Politics from the Palouse to Puget Sound

Monday, August 18, 2008

Liberals block renewable energy

Typical Liberals, Democrats, anti-technology Greens, environmentalists and NIMBY's block wind generation and transmission infrastructure.

This article is from the Wall Street Journal August 18, 2008. Link to article : http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121901822110148233.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks
All credit goes to WSJ.

Wind Jammers
August 18, 2008

In this year's great energy debate, Democrats describe a future when the U.S. finally embraces the anything-but-carbon avant-garde. It turns out, however, that when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats.

To wit, the greens are blocking the very transmission network needed for renewable electricity to move throughout the economy. The best sites for wind and solar energy happen to be in the sticks -- in the desert Southwest where sunlight is most intense for longest, or the plains where the wind blows most often. To exploit this energy, utilities need to build transmission lines to connect their electricity to the places where consumers actually live. In addition to other technical problems, the transmission gap is a big reason wind only provides two-thirds of 1% of electricity generated in the U.S., and solar one-tenth of 1%.

Only last week, Duke Energy and American Electric Power announced a $1 billion joint venture to build a mere 240 miles of transmission line in Indiana necessary to accommodate new wind farms. Yet the utilities don't expect to be able to complete the lines for six long years -- until 2014, at the earliest, because of the time necessary to obtain regulatory approval and rights-of-way, plus the obligatory lawsuits.

In California, hundreds turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. The environmental class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park. "It's kind of schizophrenic behavior," Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. "They say that we want renewable energy, but we don't want you to put it anywhere."

California has a law mandating that utilities generate 20% of their electricity from "clean-tech" by 2010. Some 24 states have adopted a "renewable portfolio standard," while Barack Obama wants to impose a national renewable mandate. But the states, with the exception of Texas, didn't make transmission lines easier to build, though it won't prevent them from penalizing the power companies that fail to meet an impossible goal.

Texas is now the wind capital of America (though wind still generates only 3% of state electricity) because it streamlined the regulatory and legal snarls that block transmission in other states. By contrast, though Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor Ed Rendell adopted wind power as a main political plank, he and Senator Bob Casey are leading a charge to repeal a 2005 law that makes transmission lines slightly easier to build.

Wind power has also become contentious in oh-so-green Oregon, once people realized that transmission lines would cut through forests. Transmissions lines from a wind project on the Nevada-Idaho border are clogged because of possible effects on the greater sage grouse. Similar melodramas are playing out in Arizona, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, West Virginia, northern Maine, upstate New York, and elsewhere.

In other words, the liberal push for alternatives has the look of a huge bait-and-switch. Washington responds to the climate change panic with multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidies for supposedly clean tech. But then when those incentives start to have an effect in the real world, the same greens who favor the subsidies say build the turbines or towers somewhere else. The only energy sources they seem to like are the ones we don't have.


Typical anti-technology hypocritical libs. They are for renewable energy but it cannot be seen or heard. How will electricity be transmitted? Last time I looked, transmission lines are the ONLY way to do this. Do greenies know how electricity is generated and transmitted? Do greenies know that we are using the same electrical transmission lines that were built in the 1950's and hardly any new lines have been built to handle current day electrical loads?

You cannot bury high voltage transmission lines like your buried residential 220V lines that go to your house. It is too hard to maintain and the risks to the people and the grid is too high.

Electricity is the backbone of life here in America.

I guess the greenies do not remember the 2003 blackouts that California was struck with. Electricity from the Pacific North West goes down to California via two high transmission lines. If one of those lines go down, LA and probably the rest of southern California is screwed since the other line cannot handle the load. I doubt the power lines from Nevada/Arizona could handle the load.

In closing, improving an old infrastructure is great and once again the people who would rather let us sit in darkness of the 18th century reveal themselves as liberals. What was the name of that guy who uses 200+ kilowatt hours a month on his house...

No comments: