By Philip Meza

Here is the bottom line from a talk that Andy Grove (Intel former chairman, Time Magazine Man of the Year, 1997, etc.) gave on June 30th at the Stanford Business School on the strategic importance of using electricity for transportation. In a nutshell, plug in electric vehicles are the way to go. And do it now. (Retrofit gas guzzlers first.)

Slides from Grove’s talk at Stanford are available here (pdf).

Grove’s main point is electricity has various sources of inputs (oil, coal, nuclear, wind, etc.) whereas today the transportation sector is almost completely reliant on one source: oil.

With world demand for oil increasing, it seems likely that there will be greater competition for oil which will lead to higher prices and possible conflict. It has happened before. In Grove’s paraphrase (of a recent movie title), “There could be blood.”

Producing more oil in the US will not help because oil is sold on world markets. By contrast, electricity is “sticky” because it is inefficient to transport over oceans.

Grove thinks that more cars running on electricity will improve our strategic security and also help reduce pollution and CO2 emissions. This is because the bad stuff will be centralized at the power plants, where they are subject to current and future industrial emission reductions solutions, and not at the millions of tailpipes of the nations cars.

Sound right to you? Sound wrong? Grove has a piece coming out in The American this month that will be highlighted here. In the mean time, take a look at the slides (pdf).

Philip Meza is the author of Coming Attractions: Hollywood, High Tech and the Future of Entertainment and the co-author of Strategic Dynamics: Concepts and Cases.