An Energy Policy We Can Stick To

The forces of disruptive technology would eventually bring improvements in battery technology, ultimately allowing the production of an all-electric car with satisfactory driving range.

Our biggest problem, however, is how long all this takes. No matter how fast the production of dual-fuel cars is ramped up, replacing the bulk of the approximately 250 million cars on America's roads will take a decade.

We must mobilize all segments of our economy to accelerate the process. Enterprising folks are working to devise ways in which existing gasoline cars could be converted to dual-fuel. Not all vehicles have the space and design that allow this process to happen easily. Luckily, the most gasoline-hungry cars do. Pickups, sport-utility vehicles and the like represent about 80 million vehicles, with mileage of perhaps 13 to 16 miles per gallon. Converting these should be our first priority.

Estimates show that converting these vehicles to dual-fuel operation, even with electricity providing no more than 50 miles of driving range between daily rechargings, could cut petroleum imports 50 to 60 percent -- a stunning opportunity.

A task of this magnitude requires changes in the behavior of millions of consumers. We may need to apply tax incentives over some initial period, perhaps one or two years, to offset the cost of the retrofit and couple them with deep discounts on the cost of electricity used by the vehicle.

The move to electric miles also has the added advantage of helping to mitigate a major environmental threat. A shift from petroleum-based vehicles to electricity-based ones would move the locus for addressing carbon emissions from millions of individual vehicles to far fewer centralized electricity-generating plants. Controlling emissions thus becomes an industrial task, easier technologically. Estimates indicate a potential reduction of carbon emissions of around 50 percent.

There is no issue more urgent. History shows a pattern of using access to energy to influence diplomatic outcomes, with events often escalating into violence. We must prevent this from happening to our country. National security as well as economic needs require that we urgently adopt a strategy to strengthen our energy resilience. The most practical and immediate way is to encourage the mass manufacture of vehicles, as well as the retrofitting of existing ones, so that they first run on electricity.

Andrew S. Grove was chairman and chief executive of Intel Corp. from 1987 to 1998 and now serves as senior adviser. A longer version of this column appears in the current issue of the American magazine; much of the work for that article was based on collaboration with Robert Burgelman of Stanford Business School.