Whether cities and the national highway authorities will invest in embedding their roads with electricity strips is another question that kept Hyundai on the sidelines, Mr. Lee said.
Stern dry-docked it on a remote stretch of river with no road access or electricity, stripped it to its hull, and thoroughly rebuilt it, ferrying in all necessary materials, including 12 solar panels for hot water and four propeller-free jet engines that wouldnt disturb the riverbed.
Dozens of desalination plants provide nearly all of the country's drinking water, but the plants are expensive and require huge amounts of electricity to strip the salt from seawater.
The FutureGen plant would have created electricity by stripping coal of harmful carbon dioxide and pumping the gas underground.
Israel will continue to supply water and electricity to the strip.
The money it makes from fertilizer would offset the 72 megawatts of electricity needed to strip out the carbon, compress it and pump it out to sea.
In 1801 the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy had demonstrated the incandescence of platinum strips heated in the open air by electricity, but the strips did not last long.
"We are the first in the world to use the technology this way," he said, admiring the way the tram sucks electricity from power strips buried beneath the road.
I had already heard from friends who had been arrested since the protests began, who told me about how they had been shot with electricity, hit severely, stripped naked, and deprived of sleep.
But in one of Latin America's poorest nations, it is hard for Bolivian officials to talk about progress to the wide portion of the population that continues to live in grinding poverty and feels that entitlements the government once provided in the form of subsidized rates for water and electricity have been stripped away.
Power outages were also widespread in Hyōgo Prefecture, including a localized outage stripping electricity from 900 homes in the Kita-ku ward in Kobe; similar impacts occurred in Osaka Prefecture.
