History has shown the wisdom of government spending for renewable-energy development, write Jim Rossi, an analyst at the Nevada Institute for Renewable Energy Commercialization, and Launce Rake, a freelance writer on environmental issues. "Railroads, interstate highways, the electricity grid, personal computers and the Internet are inventions crucial to our modern economy which were first developed through investments by the federal government," Rossi and Rake point out. These transformative technologies "were too big, complicated or too risky for the private sector to develop all by itself," they write.