Renewable Energy's Missing Logic
Sunday, August 22, 2010 at 04:42PM 
This editorial ran in the Opinion section of Sunday's Santa Fe New Mexican...click here to read it. I wrote it in response to Staci Matlock's article on Tres Amigas from a couple of weeks ago. You may want to read that one first to fully enjoy the satire here! - Mark.
Imagine that you’re sitting on big piles of sunshine and wind and you’re thinking, “Geez, how am I going to get this stuff to market?” when in rides a tall stranger in a Stetson hat. He comes from humble roots – a “ranch kid” from southern New Mexico, and even though he left the state to attend West Point and become a power player in electricity, his firm handshake and his love of western art convince you that he’s still a New Mexican at heart. “The solution,” says the stranger, looking natural in cowboy boots, “will only cost a few billion dollars.”
The tall stranger in this case is Phil Harris, the man being hailed as the “mastermind” of a proposed electric transmission project called Tres Amigas. Harris’ big idea is to build an electric “superstation” that ties together three giant electricity grids so that gigawatts of power can flow between them. This, according to Harris, will “unlock the potential” of New Mexico’s vast renewable energy resources by enabling us to sell sunshine and wind to California.
Does spending a few billion dollars on a system to ship wind and sunshine around the country strike you as odd? I’m pretty sure Californians have sunshine and wind already, but who knows...maybe they would prefer a nice imported brand. Hello...customer service? Do you have anything in a dry, desert wind with hints of pinon and juniper? Great...put it my bill!
The problem with claiming that multi-billion dollar transmission projects like Tres Amigas, Sun Zia, and High-Plains Express are renewable energy projects is that it isn’t even remotely credible. Big transmission lines are for one purpose only: to support big, central power plants like coal and nuclear. And while we continue to invest in obsolete central-power infrastructure, the rest of the world is charging ahead with far more efficient electricity based on distributed power. With distributed power, we wouldn’t need to build any more big, ugly, expensive, inefficient power stations, and we wouldn’t need all these big, ugly, expensive, inefficient transmission lines to haul power over long distances. Instead, independent developers would build lots of small, nifty, clean, efficient power stations, near the loads where they’re needed. This has huge advantages: efficiency goes to the moon, costs go down, reliability improves, and lots of new players come into electricity markets, bringing innovation and private capital with them.
So I don’t think Harris’ superstation is so super after all, and I sure don’t think it has anything to do with renewable energy. No, my guess is that Tres Amigas is a component of a poorly conceived plan to revive the nuclear power industry here in New Mexico. Harris built and ran a nuclear power plant years ago, and this past April he admitted being approached by developers who want to locate nuclear power plants near his project. And why wouldn’t they? We’ve got a nuclear fuels plant going in down in Eunice, New Mexico, and there’s a big push under way to allow our nuclear waste dump in Carlsbad to take high-level waste. All we need is a few reactors and his multi-billion dollar super thingy, and we’re the new, nuke capital of the U.S.
The debate over whether nuclear power is a good idea is a completely separate issue. The question for now is, why are big power-line developers all claiming that their wires are for hauling sunshine? Instead of hints of pinon and juniper, I’m starting to pick up a strong scent of green goo. Whew...check your boots, fellas! And then put ‘em outside where the sunshine can dry ‘em out, assuming you didn’t sell it all to California already.
Reader Comments (3)
The statement that all developers are being dishonest and that they’re really just trying to trick the public into believing it’s for renewables so that they can really get to build coal and nuclear is simply wrong. For several reasons, I think, but most notably because many of the “merchant” transmission developers really do want to provide access to wind resources. And they want to get paid lots of money for it. They think they’re going to get rich riding the wave of public sentiment for green power. I suspect they have lots of flaws in their business models (for example, they’re attempting to compete against federally-capped rates of return which will limit their ability to charge the exorbitant transmission service fees they seem to think they’ll be able to charge), but I don’t accept a secret, long-term conspiracy to build more coal and nukes. In fact, I’m aware of one reputable wind developer who’s attempting to move forward building the transmission to move about 3,000 MW of wind-generated electricity across New Mexico. They don’t give a crap about nuclear or coal. They build wind and solar. That’s how they make money. And they need transmission to move electricity from this “central” region that is the eastern plains of New Mexico. By the way, know why nobody lives there? So my point again is that central station does not automatically mean fossil-fired (or nuclear). It is perfectly feasible to have a renewably-sourced central station model in this country. Granted, we haven’t run it that way so far, but that’s because We the People were sold – and bought – the line that cheap electricity is our right.
Further, we’ve come to worship God Efficiency as the answer to all of our energy woes. Like some magic elixir sold out of wagons - Cures what ails ya! Between the two forces, the PNM’s of the world worked in close cooperation with their willing accomplices, We the People, to downright mandate exploitation of dirty resources like coal…but really cheap dirty resources! Add in wonders of technologically miraculous leaps in efficiency (like the steam turbine and the transistor that created stupefying increases in resource consumption) and we’re burning through exponentially greater amounts of resources. “See how little energy it uses and how cheap it is, honey?! Golly, we get 12 TV’s now for what that old console thing costs! We can have one in every room, honey! And with that Energy Efficient Mortgage (EEM – a real financial product, mind you) we just got, we got to add two bedrooms and a Bonus Room (whatever the heck that is, but Gosh! It sounds cool)! Good thing we insulated…”
So I’m muddling two points here: First, the central station model for the electric grid does not necessarily imply dirty sources. Second, drives for efficiency exacerbate the problem – they don’t help fix it.
I do want it to be clear to people reading this that I am absolutely for allowing public access to what, theoretically, is already supposed to be a public asset; I just once again am not seeing the necessary connection between dealing with social issues and clean energy issues. Well, except for the obvious fact that, whatever the solution is, it must rely on clean, predictably-consistent, perpetually-renewable sources.
On Tres Amigas, it is indeed a fundamentally flawed project from its conception, in my view. But mostly because it’s being proposed dead in the center of the largest wind resource region in the country. They claim they want to be able to move renewably-generated (wind) electricity between the three US Interconnections (western, eastern, and Texas), but there aren’t any pricing mechanisms to create flow. Further, there’s no way as yet for each of the three grids to move what they already have; what do they need more for? Add in pancaked rates caused by moving across several utilities, and I don’t get it. Finally, I suspect (actually am quite certain) that the developers of the Tres Amigas project have talked with nuclear and coal advocates to “firm” power availability. I think this is asinine and the wrong approach, but I can’t accept that the entire purpose of the project is to build such facilities for two primary reasons: the first is that nuclear facilities are built by utilities (or collaborating groups of utilities) to serve base loads. Said another way, they aren’t built to provide spot market power that could go here or there or that other direction. It’s far more likely (and historically accurate) that when nukes are built, they serve a dedicated base load in a geographically fixed region(s). Coal works the same way. And for those who’ve been paying attention, coal’s getting very difficult to build. Several projects in the west – from Kansas to Nevada - have been, thankfully, indefinitely put on hold due to public resistance to more coal plants. So the ones that operate now serve very specific dedicated loads, and any future ones will do the same. My second reason for being skeptical of the “nuclear motive” is that it makes no sense to me to build a nuclear plant in Missouri to supply California. Why would anyone do that? We the People have the power to demand an end to coal plants; to say we want clean energy. But I’m not sure that obviates the central station model. We (they/whoever) don’t need the Tres Amigas Project to advance nuclear.