Chicago physicist Eric Isaacs shares his thoughts on whether the United States should invest in technologies that could improve its power grid and end its reliance on foreign oil, to bring an important part of the nation’s infrastructure into the 21st century.

MSNBC TRANSCRIPT:

>>> all right welcome back. a good friday afternoon, and awful one out here in the desert and the home to the hoover dam. a perfect location to have a conversation, albeit in the wind, about this nation’s vastly inefficient power grid. we generate so much energy, but so little of it actually goes to what we want it to do. the dam that we mentioned provides power to around 30 million folks around the southwest. we just talked about that. and at a more efficient rate than a lot of the rest of our infrastructure. just take a look at some of these ? numbers. nearly two-thirds of the power generated in this country, think about all the energy we burn, natural gas, coal, all of the creation of that energy is lost. it never goes to overland transportation, lights for your house, heat for your home, air-conditioning for your kitchen, that never happens. that is a startling inefficient number. compare that to the efficiency rates that already exist around western europe and asia. their numbers as high as a 90% efficiency rate. they burn natural gas, they burn coal, they generate nuclear power, but they don’t let two-thirds of it fly out the window or into the sky or whatever it goes. talk about a way to create jobs. why are we not investing in technologies that could massively improve our power grid and help end our reliance on foreign oil without a huge debate as to whether you’re into alg algae, tidal, or drilling in alaska. let alone all of our soldiers right now fighting in the middle east, because we have an inefficient power grid. can you think of a more important issue, whether it goes to our infrastructure, the way we live, or our own national security. we set out to find out what options actually exist. can we do it better than anybody. let’s bring in a man who knows a heck a lot more than i do. eric isaacs is the director of argone national laboratory. he’s also a university of chicago physicist. professor, it’s a delight to have you here. i want to read off a couple of more numbers. we consume four times the rate that they do in europe. even if we just changed our efficiency rate, we could reduce our consumption by 50%. if you look at homes, 35% of home energy loss is through air leaks. are these problems solvable?

>> yes, they most certainly are. thank you, dylan, for having me on your show. the grid is really a marvel. we depend on it. it’s our back backbone. i’ll add one more number to it. we’re so ? dependent on it, last year alone, disruptions in the grid, shutdowns cost us over $100 billion, just in those disruptions lo s alone. so the answer is yes. there are technologies out there that we can find that will actually improve the efficiency and delivery of energy from power plants like the one you’re sitting on right now, to your home.

>> what’s the barrier? whether it’s the zpags rate on the electricity that leaves here and gets to phoenix or los angeles or las vegas. and for that matter, what’s the barrier to other things — hot air and cold air blowing out the window?

>> right. there are several things that contribute to it. actually, one of the big things in efficient is really load distribution. nighttime, we have low load, and daytime, we have high load. but the source is constant. we produce energy all the time. so one of the energies for us is how to manage day and night. one can think about storage mechanisms, one can think about a more national grid. right now our grids are fairly regional. we don’t deliver power throughout the country from one place to another. the hoover dam is a great example. it’s a natural source of energy. we need to do the same thing in all parts of the country. we need to be able to deliver power from where its generated, both efficiently night and day. how do we equal the load? how do we level the load? that’s one of the big questions on the table. a lot of that has to do with managing a more national grid. how do we manage it, that grid? and i can tell you, the answer, some of the answer is actually in modeling, using computation. we have to understand the grid better. our current grid, which as i said, is a real marvel of engineering, was innovated over 100 years. in fact, if you had edison come back today, he’d pretty much recognize what he originally put up, set up many, many years ago. 100 years ago. we’re really working with a grid that’s quite old. we don’t know how to monitor or model the grid very well. so just distributing, justensing how to distribute the energy more effectively across the whole nation instead of regionally will have a huge impact on the efficiency.

>> and what’s the barrier to addressing that?

>> so there are several things one is actually just mornding. so just getting out there and measuring, even at the level of houses and industry, companies, buildings. just understanding what the local consumption is. but also using — building the models that actually manage the grid. the grid itself is a very complex object. very complex in the sense that there are many components. many sources, many loads from industry to, you know, to your home, et cetera, but there are also different kinds of sources, which you’ve already mentioned. and those sources provide variability. so we have to understand, just understand how to model the grid better. and we can do that with much more sophisticated modeling on computers. once we understand how to — once we understand the grid better and do things like forecasting consumption. for example, higher consumption in the south, lower consumption in chicago, say, in the summer, for air-conditioning, one might be able to distribute the power, and we can gain a better understanding.

>> is that the responsibility of the federal government, state governments, private industries, private industries that own the power generation facilities? how do we get our act together to do this?

>> that’s a great question. it really is, in the end, it’s going to have to be a private/public partnership. that’s exactly the debate the country is in now. and you talked about it in your earlier segment. it’s really part of the debate we’re involved in now. but i want to remind you, the investment really is in part in our people. you talked about investment in large infrastructure, like the hoover dam. very important, very innovative. a large investment at the time, something like $50 million. today we have to think about informi investing in innovators. who shost who’s going to do that? and industry still does some of it, but not nearly as much as they did 20 or 30 years ago. it’s an issue the federal government has to work on in partnership with the private sector.

>> professor isaac, it’s a pleasure to make the acquaintance, even if it’s remote from the hoover dam. i hope we’ll be able to stay in touch and i appreciate your insights, thank you, sir.