your region, from spv.co.uk -shows operating and former rail footprint, helpful for working with unemployed road department designers on Oil Interregnum Plan B...

For groups looking at typical rail project scoping methodology, see 1995 CalTrans' "Reno/Tahoe I-80/US50 Rail Corridor Study (Unabridged) from CalTrans Director, Randell Iwasaki. Railway linked to renewable generation is a crucial element in your neighborhood, better famine hedge than Gold & guns...

[patience]

Browsing the review at Barnes and Noble, it appears that maybe the author is advocating solar PV to disassociate water into hydrogen and oxygen, then use the gasses for fuel , producing heat energy and pure water in the process? I can't tell what his thesis is, but I don't see the above as a credible answer, given the issues of infrastructure scale involved. Did I miss the mark here?