Superpower

Russell Gold is an award-winning Wall Street Journal investigative journalist. Gold's reporting has taken him to five continents and two times above the Arctic Circle. He was a member of the Wall Street Journal's award-winning team that covered the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in 2010. In 2014, his first book, The Boom, was nominated for the FT Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award.

The United States is undergoing an energy transition. We want to rely less on dirty fossil fuels and more on renewable energy sources like wind and solar. We don't want to continue pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. Any transition from a North American power grid based primarily on fossil fuels to one based primarily on clean energy necessitates a massive building spree worth billions of dollars.

Enter Michael Skelly, an infrastructure builder who started working on wind energy in 2000, when many thought it was a joke. Skelly later helped found the second largest wind power company in the United States, which was sold for $2 billion. Wind energy was no longer amusing; it was well on its way to supplying a significant portion of the electricity in the United States.

Russell Gold, acclaimed journalist and author of The Boom, "the best all-around book on fracking yet" (San Francisco Chronicle), tells the story of this pioneer whose innovations, struggles, and perseverance represent the revolutionary changes taking place in American energy. In Superpower, we meet Skelly's financial backers, a family who switched from oil exploration to renewable energy; farmers eager to embrace the new "cash crop"; landowners willing to go to court to avoid looking at overhead wires; and utility executives who devise ingenious ways to stymie renewable energy. Gold also demonstrates how Skelly's innovative company, Clean Line Energy, came up with the idea for a new power grid that would allow sunlight to light up homes thousands of miles away in cloudy states, and wind from the Great Plains to keep Atlanta's air conditioners running. Superpower is an exciting, provocative, and important look at America's future.

Author: Russell Gold

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Superpower-Quest-Transform-American-Energy/dp/1501163582

Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 132 reviews)

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