The last thing renewable energy needs right now are new transmission lines.
This statement is heresy in the green community, but there’s a danger that the increasing focus of green energy advocates on a new nationwide transmission superhighway may undermine the pursuit of near-term renewable energy goals.
People are excited by renewable energy. It’s clean. It’s limitless. It’s local. It’s the one kind of energy source that anyone can harness. Public polls show substantial majorities of Americans in every state favoring more renewable energy.
And states have an abundance of renewable energy assets. A new report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance—Energy Self-Reliant States—shows that every state has the potential to meet its renewable energy goal or mandate and that 3 in 5 states could get all of their electricity from in-state renewable resources. Almost every state could get at least 20 percent of its electricity from rooftop solar photovoltaics (PV) alone.
These renewable assets can be tapped for significant local benefits. A single wind turbine, for example, creates $1 million in economic activity, according to the American Wind Energy Association. And that’s just a generic, utility size turbine. Locally owned wind projects can create twice the jobs and 3 to 4 times the economic impact of absentee owned projects.
The benefits from locally harnessed renewable energy create a feedback loop, building even greater public support for clean energy.
People are not so excited about new high-voltage transmission lines.
Transmission legislation moving through Congress would preempt longstanding state regulatory authority over transmission line approval and siting. The goal is to speed the construction of a $100 to 200 billion interstate transmission superhighway, bringing solar power from the Southwest and wind from the Great Plains to the coasts.
Why is this problematic? Let’s ignore for a moment that most people wouldn’t care to live by a 150 foot tower running through a 200 foot swath of denuded landscape. Or to have their land seized for this purpose by eminent domain.
Many states oppose the new transmission superhighway for two reasons. One, it’s expensive. Two, it undermines efforts to reap the economic rewards of renewable energy self-reliance.
In a New York Times Op Ed, the Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs, Ian Bowles, wrote:
Lawmakers should resist calls to add an extensive and costly new transmission system that would carry electricity from remote areas like Texas, the Great Plains, and Eastern Canada to places with high energy demands like Boston, Chicago, and New York ... Renewable energy resources are found all across the country; they don’t need to be harnessed from just one place.
In May 2009, the governors of 10 East Coast states wrote to senior members of Congress to protest. Requiring their residents and businesses to pay billions of dollars for new transmission lines that would import electricity from the upper Midwest and Southwest into their region “could jeopardize our states’ efforts to develop wind resources ... “ They added, “it is well accepted that local generation is more responsive and effective in solving reliability issues than long distance energy inputs.”
Nine of the 10 Eastern states whose governors signed the May 2009 letter could get over 80 percent of their electricity from in-state renewable resources, according to Energy Self-Reliant States. And local energy also means fewer legal battles over the siting of unsightly transmission towers, a fact that politicians in that region are unlikely to have overlooked.
It’s not just state energy self-reliance and economic benefits hanging in the balance. A recent study released by Duke University’s Climate Change Policy Partnership throws cold water on the renewable energy transmission passion. It found that the proposed interstate transmission links from regions with low-cost electricity (e.g. the Great Plains) to regions with high-cost electricity (e.g. the East Coast) could enable coal power as easily as renewables, with poor results for carbon emission reductions and other environmental goals.
The evidence undermines the conventional wisdom about high-voltage, long-distance transmission and should raise red flags among advocates. To the people in affected states, a new transmission superhighway is costly, anathema to local energy generation, and a potential enabler of coal-fired power. It creates winners (in the sunny Southwest) and losers (in the “import states” on the East Coast).
A victory for interstate transmission may be at the expense of broader public support for renewable energy.
Renewable energy does not have to be harnessed in a few, select areas and shipped across country. And public support for clean energy may hinge on the opposite.
The ubiquity of renewable energy means that the transition to a clean energy economy can also be a transition to a new, local energy future, where the economic and environmental benefits of powering the economy are everywhere the sun shines.
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Comments
Transmission heresy
I'm a person who really believes in local self-generation. I've put a bunch of my employer's money where my mouth is too. That said, I believe that there are all sorts of issues with this approach which show clearly that we need as much renewably generated power as possible from all sources, whether local, upper Midwest, or the desert Southwest.
For one important thing, local utilities are not particularly enamored with self-generation of any kind, and in fact, for our project, a 1.65 mw wind turbine in a campus setting, they wanted us to pay a second demand charge for standby power that represents the entire possible production of our machine. The number per KWH per month they suggested would have made our project a non-starter. We were able to negotiate to a better place, but this issue is cropping up all over the country. The business models for utility companies never contemplated all sorts of self-generation taking income away. In spite of their need to meet renewable mandates, their other fixed costs don't really go down and they need to get income. It can be easy to succumb to a desire to characterize them as villains, but we really need them to be healthy no matter how much local power we can develop.
Anyway...to not capitalize on a resource that's very powerful - upper midwest wind - is to be wasteful. I'm not so sure about the heresy aspect either, as I've only heard Minnesota green power people being against transmission so far. I don't know anyone who is against transmission lines who is not also consuming plenty of power - we fundamentally crave electricity and until we face up to that it's going to be really hard to get anywhere.
Lack of infrastructure in and out of SW Minnesota means that very many of the erected machines aren't generating at any one time because there is inadequate transmission. The utilities that must meet mandates often only need to have generation capacity in place. So, potential renewably generated KWH can sit on the shelf while many in the green community fight transmission upgrades because they might also handle coal-fired generation.
I'm not sure which experts are predicting the numbers your essay suggests, but wind has to be at pretty critical levels to make generation projects pay well enough to be undertaken, and there are nowhere near as many good wind areas as people sometimes imagine.
Regarding other numbers, there is no state in America that can generate all of its electricity renewably. Many states may be able to generate the kilowatt hours they consume in a year - maybe. None can generate them at the exact times they are needed with renewables. Thus - we need a grid, and we need base load power. Until we can figure out how to hydrolyze water at a super-cheap cost so that we can move to a hydrogen based energy economy, base load will be coal, nuclear, hydro, and more and more natural gas.
While cleaner than coal, gas fired generation has negative issues that daisy chain through the economy. A 4-10 MW gas-fired turbine project is so easy to get permitted relative to almost anything else that they are going up all over the place. If this is unchecked, the gas transmission system and cost structure of the commodity will combine to make gas extremely expensive and completely decouple it from its traditional relationship with oil prices. That would be a really harmful outcome for our northern states.
The condition of the partially de-regulated transmission infrastructure is also a factor. A couple of recent major blackouts have been laid at the feet of inadequate renewal and maintenance funding by local and/or regional owners. In the interests of safety and reliability I'd love to see a federally funded and managed transmission infrastructure. Mainly, I'd love to see the system controlled by an entity whose only motivation is service and reliability instead of profit.
Finally, I am absolutely for local self-generation where it makes sense and can be productive. Doing bad projects - those with inadequate resources, whether wind, solar, or whatever - can be harmful to our overall goals for getting to high percentages of renewably generated power. These marginal projects won't make sense until we get to a day where carbon is priced correctly, that is, high enough to contribute to paybacks for local projects, and high enough to make coal generation more expensive.
Our ever increasing demand for cheap power might be a more fundamental problem than generation or transmission in any case. Disturbingly, when our turbine came on line more than one really smart person told me they were excited because we wouldn't have to think about conserving all the time!
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