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On the evening of Feb. 1, a pressure sensing line at the coal-fired Navajo Generating Station near Page, Ariz., froze, ultimately taking out a unit of the power plant, along with 330 megawatts of generation. Over the next 12 hours, the efforts to replace that lost generation were fraught with problems, some cold-related, others not, creating a cascading failure that took out power to 65,000 homes and businesses served by the Salt River Project utility. Meanwhile, over in New Mexico and Texas, the cold hit the natural gas fields and pipelines, resulting in a substantial dip in production during a time when the cold was driving natural gas demand up to unprecedented levels. That, in turn, diminished fuel supply to natural gas-fired power plants which, along with other cold-related issues, caused rolling blackouts. Over the course of three days, 4.4 million people were without power across three states, and gas for heating was in short supply.
It's another reminder of how extreme weather -- be it heat, cold, wind, snow, hurricanes, lightning or wildfires -- can mess not just with the electrical grid, but with almost all aspects of our nation's energy infrastructure, and that climate change, by enhancing the extremity, will only raise the havoc level. In fact, it already has. That's according to a new Department of Energy report about the impact climate change will have on the energy sector, from solar plants to the gas fields. The report also comes with a nifty map that charts some of the impacts that have already occurred (though it doesn't include the 2011 deep freeze), including:
• During the summer of 2010, weak precipitation levels brought down river volumes in the Northwest, leaving dams unable to generate necessary amounts of hydropower. It cost the Bonneville Power Administration $164 million;
• Much the same happened down on Lake Mead that fall, reducing Hoover Dam's generation by 23 percent;
• Over in Illinois, in 2006, the Quad Cities nuke plant had to dial down power production because the water from the Mississippi was too warm to cool the reactors;
• And in Arizona, plans for the Hualapai Valley Solar plant had to be dramatically altered to use an effluent- or air-cooled rather than groundwater-cooled system because of water shortage concerns.
• Drought has made it difficult or costly to acquire the millions of gallons of water needed for hydraulic fracturing oil and gas wells.
Wildfires have taken down major transmission lines leading to blackouts. Millions of air conditioners running at full blast to make extreme heat habitable have overloaded the grid, causing it to fail. Transmission lines sag under heat and load, get tangled in trees, and wipe out power to millions. Many coal, gas and nuclear power plants can't operate efficiently without cool water for cooling -- tepid stuff just won't do. And so on.
As the world warms -- and 2012 is now on record as one of the warmest years in history -- energy, which we use in ever-increasing amounts, will get more and more difficult to extract, generate and deliver. I guess that's fitting, considering the hefty contribution energy extraction, production and consumption has made to climate change.
None of this is super surprising, but what's notable is how the Department of Energy has dived right in, explicitly tying a lot of our energy and grid failures to extreme weather, and implicitly attributing that weather to climate change. Also worth paying attention to are the tools the DOE is offering to help track those impacts, particularly this real-time storm vs. energy infrastructure tracker. It also allows you to go back and watch past storms clobber transmission lines, power plants and the like.
Of course, these tools don't necessarily do anything to fix the problem. But there's something vaguely reassuring, I suppose, in being able to watch our world collapse around us.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News.
]]>Except that in Gallup, the dream is all but dead. According to data recently released by The Equality of Opportunity Project, Jonny Gallup and his peers of geography and income have only about a six percent chance of ever making it into the top income bracket. The odds are even worse for kids in the deep south or in Nome, Alaska, the very least mobile of all places in the nation. The Project's data is part of a paper that links geography to income mobility, and the picture it paints for Western places like Gallup, Albuquerque, Tucson or Phoenix isn't so pretty: For the most part, kids who are born poor in these areas stay poor.
The authors of the paper, two from Harvard and two from Berkeley, including Emmanuel Saez, who's well known for his work on income inequality, correlate higher mobility rates with higher local, state and federal tax expenditures in a specific area. In other words, if taxes are higher in your area, your kids' chances of moving up an income bracket or more will also be higher. It makes sense: The higher the taxes, the more the government has to spend on schools and other support systems that enable folks to lift themselves up by the bootstraps.
But take a look at the map from the report, or better yet, the New York Times' interactive map of the same, and look only at the Western states, and another correlation will become apparent: The counties with the highest mobilities tend to be in the gas patch, the oil fields or in coal mining country. If Jonny Gallup's family's situation was exactly the same as described earlier, but he were to grow up in, say, Williston, N.D. (oil boom) Vernal, Utah, (oil and natural gas) or Gillette, Wyo., (coal and natural gas and oil) his chances of moving up the income ladder would increase fivefold or more. About 30 percent of his low-income peers would end up with an opportunity to park that Hummer in his palatial suburban home's driveway out on the west end of Gillette, where the average income is over $100,000.
In fact, six of the nation's top ten areas for upward mobility are in North Dakota, and the remaining four are in South Dakota, eastern Montana (part of the Bakken oil boom, too) and Nebraska. Wyoming and Utah energy counties are also in the top tier. On the one hand, the reason for this is pretty obvious: An oil or gas boom creates a lot of jobs -- unemployment rates are very low in the oil and gas fields -- that pay quite well and that are accessible to those with only high school diplomas. The average oil and gas field salary is close to $60,000, and it's even higher for a coal miner. If Jonny Gallup started working in the fields right out of high school, and kept at it without getting killed or injured, he would leave his parents in the dust, financially speaking.
If Jonny got a college degree -- paid for, perhaps, by one of many scholarships offered to local students by energy companies, from BP to Arch Coal to Encana to ConocoPhillips -- and then went into management, engineering or even PR in the oil and gas or coal industries (perhaps in a Wyoming or New Mexico college program, funded in part by energy companies, that focuses on energy-related education) he'd be looking at a mean salary of over $100,000. Not too shabby.
At first glance, this seems to fly in the face of the Equality of Opportunity Project's conclusions regarding taxes. After all, Wyoming has no state income tax, North Dakota's is a slightly lower than average 3.99 percent, and Utah's is a moderate 5 percent. Yet Wyoming is among the top three states in the nation for tax revenues per capita. Why? Because relatively hefty taxes on oil, gas, coal and other minerals make up for the lack of a state income tax, and then some. Wyoming collects close to $1 billion per year in energy-related severance taxes, and North Dakota, with one of the highest severance taxes on oil in the nation, collects almost $2 billion. Counties can collect millions in property taxes -- and in some cases, impact fees -- from the energy industry, money that will go towards fixing roads and infrastructure, but also to county services and schools.
Thanks in part to its oil, gas and coal-filled state coffers, Wyoming is able to spend almost $16,000 per student on education, putting it in the top five in the nation and in the top 15 for teacher salaries. North Dakota now has a big budget surplus, too, and will hopefully follow Wyoming's lead. Higher-paid teachers lead to better schools, and better schools provide a launching pad for upward economic mobility.
The resource curse is still a curse. Just ask the folks in Pavillion, Wyo., where oil and gas drilling has contaminated local wells. But in this era of stagnating wages for everyone but corporate CEOs, a widening gap between the rich and the poor, and when our Congress refuses to address the problem by putting a reasonable tax on wealth, the energy fields provide one of the last vehicles for moving up in the world. And in that way, at least, if state and local governments stand up to industry and tax it adequately, the resource curse becomes a blessing.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. Follow him on Twitter @jonnypeace.
]]>The first came from Western Resource Advocates, a Boulder-based group that has been involved in issues such as oil shale, oil and gas drilling, and river preservation since 1989. "The SunZia project is incredibly complex," Gary Graham, Director of the organization's land program, is quoted as saying in the release, "but if we can do it here we can do it anywhere. It opens the floodgates for renewable energy development and a new route toward a clean energy future."
Contrast that to the second release that hit my virtual mailbox, from the Cascabel Working Group, a grassroots organization "concerned with the cultural and ecological integrity of the lower/middle San Pedro Valley" in Arizona: "The BLM has advanced this project without realistically or honestly assessing its actual use, need, or feasibility in order to expedite a wishful policy ... (and) is sacrificing an irreplaceable Arizona environmental gem that governmental agencies – including the BLM itself – corporations, public interest groups, and individuals have worked for more than three decades to protect."
No, this is not some mixup. Both statements refer to the very same project, and both do come from genuine environmental groups, they're just coming from radically different perspectives. You've got your grid-oriented greens on the one hand, who believe that the only way to slow or reverse climate change is by attacking it on a large scale, with big wind farms, big solar plants and big power lines to ship it across long distances. And on the other, the grassroots groups who feel that sacrificing local ecosystems to fight climate change isn't the answer. It's the type of green on green scuffle we're likely to see more of in the near future as the Obama administration fast-tracks long-distance, high voltage power lines across the West in order to shore up the aging grid and enable more renewable energy development.
SunZia -- one of seven lines on that list, five of which are in the West -- is a merchant line, meaning it's being developed by a private party, the SouthWestern Power Group, not a utility, and was originally intended to carry natural gas-generated power from the group's proposed plant in Bowie, Ariz., westward. But the gas plant has yet to be built, and developers saw opportunities further to the east, in the wind-rich area of central New Mexico, where a lack of transmission capacity has left potential wind farms "stranded." If it's built, the SunZia will enable the development of more New Mexico wind that could be sold to Arizona or California utilities (Salt River Project, which serves most of metro Phoenix, is an investor in the line). Thus the enthusiasm from Western Resource Advocates and others.
But stringing 500 miles of wire across a place like southern Arizona and New Mexico and a dozen different jurisdictions is bound to be strewn with hurdles. The Cascabel folks, who have taken up opposition to SunZia as their prime raison d'etre, have attacked the project on a number of fronts. Of most concern is that under the BLM's preferred alternative, the line will first cross the ecologically-rich San Pedro River, then follow it for 45 miles, which would not only be an eyesore but also cause problems for birds. The Wilderness Society, which tends to occupy a middle ground on transmission, also opposes the preferred route, primarily because it goes through the San Pedro Valley. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., has also joined the opposition.
And the San Pedro will pay, says a Cascabel report authored by Mick Meador, for a transmission line that will likely carry as much non-green power as from green sources. The Bowie Power Station, for which the line was initially planned, is still on the table, and other gas plants sit near the line's path.
This is a common catch with so-called green transmission lines: Though they may enable wind or solar to be developed and transported, no one can guarantee the nature of the power flowing through them because of the nature of the grid (interconnected like a web through which power finds the easiest path to its consumers), and because federal regulations require transmission lines to allow access to any type of energy. There's also the question of need. Arizona may be able to reach its renewable portfolio standard of 15 percent without importing New Mexico wind power. California, meanwhile, requires that 75 percent of its renewables -- which must make up one-third of its energy mix -- come from in-state sources or projects that can hook directly into the California grid, which SunZia would not do. Of course, if there is no need, there will be no "tenants" signing up for the line, and no money to build the thing.
The BLM could make a final decision on the line as early as August.
Meanwhile, the BLM launched the process that will likely lead to a similar debate further north. In early July, the agency released the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the TransWest Express, another high-voltage transmission line, also on the fast-track list, that would move wind power from Wyoming westward. The 700-mile line is being developed by the Anschutz Company, and it would start in Sinclair, Wyo., just a stone's throw from the same company's massive proposed wind farm. It will be a direct current line, meaning little or no opportunity for other power generators to interconnect along the route, easing concerns that it will be filled up with fossil fuel-generated power. But it will go directly across Utah, with the potential of slicing across sensitive landscapes on the way.
The floodgates are indeed opening, albeit incrementally -- it may be years before either of these projects are actually built. The question is, what will be washed away in the process?
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News.
]]>That means Durango is a lot like Jackson, Aspen, Boulder and dozens of other chi-chi Western towns: Rents are high and wages are low. It's not uncommon around here for a family's rent to suck up half the monthly paycheck, and most people can forget about buying a place within the city limits. If you want to live here, either bring a lot of extra cash or be prepared to commute from some neighboring town.
Even in those places with less cachet, affordability is also elusive. The West has the greatest disparity between incomes and housing costs in the nation, according to the National Association of Realtors' affordability index. Even Boulder, with its high-paying jobs in academia, science and high-tech fields, is the twelfth least-affordable town in the nation, thanks to little bungalows that sell for a half-million bucks. As the housing market recovers from the bust, the situation will only get worse.
Here in Durango, though, we have a pressure-release valve of sorts -- sprawl. The town itself is nicely hemmed in by hills on two sides, and a big floodplain on another, which to some degree guarantees reasonable land use, even in the absence of good regulations. But one need only drive over the hills to find acres of private, developable land. Much of it was once in agriculture, but a building boom from the late 1980s until the mid-2000s, encouraged by lack of land-use planning, left it spattered with a hodgepodge of ranchettes, trailers and subdivisions.
Some might see this as a mess, but it's a relatively affordable one. The same $300,000 that would get you a tiny old fixer-upper in town will buy a brand-new home in the development just over the ridge, a sweaty bike ride to downtown, true, but still within the school district and town limits. With considerably less, you can purchase a trailer 10 miles outside of town. It's hardly ideal, but Durango has stumbled into a housing situation that's far more sustainable than the 45-mile treacherous, mountain pass drive to affordability in Jackson, Wyo., for example, or the epic trek up-valley to Aspen that for some workers exceeds 60 miles.
Durango's "solution" highlights the quandary that many communities face, in which it appears they must choose between affordable housing and the preservation of the environment, open space and scenery on which the community's very identity depends. Sometimes this conflict is indirect, such as when a town puts up land-use codes that are so strict, it becomes virtually impossible to build in an affordable way. Other times it's blatant -- in Jackson, affordable housing development proposals have been shot down over what are called environmental concerns.
It's time we move beyond these conflicts. After all, the current situation, in which the working class must "drive until they qualify" for a mortgage, and then commute long-distances to their jobs without the benefit of public transportation, is hardly environmentally friendly. Think of the resources used by, and the carbon and particulates emitted from, that line of cars heading into and out of Boulder, Aspen, Jackson and Telluride every day.
That's not to say that the Boulders and Jacksons of the world should scrap their land-use codes and start putting up trailer parks in the surrounding open space. The sprawl solution to housing is ultimately no more sustainable than the commuter-class fix.
Perhaps there is a middle way. Instead of pushing the working class out into the exurbs or over the pass, why not pull them inward, into the heart of the community where they belong?
It's possible, through high-density development in the urban envelope, taller buildings with income-restricted housing atop commercial spaces, and maybe some clustered development on the town's fringes. Sure, the community you're living in might lose a bit of that prized "frontier town" feel. But as the lack of affordable housing makes clear, those frontier days have long been over.
Jonathan Thompson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News. He is a contributing editor for the magazine in Durango, Colorado.
]]>Sizzling, blistering, brutal: Whatever adjective you use to describe the West's recent heat wave, it's not strong enough. Normally cool places like Portland and Seattle hit the 90s. Phoenix soared above 104 every day in June, reaching 119 once, and a few nights the low was a baking 91 degrees. Rattlesnakes huddled in garages, while non-reptilians submerged themselves in whatever water they could find, invaded the high country, swarmed air-conditioned malls, or else ran sub-seven-minute miles in Death Valley wearing Darth Vader suits. Seriously. Jon Rice, who does the Darth Valley run every summer, was probably the only one posting a 6:36 mile when it reached 129 degrees. Yet there were plenty of others in the Valley under sizzling skies -- hotels full of extreme-weather tourists, mostly from Europe. While Death Valley National Park officials appreciate all the attention, they're not too keen on a popular activity: They've asked people to kindly stop trying to fry eggs on the pavement or the Salt Playa at Badwater.
Could that heat and drought, along with suburbs in the woods and unhealthy forests, be responsible for the devastation wrought by this season's wildfires? Of course not! Forest jihadis are to blame. At least according to the American Center for Democracy's website, which noted that Al Qaeda's online magazine once ran an article titled, "It Is of Your Freedom to Ignite a Firebomb." The Center asks, "How many Tzarnaevs (the Boston Marathon bombers) are hiding in Colorado's woods?" A lot, if the Center's Bill Scott is correct. "In military terms, Colorado is a target-rich environment -- an arsonist's dream come true," he writes. Scott vividly imagines a terrorist flying a Cessna 172 over a tinderbox forest, throwing flares and igniting a massive fire near a town hemmed in by cliffs on three sides, where the feds are stretched too thin to fight the deadly fire that follows. Replace the Cessna-flying terrorist with lightning, and Scott's nightmare is not too far-fetched.
It's hard to find anyone (aside from forest jihadis) who revels in the drought and heat, which are killing crops – and, tragically, firefighters. Boat launches at a major reservoir on the Colorado River, Lake Powell, which appears headed for record-low levels, remain high and dry. New Mexico state park officials say visitor numbers have evaporated by as much as 40 percent, partly because of "repetitious stories about the rivers and reservoirs going dry." (Apparently, journalists, not the climate, are to blame.) Instead of rowing through whitewater, commercial raft guides end up outside their rafts, pushing client-laden boats through too-shallow-to-float waters. Yet there's one group that's thriving despite the low flows: inner-tubers. As soon as the paltry spring runoff subsided enough for safety, they swarmed the rivers, wearing giant tubes and tiny bikinis, flaunting full-frontal sunburns and Pabst Blue Ribbons and thereby humiliating professional raft guides and their frustrated customers. But it took a deluge, not drought, to get Todd Hoberecht to float down 11th Avenue in Bozeman, Mont., on an inner tube. Hoberecht told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle that he was having a bad day when a rainstorm inspired him: "I always remembered: When things are bad, the best thing to do is just 'wahoo' and paddle hard," he said. "I ran home and just got my inner tube and went for it. ... If He gives you rain, you might as well go tubing."
And if you're given fish, you might as well catch them. That must have been what anglers thought when they started hauling big tiger muskies out of a warm water pond in West Salt Lake City. About 100 of the popular sport fish were caught, reports The Salt Lake Tribune, before one fisherman called the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources to inquire if there were any fishing regulations at the ponds. Unfortunately, yes: The ponds are part of the state hatchery, and fishing is illegal. But since there were no signs saying so, the anglers won't be prosecuted.
Montana's Beaverhead County is getting state emergency funds for a natural disaster. But it's neither wildfire, nor flooding; it's the Rainbow Gathering, which has drawn some 6,000 hippie revelers and thus far occasioned 49 visits to the emergency room, according to the Montana Standard. Meanwhile, Big Game Forever, an anti-wolf group in Utah, also received state funds -- some $300,000 last year -- but isn't saying exactly how it was spent, to the dismay of some Democratic lawmakers, says The Salt Lake Tribune. The group, which wants the feds to remove Endangered Species Act protections for wolves -- something likely to happen even without taxpayer-funded lobbying -- is slated to receive another bundle of state cash this year. Elsewhere, a 6-year-old boy from Wasilla, Alaska, perhaps inspired by former presidential candidate Mitt Romney's dog, rode on top of his family's minivan for three miles before falling off. He had apparently done it before and was not seriously injured.
Guest author Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor of High Country News.
Tips and photos of Western oddities are appreciated and often shared in this column. Write email@example.com.
]]>Arizona's Corporation Commission, the state's public utilities overseer, requires investor-owned utilities to allow customers to use power generated by their solar panels or wind turbines to offset their power bills, a policy known as net metering. Arizona's net metering policy is considered among the best in the nation by solar advocates, and is credited with making Arizona one of the leading residential solar states in the nation.
But APS says that the current policy's pricing structure gives rooftop solar folks a free ride on the grid, which they rely on when the sun's not shining, leaving other ratepayers to pick up the tab. So, soon after not-so-sympathetic-to-solar Republicans swept the ACC elections last November, APS started making noise about asking for the policy to be rescinded or altered. Solar industry advocates and a group of Republican free marketeers, led by Barry Goldwater, Jr., accused APS of trying to kill the industry and fortify their monopoly status. On July 12, APS submitted their proposal, [pdf] which will be considered in coming months.
APS's proposal, if ultimately accepted by the ACC, would diminish the incentive for folks to generate their own solar power in the sunniest state. APS says it would also be more fair by shifting the burden of paying for infrastructure from non-solar ratepayers, to those with solar panels on their roofs. The proposed changes would not affect current residential solar generators: Everyone currently in the system, and applying to be on net metering by October of this year, would remain under the current net metering system until 2034 (meaning the proposal alone may spur a rush on rooftop solar applications in the next few months).
APS ended up asking the ACC to choose one of two options:
• keep the net metering program in place, but require new residential solar customers to be on a time-of-use rate plan -- with a "demand charge" based on a home's maximum electricity demand -- for the electricity they get from the grid; or,
• go with the so-called bill credit, in which APS would pay the rooftop solar customer a market-based rate for the power they generate.
In order to better understand what this would mean to the various pocketbooks involved, I used sample utility bills provided by APS for a customer -- we'll call him Solar Sam -- who uses 1,600 kilowatt hours (kWh) per month in the summer, and 900 kWh in the winter. His monthly bill in the summer, if he had no solar, would be $275, and $115 in the winter.* Solar Sam's rooftop photovoltaic array generates 1,000 kWh of solar during summer months, and 750 kWh during winter, which is fairly typical.
Under the current net metering system, the 1,000 kWh of rooftop solar power generated by Sam's array directly offsets 1,000 kWh of power he pulls off the grid, regardless of the time. So Sam gets billed for just 600 kWh during the summer months, bringing that $275 bill down to just $92. Throw in the winter usage and average it out over the year, and Solar Sam can slash his electric bill by some $1,600 per year.
APS's proposed net metering option would be a significant tweak. Sam's electricity rates would vary during the course of the day, depending on overall demand on the grid. So if he generated 10 kWh during non-peak hours, it might only offset 5 kWh used during peak demand times. Plus, he would pay a "demand charge" based on the maximum amount of power he uses during a single month. "Basically, it's how much you are leaning on the grid," says Chuck Miessner, Pricing Manager for APS, and is usually proportional to the size of a house (and its air conditioning system and the number of electronics). Solar Sam's monthly summertime bill under this regime, depending on how careful he is about when he cranks the AC, would be $157. His yearly savings would be just $900.
The bill credit option would be an even bigger bummer for Solar Sam. He'd be billed regular rates for all of the electricity he pulls from the grid -- that same $275. Then, APS would give him a market-based credit for that 1,000 kWh of solar he generated. The unknown here is the market rate, which would change each year. APS is aiming for 4 cents, based on forward prices at the Palo Verde trading hub. That's less than one-third of what current net metering folks get, and half of what the utility pays for utility scale solar. It brings Solar Sam's final summer bill to $235 (or $184 if he were to switch to a time-of-use rate plan). Total yearly savings are just $414.
Will either option stop Arizona's budding rooftop revolution in its tracks? It's tough to say. If Solar Sam's hankering to get energy from the sun is motivated purely by finances, then either of the proposed systems are likely to dampen his mood. After all, it would take anywhere from two to four times longer than under the current system to pay for the upfront cost of the solar array. If Sam's more interested in a bit of energy security, or doing his part to clean up the air, then the changes may be irrelevant.
And how about all of those non-solar ratepayers? If you assume that all of Solar Sam's savings**, along with those of everyone else with rooftop solar, are being added to non-solar ratepayers' bills, then those other ratepayers are forking out an extra $29 million*** per year. That sounds pretty hefty until you consider that it's spread out between more than 1 million non-solar customers****. If another 18,000 Sams go solar in Arizona, the new proposals would save those non-solar ratepayers between $13 and $22 per year.
The choice is now in the ACC's lap: Should they slash solar customers' savings by up to $1,200 per year, and risk slowing the state's solar standing? Or add an extra $18 or so to non-solar ratepayers' bills, and continue to offer strong incentives for plastering parking lots and rooftops with PV arrays? Or will they go with something in between? We'll keep you posted.
* This is well-above what the average Arizonan uses or pays per month because, says Chuck Miessner, APS Pricing Manager, people with rooftop solar in Arizona tend to live in larger homes and gobble more electricity than average.
** I'm making this assumption only for computation's sake. In fact, it's much more complicated than that, and Solar Sam's rooftop panels are also saving the utility and its ratepayers some costs.
*** This number is based on multiplying Solar Sam's annual savings by the 18,000 APS residential customers with rooftop solar. The costs are shared by just over 1 million non-solar customers. Keep in mind that this cost transfer won't change for the next 20 years, since current rooftop solar folks will be grandfathered in under either APS proposal.
**** Even if there were 50,000 residential solar arrays under the current system, the non-solar ratepayers would only be saddled with about $80 extra per year, or less than $8 per month.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. His Twitter handle is @jonnypeace.
]]>Every summer, bp, née British Petroleum, releases its Statistical Review of World Energy, a big fat pile of data detailing the world's energy production, consumption and trade. Energy geeks revel in it. Nowhere else can one find so much up-to-date information in such an easy to peruse package. Yet the data are also terrifying. They reveal that with each passing year, more and more fossil fuels are dug and sucked from the earth and then burned up in cars and power plants and homes, spewing out greenhouse gases and other pollutants. For those concerned with the fate of the planet, the Statistical Review is the quantification of imminent doom.
True, squint hard enough and you can pick out a few glimmers of hope from the document. The U.S., for example, is using 10 percent less oil than it did just eight years ago. Some of this is due to the economic collapse, but at least as much credit goes to high oil prices, a phenomenon that's not likely to go away (for reasons we'll get into). And we're also using some 20 percent less coal than we did a decade ago. Again, a bad economy contributed, but so have the promise of stricter emissions rules and cheap natural gas (more than half of the decrease in coal consumption has been offset by an increase in natural gas consumption domestically). Even better, we've increased our consumption of renewable energy by 170 percent. The world's fattest energy hog finally may be easing up on the fossil fuel trough.
But it's not nearly enough. The Statistical Review reminds us over and over again that when it comes to energy use and its impacts, we can't be isolationists: We're in this with the rest of the globe. That can be disturbing. Over the last decade, the planet's teeming masses have collectively increased energy consumption at a startling rate. China and India have led the feeding frenzy, along with a host of developing countries in Africa and elsewhere. This is not, despite what some U.S. greens might want you to believe, the result of exploding populations. It's just that larger portions of those populations are getting access to energy -- China's primary energy use jumped 150 percent even as the population grew by only five percent -- thereby improving their quality of life. But it comes at a cost. A bulk of that new energy is coming not from wind turbines or solar panels, but fossil fuels. Over the last decade:
• global oil consumption increased by 14 percent;
• natural gas consumption shot up by 31 percent; and,
• the world's coal consumption increased by 54 percent(!).
Carbon emissions have shot up accordingly, further exacerbating climate change everywhere, while in parts of China pollution from coal-burning has reduced life expectancy by as much as energy access may have increased it. And even though the so-called War on Coal may be making headway here at home, it hasn't even been felt on a global level. Even relatively green Germany is burning more coal these days.
And don't expect energy consumption or fossil fuel use to level out anytime soon. While China, India and most of Africa will never guzzle as much energy as the U.S. on a per capita basis -- there's simply not enough fuel to support such gluttony -- we can't blame them for, nor should we try to stop them from, reaching a level of per capita energy consumption on par with, say, Japan, or Germany (about half of the U.S. level). Yet even getting there will mean a doubling of overall energy use for China, and a tripling for India. Some of this will surely come from cleaner sources: The globe has tripled its renewable energy use over the last decade, and the trend is likely to continue, but the contribution is limited by the fact that renewables still make up less than 5 percent of the global energy mix. Nuclear, though it emits no carbon, is faltering on a global level -- consumption is off about 12 percent from 2006 levels -- and the U.S.'s abundantly cheap, slightly cleaner-burning-than-coal natural gas is still pretty much confined to North America. That leaves coal and oil as the popular fuels for the next decade, at least.
And that brings us back to the U.S., and the West. Poring over the Statistical Review, one can't help but feel a certain tension in the global energy world between the burgeoning demand from far-flung parts of the globe and the abundance of supply in the U.S. Asia and Europe are eying the coal from Montana and Wyoming's Powder River Basin, and are surely even more covetous of our cheap natural gas. It seems only a matter of time before our coal and natural gas flow across the world as freely as oil does now, shaking up both the domestic and international energy market.
Indeed, it's oil's status as a purely global commodity that has kept prices here sky-high, even as demand has dropped and drilling in North Dakota has gone wild -- global demand simply overwhelms domestic market forces. And despite all the talk of the current oil-bearing shale bonanza leading to oil independence, we're nowhere close to ending our need for oil imports. We pump about 9 million barrels of oil from domestic wells each day. Yet we and our cars and trucks and planes guzzle 18.6 million barrels per day, making us the world's biggest oil guzzler by far.
Now that's a scary set of numbers.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. His Twitter handle is @jonnypeace.
]]>Plenty of Western ranchers and farmers could use that sort of cash, especially in these days of extended drought, when the ditches run dry after the first cutting of hay. But Stehr lives in Germany, outside Hamburg, and his wind-powered windfall is the offspring of that nation's Energiewende -- inadequately translated as "energy transition" -- that encourages renewable energy and is phasing out nuclear power.
I and 17 other European and American journalists visited Stehr in June as part of a weeklong Energiewende immersion tour spearheaded by the Transatlantic Media Network. My mission was to try to answer the question I asked in this space a few months back: Can the West have its own Energiewende? Now, after delving into the details of Germany's plan, and listening to all of the challenges, which are not unlike ours, I've got an answer: Yes.
From the many glowing reports on the Energiewende from journalists on this side of the Atlantic (including, I confess, my own), we might be led to believe that Germany's progress on renewable energy is out of our reach: They're simply greener than us, more inclined toward allowing government interference, with a political will to combat climate change that we lack. We drive Hummers; they prefer tiny Twingos. We love energy-gulping air conditioning; they don't even use fans. We have the Tea Party; they have the Green Party.
There's some truth to this. But as one of our hosts emphasized, "Germany is not a renewables Disneyland." What he meant was that as successful as their energy transition has been -- on one day in June, solar and wind accounted for 60 percent of Germany's power production -- it hasn't come without pain, conflict or, for that matter, a healthy dose of coal.
Germany's Energiewende has two parts. One is the phaseout of nuclear power, which has been in the works for some time, but was accelerated in 2011. The second is the move toward renewables, driven primarily by the feed-in tariff (FIT), which guarantees renewable power producers a premium price for their goods for 20 years, along with automatic access to and priority in the grid. The FIT turns everyone from the apple farmer with a turbine to the apartment-dweller with a solar panel into his own mini power company with a long-term, potentially lucrative contract with the utilities. To fund the tariff, a renewable surcharge is tacked onto power customers' bills. Now, Germany has 30 gigawatts of installed solar -- about five times what the entire U.S. has -- a good portion of which is individually owned. The FIT is almost wholly responsible for that.
Before you scoff at the potential for such a program in the U.S., consider this: Just days ago Los Angeles implemented its own feed-in tariff (though limited in scope). And deep red Arizona has long had a robust net metering system in place, which is similar to a feed-in tariff. Meanwhile, the federal production tax credit has helped the U.S. install a whopping 60 gigawatts of wind capacity. Clearly, we in the West are open to such programs, as long as they don't raise our electricity rates too much.
Well, guess what? Germans feel the same way. Individuals, cooperatives and companies receiving the FIT, like those on net metering in Arizona, don't pay infrastructure fees for using the grid, transferring that cost -- critics say unfairly -- to the ratepayers. The debate sounds remarkably similar to the one going on in Arizona right now. So some German politicians are working to change the pricing structure on the tariffs or even eliminate them altogether. That's despite the fact that the FIT is really not the main driver of energy prices. Corporate welfare is: In order to keep large industry -- which is thriving in Germany -- from fleeing, the biggest energy users don't have to pay the renewable surcharge, pushing that cost onto individual customers. And the pricing scheme is such that when wholesale power prices drop due to so much renewable power going into the grid, the ratepayers actually pay higher retail prices (meaning the utilities reap higher and higher profits). These are mistakes from which we in the West can learn.
Germany's grid, too, faces many of the same problems as ours: It was built around a centralized fossil fuel and nuclear system, and needs more "flexibility" in order to efficiently back up all that wind and solar. Natural gas plants that would provide that backup are being mothballed because they are economically infeasible (since they only run a few hours each month). Transmission lines are needed to link offshore wind turbines in the north with industrial centers in the south and west, just as we need new transmission to get wind power from Wyoming to California. Yet just as is the case here, grid expansion in Germany -- along with big wind farms -- runs into local opposition over aesthetic and environmental concerns.
Perhaps most worrisome is that even as Germany beefs up its renewable portfolio, it's also burning more coal. Last year, 45 percent of its electricity was from coal, slightly higher than here. This is not solely, as some believe, the result of shutting down nuclear plants. It's because coal -- especially lignite or brown coal -- is dirt cheap in Germany. Lignite is mined royalty-free and has a strong lobby pushing it. Meanwhile, natural gas prices in Europe are rocketing upward. Naturally, utilities are turning to the cheaper fuel and away from natural gas.
All of which is to say that in the end, Germany's path to a carbon free future is filled with as many cultural, political and economical obstacles as ours. Yet they are overcoming many of those obstacles, thanks in part to what I think of as American traits: innovation, locally-owned energy, and seizing opportunities to make money in areas like energy efficiency. That means that we should be able to accomplish all that they have and then some, thanks to our abundant resources. The West has more potential for wind power than Germany, and far, far more solar resources (Germany is basically on par with Alaska when it comes to generating power from the sun). Just imagine how much electricity the Southwest could generate with 30 GW of solar capacity. We have more rooftops on which to put solar panels, along with plenty of vacant land. And we're in the midst of a shale gas boom, which allows us to discard all that coal for slightly cleaner-burning natural gas.
What we have in resources, though, we're lacking in a coherent and focused energy policy, one that sets tangible goals and provides the tools to reach them. It so happens that just as I was heading over to Germany for the energy tour, the Western Governors Association released its 10 year "Energy Vision" for this region. It's yet another "all of the above" energy plan, encouraging renewables along with everything else, including oil, coal and especially natural gas. To its credit, it gives a passing nod to net metering as a useful tool along with the production tax credit, but misses out on one of the most important aspects of Germany's incentives: long-term certainty and grid access. Even the most generous incentive is worthless if it will disappear next year, or if you can't ship your power to market.
Just ask Peter Stehr, the fruit and wind farmer. As he filled us up with cider, he assured us that he's no environmentalist -- he built the wind turbines solely for the 20 years of assured income. Then he bid us aufwiedersehen and we headed down the road, only to pass a giant coal-fired power plant so new it hasn't even started operating yet. It was a reminder of how tough a row we have to hoe in shifting away from our carbon-intensive energy system, both at home and abroad.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. His Twitter handle is @jonnypeace.
]]>Yet, even way out here I can't escape the devastation that is being wrought back home. Yesterday we were standing on a corner on the Upper East Side, trying to figure out where to eat, when an archetypical New Yorker -- accent and swagger and all -- offered his help (despite my New Yorker friend's admonition to "never, ever make eye contact," folks here are quite friendly).
"You visiting from somewhere?" he asked. "Where you from?"
"Colorado," we said.
"Oh, so sad," he said. "I'm so sorry."
He wasn't sorry about the fact that what passes for an art museum in my hometown might include airbrushed paintings of Hollywood Indians and sunsets, or that our idea of ethnic food includes ambrosia salad from way over in Utah. He was sorry about the fires that are currently gobbling up forests and homes across the West.
The fires, themselves, are the bad news, of course. But the fact that the average Joe on the East Coast knows so much about the fires is bad, too. That means that national news outlets are running image after image of flaming catastrophe, and each time the scene is repeated, someone else is canceling his Western vacation. Our economy, still fragile from the Great Recession, just can't afford that kind of blow.
I wrote recently about the surprisingly positive economic impacts of wildfire on some sectors of the local economy. But the effects of fire -- and drought in general -- are almost purely negative when it comes to tourism. Travelers are no more enthusiastic about vacationing in a burning state than they are eager to hang out on the beach in a hurricane. No matter that the worst fires might be confined to one corner of a great big state: In the minds of much of the outside public, the entire state is on fire.
And that hurts. Last year's Waldo Canyon Fire near Colorado Springs was the state's worst ever, charring 350 homes (the 2010 Fourmile Canyon Fire near Boulder had been the worst, with 168 homes burned, before that). During and after the fire, the lodger's tax -- a good reflection of the health of tourism -- plummeted. July's revenues were down 18 percent from the previous year, with August and September down 5 and 8 percent, respectively. Local economic development officials estimated that small businesses lost some $8.6 million in potential sales as a result of the fire.
Waldo Canyon didn't hold its worst-fire-ever distinction for long. This summer's Black Forest Fire, which still smolders as I write, burned more than 400 homes, also near Colorado Springs. At the same time, the Royal Gorge Fire burned a stone's throw away from that major tourist attraction. Forests also went up in flames to the east, west and north of Santa Fe, N.M., one of the region's major tourist meccas; the 150,000-acre Las Conchas Fire of 2011 was blamed for bad business in Santa Fe for the next several months. Las Conchas was the biggest fire in the state until last year's Whitewater Baldy Complex Fire in southern New Mexico dwarfed it and dealt a severe blow to tourism down there. Now the Silver Fire, also in the south, is threatening the small town of Kingston. A fire is burning near Yosemite National Park, and people all over are changing their summer travel plans.
My hometown of Durango, Colo., which relies on tourism for about one-third of its economy, has thus far dodged the bullet this summer. But its air is smoky, thanks to fires burning everywhere else, particularly in eastern Utah, and it holds the stigma of the other fires in the state, especially Black Forest. Back in 2002, when the Missionary Ridge fire raged for a month near town, ridership on the tourist train dropped by 30 percent and Mesa Verde National Park saw about 25 percent fewer visitors than the year before. If the smoke isn't enough to scare folks away, the drought might just do it. The Animas River, a favorite for commercial rafting trips, is running at less than 500 cubic feet per second and dropping. The median for this time of year is about 2,500 cfs.
The good news is that tourists are generally amnesiacs, and the drag on the tourist economy during fires doesn't seem to last that long afterwards. But as one devastatingly dry summer is piled upon another, and mega-fires become the norm, not the anomaly, one has to wonder when that amnesia is going to fade away. It's not hard to imagine a day when travelers simply avoid the West during the ever-lengthening fire season. Sad, indeed.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. His Twitter handle is @jonnypeace.
]]>"I'm not sure if this is a drought," said Roger Fragua, of Jemez Pueblo and former Deputy Director of the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, as he introduced the conference the next morning, "or our new reality." The attendees could think of the scorching planet in the abstract for the moment, at least, as we were all ensconced in the cool, opulent Sandia Pueblo Resort and Casino -- the pueblo is not an energy tribe, but does okay with its own extractive industry, namely mining the pockets of gamblers.
The drought, and climate change, as both opportunity and threat, were recurring themes throughout the conference. But a much bigger menace, it seemed, was the sequester, and a general movement toward austerity on a federal level, which will deal a big blow to tribal budgets even as native populations grow. To face that threat, and to become financially independent, it was generally agreed that tribes must develop their resources, be they wind, coal, oil or sunshine.
Indian lands hold around 20 percent of the nation's extractable fossil fuels, and 10 percent of its renewable resources. Yet only 1.3 percent of all fossil fuel production in the U.S. happens on tribal land; the figure for renewables is probably far lower. It's clearly not because tribes don't want to develop their resources, it's just that they're in an awkward position: Many lack the human capacity or capital to develop their own resources, leaving them, potentially, to be exploited by outside corporations and the feds, as has been done for decades. The bureaucratic red tape around resource development on tribal lands is especially thick, and tax incentives for renewable projects carry less weight for tribal projects because tribes aren't taxed.
Tex Hall, Chairman of the Mandan, Hidatsa & Arikara tribes, wearing a straw cowboy hat and a pony tail, holds a bit of rockstar status for getting past that. His tribe's land -- situated atop the famous Bakken shale formation -- has 800 oil wells with 30 rigs currently drilling, pushing it to the top of the oil-producing tribes in the nation (he emphasizes that his tribe has strictly regulated drillers, and fines them substantially for violations). The Navajo Nation has been an oil giant for decades, and President Ben Shelly made waves at the conference by demanding that the red tape be ripped down, threatening to leave the event if the assembled group of leaders didn't come up with a plan to streamline the permitting process for resource development in Indian Country.
Shelly's tribe derives a huge portion of its budget from fossil fuels, including some $48 million from oil and gas and $55 million from coal. "We are dependent upon coal," Shelly says, and the feds created that dependency by foisting oil and coal leases on them in the first place. Now he says wants time to wean his tribe off the fuel by, yes, investing in it. He's interested in buying the Navajo coal mine, which fuels the Four Corners Power Plant in northwest New Mexico. The purchase would help keep both the mine and plant -- providing a total of 800 jobs, mostly held by Navajos -- alive, and would entail building a rail line south from the mine to the main BNSF line to enable the mine to sell coal to distant markets. Shelly's also fighting to keep the Navajo Generating Station near Page, Ariz. going because of the revenue and jobs -- critical given the 50+ percent unemployment rate -- it and the mine that supplies it provide.
Which is not to say that everyone at the conference was in a fossil fueled frenzy. A handful of gadflies were on hand to call out Shelly and his coal boosterism. Vernon Masayesva, a former Hopi Chairman and founder of the Black Mesa Trust, was there, along with Milton Bluehouse, Sr., former Navajo President. Both asked tough questions about the environmental and cultural impacts of coal. Glenn Manygoats, an engineer from Flagstaff, described the activists' plan to replace Navajo Generating Station with a combined cycle, solar and natural gas power plant, with wind and hydropower backup, using natural gas from the Southern Ute Tribe's wells. Jemez Pueblo, over which one of New Mexico's big fires now looms, is making a second, more ambitious attempt, to build a utility-scale solar plant after the first one flopped. It's relying on help from the Albuquerque-based Southwest Indian Polytechnic Institute and its students, including some from Jemez.
Perhaps they can use the radical turbine designed by Johann Steinlechner, who stood out in the bolo-tied, dark-suited crowd with his big black cowboy hat, a Western sort of polo shirt with a graphic of a horse herd trampling across it and a thick Austrian accent as incongruous as the wing tips he was wearing. He retired at 40, went on a tour of casinos, "living the high life," until a friend was killed in Iraq "for da oil," inspiring him to delve into the wind industry. Now he's invented a giant turbine that lies flat -- from the outside it resembles a parking garage, while the turbine looks like a giant roulette wheel -- reducing bird kills and aesthetic concerns.
For the time being, though, it appears that drill rigs will outnumber wind turbines in Indian Country. T. Greg Merrion, President of Merrion Oil & Gas, seemed ready to burst from his skin with enthusiasm over the riches in the mostly untapped Mancos Shale formation that underlies a huge swath of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona and several Indian reservations. Though most of the land in question is already pocked with thousands of conventional oil and gas and coalbed methane wells, the hunt for Mancos Shale oil will require horizontal drilling and "very very large fracking jobs," with each $5 to $10 million well requiring as much as 1 to 2 million pounds of sand and 5 to 10 million gallons of water. This is no Bakken, said Merrion, but "our future looks bright."
As he said this, golf carts rolled by outside the wall-sized window of the room, along a path carved from the emerald green grassy hilltop. Sprinklers sprayed a glimmering stream into the smoky air all day long, in a desperate attempt to keep the desert at bay.
In one of those unscripted moments that such conferences can produce, Shelly worried that global warming and rising sea levels would force urban folk inland, and they'd seek out Indian land for their new homes. The only way to avoid such a fate, he said, would be to develop the land, and develop the economies. It's a bit far-fetched, and contradictory. But outsiders have long gone after the resources on tribal lands; it's only natural that the tribes would want to have some control over the onslaught, and to get as much from it as they can.
After all, said Monique LaChappa of the Campo Band Mission Indians, a small tribe near San Diego that has a 50 MW wind farm: "Whoever has the water and the energy, in the end, is going to win."
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. His Twitter handle is @jonnypeace
]]>In the last two years, Arizona has taken advantage of all that sun and space. The state now has 1,079 megawatts of installed solar capacity, good enough to make it second in the nation, with just under one-third of that coming from solar panels on residential and commercial rooftops. That's thanks in part to progressive solar-incentive programs, notably net metering, put in place several years ago by the Arizona Corporation Commission, which serves as the state's public utility commission.
Net metering, which allows consumers to run their electric meters backward with power generated by rooftop solar panels, has been particularly successful. But now that program, along with Arizona's other solar incentives, is under attack. During last November's elections, the commission's two Democrats, both of them pro-solar, were voted off the board, making it fully Republican.
In the past, solar was bipartisan in Arizona. In fact, a Republican-led corporation commission implemented the state's current incentives, considered some of the most progressive in the nation. Barry Goldwater Jr., a GOP icon, is currently leading the charge to keep net metering in place, though the Goldwater Institute, started by Barry's uncle, opposes renewable energy.
These days, the five Republicans on the commission take a hard line. In January, they revoked an incentive for commercial solar, which pays producers for each watt produced, a move that some in the industry said would kill their business. Then they toyed with the idea of gutting the mandate that utilities must get 15 percent of their power from renewables, though they dropped that after they realized how many renewable-related jobs would be lost. And now, the commission, along with Arizona Public Service, the state's largest investor-owned utility, are targeting the net metering program, all in the name of cutting electric ratepayers' bills by a few cents per month.
Arizona's program is especially strong because it allows the customer to install enough generation to offset 125 percent of a home's total demand, and the owner gets paid retail rates for that power. In other words, it makes it fairly easy to offset an entire electric bill, including the costs for using the power lines that are built into its regular rates.
And therein lies the rub for the utilities. Arizona Public Service argues that the solar rooftop customer is getting out of paying for using its transmission lines, substations and the like, and that those costs are then being pushed onto other customers. That adds up, said the utility's CEO Don Brandt in an op-ed in the Arizona Republic. He charged that net metering ends up costing the average non-solar-generating APS customer some $20,000 over a lifetime.
Brandt's math is a bit dubious. Two studies, including one commissioned by the utility back in 2009, concluded that net metering will provide a benefit to ratepayers in the long-term. But his gripes aren't entirely unreasonable.
To be fair, it seems unlikely that the utility or the commission will end net metering. Their real goal seems to be making the rate structure fairer, which might involve paying far less for rooftop solar, or charging net-metered customers a service fee for infrastructure. Either plan would make it virtually impossible for someone to zero out a utility bill.
When a million Arizona rooftops are gleaming with solar panels, perhaps such changes will make sense. But now is not the time to act. Only about 2 percent of Arizona Public Service's 1 million customers have rooftop solar, which is not enough to make a significant difference environmentally or, for that matter, to the utility's bottom line. It rakes in some $600 million in net income annually.
In other words, while Arizona is making progress on solar, it needs a lot more. And that's what incentives are for: They encourage folks to do something worthwhile to help the world and themselves. That's why it's critical for Arizona to keep the net metering in place, just as it is.
Jonathan Thompson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an op-ed service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a Durango, Colorado-based senior editor of the magazine, which is headquartered in Paonia, Colorado.
]]>But in one place, things have changed. Dozens of brand-new homes dot the landscape, many of them energy-efficient and architect-designed. Unremarkable $500,000 homes have been replaced by $1.1 million mansions in a full-tilt construction frenzy -- courtesy of a raging wildfire.
The Fourmile Canyon Fire tore through 6,000 acres of Boulder's foothills for just a few days in September 2010. But at the time, it was the costliest fire in Colorado's history, with 168 homes, valued at over $200 million, burned to ashes. Add $14 million in firefighting costs and some $1 million in lost tax revenues on devalued property in the years since, and you've got a natural and financial catastrophe.
But every $1 billion fire season -- and experts believe we're heading into another one -- has, believe it or not, a silver lining. Just as a fire can have positive ecological effects, so the cash spent to fight it and rebuild afterward can boost local economies, says Cassandra Moseley, director of Oregon's Ecosystem Workforce Program and author of a study on the nuances of fire's effects on communities.
Boulder County's silver lining appeared shortly after the Fourmile Fire, as insurance payments flowed to homeowners who kept their policies apace with rising property values. A handful of folks abandoned Boulder altogether, using the cash to buy boats or homes in cheaper zip codes, and some bought elsewhere in the county. But at least half rebuilt. Meanwhile, the county streamlined permitting -- some re-builders navigated the normally months-long process in just a few days.
During the 30 months after the fire, 182 permits were issued for single-family homes together worth $81.6 million; half were for fire-related rebuilds. That's twice the number and value of permits issued in the county for the previous 30 months, and four times the value of those issued between 2004 and 2008, during the height of the national housing fever. The fire not only efficiently cleared away brush thickets and dead grass, it left a blank canvas for new development bankrolled by insurance payments.
Nearly all of the rebuilt homes are worth more than the ones they replaced. And, bucking expectations, the real estate market on the fire's fringe has held strong: One home that was licked by, but withstood, the flames sold in 2007 for $537,000; last year it sold again, for $761,500. Higher price tags yield higher property taxes, filling county coffers.
But that's Boulder. Real estate values have plummeted elsewhere by 10 to 15 percent after an initial wildfire, according to studies by Colorado State University resource economist John Loomis, and tumbled further after subsequent fires thanks to greater perceived risk. Other economic sectors, especially tourism, suffer, too. During and right after the 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire near Colorado Springs, which burned 350 homes and topped Fourmile as the state's priciest, local lodging revenues dropped by almost 20 percent.
Yet even those hits can be offset to some degree, says Moseley. Most of the money spent on fire suppression comes from the feds or the state and is "captured" by the community when locals go to work on fire lines, or non-local firefighters buy food, gas and the like. Moseley's study found that local capture rates vary from 5 to 25 percent, meaning that a $20 million fire could infuse the local economy with as much as $5 million.
Money rolls in after the smoke settles, too. Boulder County received $3.4 million in federal and state grants to rehabilitate the charred areas -- a sort of stimulus package for local contractors. And the Colorado Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau got $110,000 in federal and state grants for post-fire PR. Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency shoulders at least 75 percent of the costs incurred by local fire response for big blazes.
That's not to say that wildfires have a net positive impact on communities. They usually don't. But when the total cost of a fire is being tallied, these upsides are almost never considered. Nor, for that matter, are the serious non-financial consequences: the loss of beloved homes and property –– and, on occasion, even life –– along with the health impacts of lingering smoke. "This boost doesn't undo any of those losses," Moseley says. "It's just another frame on it. It's taking a step back and looking at the ecological and economic benefits other than what's talked about during the moment."
To see those benefits, take a drive down Sunshine Canyon Drive. Over there, where a little cabin, circa 1972, was reduced to ashes, now stands a half-million dollar, three-bedroom home of steel, glass and corrugated tin, with a huge deck along one side. It's powered by the sun and specially built to resist the next conflagration. The south wall, which is entirely glass, frames an expansive view of emerald-green grass sprouting from the scorched earth.
]]>Last summer, I moved back to my hometown of Durango, Colo., with my wife and daughters. It's been a bittersweet experience -- sweet because my family has been here for generations, and it's got great schools, a college and a river running through town. And bitter because the housing is far too expensive for the average working joe.
That means Durango is a lot like Jackson, Wyo., the subject of Ray Ring's cover story -- or, for that matter, Aspen or Boulder or dozens of other chi-chi Western towns. If you want to live here, either bring a lot of extra cash, or be prepared to commute.
Here in Durango, though, we have a pressure-release valve of sorts, called sprawl. Though the town itself is hemmed in by geography, one needn't go far to find acres of private, developable land. Much of it was once in agriculture, but a building boom from the late 1980s until the mid-2000s, encouraged by lack of land-use planning, left it spattered with a hodgepodge of ranchettes, trailers and subdivisions.
Some might see it as a mess, yet it's also relatively affordable. The same $300,000 that would get you a tiny old fixer-upper in town will buy a brand-new home in the development just over the ridge, a sweaty bike ride to downtown, true, but still within the school district and town limits. With considerably less, you can purchase a trailer 10 miles outside of town. It's hardly ideal, but Durango has stumbled into a housing situation that's far more sustainable than Jackson's 45-minute, treacherous, mountain pass drive to affordability.
If you're anything like me, as you read Ring's story, one side of you will plead with Jackson's conservationists to allow enough growth to alleviate some of the housing crunch. The current situation doesn't work, and Jackson's "bedroom communities" will eventually create their own economies with their own jobs and their own housing issues, forcing Jackson's workers to commute even farther. Eventually, the rising cost of gas will make that prospect untenable, as will the environmental toll of all those workers driving every day.
Yet the other side of you will just as heartily urge those conservationists to keep up the good fight, and not give into the housing "solution" that communities like mine have fallen back on. Because sprawl is not remotely sustainable, either.
There is a middle way. Instead of pushing the working class out into the exurbs or over the pass, why not pull them inward, into the heart of the community where they belong? It's possible with high-density development in the urban envelope, taller buildings with income-restricted housing atop commercial spaces, and maybe some clustered development on the town's fringes. Sure, Jackson might lose a bit of that prized "frontier town" feel. But as the lack of affordable housing makes clear, the frontier days are over.
1. Weather Underground (FREE): This is my go-to weather app, for sure. The home screen has just about all the relevant information you could want: current conditions, forecast for the next several days, radar map, "Find Your Love" ad, and a weather watch/warning icon that displays the entire warning at a touch. The app also has an hourly forecast, which has proven to be fairly accurate. The map screen includes radar, but also a huge network of web cams that allow one to see the weather, just about anywhere, at any given moment, allowing you to track storms across the landscape.
2. Dark Sky ($3.99): Okay, I'm a cheapskate, and usually just stick with the free apps. But a lot of folks out there in the tech world rave about Dark Sky, so I figured I'd check it out. The interface is nice and uncluttered. The home page simply tells you the current temperature and weather, and what it's likely to do in the next hour, and that's it. The forecast only goes out 24 hours, which is not enough for me. Since the weather hasn't varied from hot and "clear" since I got the app, and may never do so in the future, I can't really speak to the accuracy of the forecasts. The reason I forked out $4 for this was to play around with the crowdsourcing -- it allows you to submit your own weather report, with a photo -- a concept with which I'm interested. There's no way, as far as I can tell, however, to look at the crowdsourced reports or photos from other users. They apparently just integrate your report into their report.
Earlier this year I tried out Weathermob, which is entirely crowdsourced: The only reports they have are from the "mob" out there, which would be you and me. Great idea, not a great execution, in my opinion. It's really more like a weather-oriented social media app than a weather information app, and as much about how you feel than about an accurate accounting of the current weather.
3. Dust Storm (FREE): Wanna know when the next Haboob is going to hit? This app, developed by Northern Arizona University, will tell you, as well as give you helpful tips about what to do once the wall of dust envelopes you. I had hoped that it would allow me to track dust storms as they moved across the Arizona desert or something. But this thing's way more bare bones than that, doing little more than sending you current weather alerts for your area. And that's about it. It could be helpful if you're actually in the path of a dust storm, but not so great for the generally weather-obsessed.
1. Wildfire Pro ($4.99), Wildfire Home ($1.99), Wildfire Info (FREE): One needn't search far to find a bevy of apps relating to wildfires. Finding one that's useful is a bit harder, especially if you don't want to pay for it. But Wildfire Info costs nothing and delivers what most of us want: A map and list showing all the active, and some inactive, fires in the U.S., along with details and a perimeter map for each fire. I forked out for the Pro version, which also includes a fire weather overlay map, weather/fire danger calculators, and other stuff that a fire fighter might need, even if I don't. It appears that the info is not updated quite as often as the Inciweb site for some fires, but it's never more than 24 hours old for active fires.
2. Wildfire from American Red Cross (FREE): If you live in the wildland urban interface, this might be the app for you. It allows you to monitor as many areas as you choose, and sends alerts when there are fires in those areas, along with a detailed description of the fire. It gives a check list of what to do as the fire approaches, a "toolkit" that can instantly turn your phone into a flashlight or strobe light, an immediate link to the Twitter feed for particular fires and to various social media to do a quick notification letting friends know you're safe.
I also tried out Burnt Planet because, well, who could resist a name like that? Relying on data from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometers aboard NASA satellites, it pinpoints "hotspots" -- which could be wildfires or someone burning their field -- around the world. It's good for a broad, global overview, but that's about it. There are no data about individual fires.
Now, I know what you may be thinking: These apps are just another waste of time thrown at us by the Internet, like our "friends" telling us on Facebook what they had for breakfast; a high-tech form of voyeurism -- worse, disaster voyeurism -- that draws us into our electronic devices and sucks us away from the real world. After all, I can figure out the weather simply by stepping outside. And if a fire's approaching, I'll see the plume of smoke long before my gadget sends me a warning--if I bother to look up from my phone's glowing, beckoning little screen, that is.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. His Twitter handle is @jonnypeace.
]]>As commuters extricated themselves from highway gridlock, and batteries faded away on millions of electronic devices, folks flocked to the handful of neighborhood bars that –– thanks to generators –– were able to keep their lights and refrigeration going. There, they could drink away the darkness and speculate as to what had caused this sudden plague of electrical impotence.
Many assumed it was terrorism -- San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station had been sabotaged, they said, or the North Koreans had set off an electromagnetic pulse that fried the grid, or maybe an Iranian cyberattack had crippled the computers that keep the modern world humming. Others blamed solar flares for disrupting the cosmic electromagnetic field, or suggested that a more earthly storm had caused distant wind farms to go haywire. Then again, perhaps a raven just landed on the wrong piece of equipment out in the desert and got fried, its death rattle reverberating through the transmission lines all the way to San Diego.
Their guesses weren't stupid or outlandish -- they all involved genuine threats to the power grid. But the biggest power outage to hit the Western Grid in a decade actually started hundreds of miles east, at a substation outside Yuma, Ariz. And it began not with a bang, but with a misplaced checkmark that ultimately crashed Southern California's electrical system.
That event was no freak occurrence. It could have happened anywhere, at any time, in the complex machine that generates, transports and delivers power to nearly every corner of the nation. Our proliferating air conditioners and gadgets have put new pressures on the grid, as the demand for electricity has grown twice as fast as the infrastructure needed to carry that power. Now we're straining it even more by trying to get that power from cleaner, more fickle sources. Meanwhile, the electrical grid -- the circulation system of today's modern age -- is still stuck back in the '80s, like one of those guys from high school who clings to a mullet haircut and his Dungeons and Dragons dice. Compared with what's to come, some say, San Diego's blackout might seem in retrospect no more than an excuse for a candlelit block party.
A 6-foot-high, gleaming white cross stands alongside a mostly empty road near Tonapah, Ariz. At its foot is a tiny Nativity scene, and an angel on the end of a stick. The shrine's purpose isn't clear, but its location makes it seem like an altar dedicated to the patron saint of electricity. Behind it, rising from the desert scrub, are the elongated containment domes of Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station's three reactors. And beyond them lie two huge fields of photovoltaic panels and three natural gas power plants. There is probably no other five-square-mile patch on the planet with more electrical generating capacity.
Yet just as critical is the network of transformers, switches and wires through which all that electricity flows. Congregated just north of Palo Verde, a dozen high voltage transmission lines slice the sky, crackling ominously as they link up in the giant, skeletal "switchyard." The lines, gently curving toward earth between each giant tower, lead inward and outward in every direction, like spokes on a bicycle wheel, making the Palo Verde/Hassayampa switchyard the biggest power-trading hub and crossroads in the region -- the electrical Union Station of the West.
Among these lines is the 500-kilovolt Hassayampa-North Gila, or H-NG, line. On Sept. 8, 2011, about 1,300 megawatts -- almost half of all the electricity imported into Southern California that day, enough to power about 1.5 million homes -- flowed westward through the H-NG line. All that juice was needed because it was so hot; the mercury hit 115 degrees in El Centro, and even sea breeze-cooled Oceanside reached 88. By mid-afternoon, air conditioners cranked across the Southwest, while irrigation pumps pushed water onto the half-wilting lettuce in California's Imperial Valley.
On its way to San Diego, the H-NG line passes through the North Gila substation outside of Yuma. Just before 2:00 that afternoon, Arizona Public Service, the substation's operator, sent a technician out to fix a capacitor bank, used to stabilize voltage in long-distance lines. As he worked -- we'll call him Kilo Watt, since the utility has kept his or her identity secret -- he marked each completed step on a checklist to make sure that he didn't miss anything. But then Watt, distracted, put a mark in the wrong place, causing him to skip one critical step: bypassing all that juice around the capacitor bank so that he could work on it safely.
At approximately 3:27 p.m., he cranked open the disconnect switch, an event that should have been uneventful. Instead, the 500 kilovolts still running through the line began to arc -- the current leaping through the air, much the way the evil Emperor zapped Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi. Watt continued cranking the switch, hoping to manually break the arc. Instead, the writhing electrical serpent grew larger, and some 43 milliseconds later, the entire H-NG line "tripped," like a home circuit breaker, and shut down.
The chain reaction, which would climax just 11 minutes later, had begun.
But the roots of the San Diego blackout are deeper than that Yuma substation. In order to really understand what happened, we need to travel back in time to the grid's primordial days among the hardrock mines of the Rocky Mountains.
During the spring of 1891, in a canyon in the mountains southwest of Telluride, Colo., icy water from the South Fork of the San Miguel River rushed through a funnel-like tube, crashing into and turning a Pelton waterwheel attached to a nearby 100-horsepower generator in the Ames hydropower plant. As the turbine spun, it generated 3,000 volts of alternating electrical current, which was then shipped by copper wire three miles to a huge motor in the Gold King Mill, perched on the side of a treeless slope far above.
Even as the motor roared to life, a battle raged over the future of what would become the electrical grid. On one side was direct current, or DC -- the kind generated by batteries, lightning and static electricity -- which Thomas Edison had used to light up a Manhattan neighborhood in 1882. On the other side of this so-called War of the Currents was AC, alternating current, embodied by Nikola Tesla, the eccentric Croat genius who had worked for and later been spurned by Edison.
Edison, in a morbid fit of desperation, played the danger card. He used alternating current to publicly electrocute house pets, sheep, horses and, finally, a retired circus elephant named Topsy, that, to be fair, had already been sentenced to death for killing three of its trainers. Topsy's demise was immortalized on film, and today you can find a YouTube video of the smoking elephant in all its grainy, demented glory. Yet even fear didn't help Edison's cause. After traveling at useful voltages for about a mile, DC petered out. AC, meanwhile, could be "stepped up" to high voltages in order to push it across long distances, then "stepped down" with transformers for use in home or industry. The Ames power plant, one of the first commercial industrial applications of AC, dealt a severe blow to DC, and was a seed of what today is a mostly AC grid.
The owners of the Ames plant strung new lines from the plant to more mines, then to town and beyond, becoming the Telluride Power Co., which would own and operate several generating stations and hundreds of miles of transmission lines. Similar systems, built by similar utility monopolies, grew up around the nation.
Until World War II, each utility's grid was fairly self-contained, with fossil-fueled or hydroelectric power plants located close to the residents and industries that used their power. But in the middle of the 20th century, as long-distance transmission technology improved, the utilities oozed outward, building huge coal power plants in the Interior West near the mines, which sent power hundreds of miles across mesa and canyon to Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix. Meanwhile, each of the three distinct grids -- the Western, Eastern and ERCOT, or Texas -- became more internally interconnected to increase reliability.
The Western Grid's 240,000 megawatts of generating capacity come from sources as varied as dams in British Columbia to coal-fired plants in northern Mexico, traveling on 120,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines, plus countless miles of distribution lines, the smaller wires that deliver power to your home. As it expanded from one-town micro-grids to today's weblike Leviathan, the grid grew in an organic fashion, with new components welded on to the old ones, like additions slapped on to trailers in the rural West. Hydropower from that same Ames plant now travels alongside coal- and solar-generated electrons in transmission lines built in the 1980s.
Operation and regulation of the grid is a similar mishmash. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, as the Bell telecommunications monopoly was dismantled, a similar effort was made to transform electricity from a service provided by monopoly utilities into a commodity traded on an open market. For the first time, non-utilities were able to build power plants, mostly natural gas-fired, and sell power to the utilities. In 1998, California dove into the open-market concept by opening the California Power Exchange. But unscrupulous operators gamed the system, with some producers creating false power shortages in order to up prices, and the infamous Enron engaging in its own crazy scheme of shipping power out of state, then back in, to dodge state price caps. That drove the utilities to the verge of collapse, caused "brownouts," led to the recall of California Gov. Gray Davis and, in 2001, ended the power-exchange experiment.
Today, about 80 percent of California's grid is run by the California Independent System Operator, a nonprofit entity that allows wholesale power producers access to the grid. It's essentially still the open market, though purportedly less prone to gaming than the earlier exchange, and follows the same model as in most of the Eastern and Texas grids. The rest of the West, though, is stuck somewhere in between the old model and the new, with monopolized utilities -- a mixture of investor-owned, municipal and co-ops, each of which is regulated differently -- still running the show.
Federal policy -- or the lack thereof -- hasn't helped. The authors of the 2011 MIT report, The Future of the Electric Grid, bemoan the fact that in other industries such as natural gas, telecommunications and airlines, federal policy was reformed after the 1970s to reflect market realities. "In contrast," they write, "despite dramatic changes in the electric power sector, federal policies established in the 1930s ... still play a central role in that sector." In other words, just as new pieces have been added onto the old grid, new policies have been piled on top of antiquated ones.
It sounds chaotic, and as the San Diego outage and others reveal, it often is. When the H-NG power line shut down back at Palo Verde, the electricity sought out the path of least resistance towards its destination, which in this case was a tangle of lines in the inland desert that weren't equipped to handle such high voltages. Seconds after that arc had crackled over the Yuma substation, lines, transformers and other equipment from Mexico up into the Imperial Valley were pushed to their limits, and began to fail. Some physicists will tell you that this phenomenon is an inevitable consequence of a grid that has evolved to operate under principles of self-organized criticality, prone to the same sort of non-linear, cascading cataclysm as wildfires, avalanches or earthquakes.
But for the most part, this gargantuan contraption is so seamlessly reliable that most of the millions of people who use it forget it exists. A small army of technicians is dedicated to keeping it that way, perching in front of monitors in rarely seen control rooms around the country.
On the south end of Scottsdale, Ariz., a low-slung, mostly windowless brick building sits back from the street between a Spanish colonial apartment complex and an upscale mobile home park. No sign tells the curious passerby what might lie within, yet the gleaming razor wire atop the surrounding wall raises unsavory possibilities. A guard is there to stop the curious, and if she fails, the device that pops out of the pavement and rips your tires to shreds will definitely succeed.
This is the operations center for the Salt River Project, one of the nation's largest municipal utilities. The executives and the clerks hang out at another building a couple miles away in Tempe, but this is where the real grid action goes down. When potential crises strike, operators here do their best to keep them from spreading. (SRP wasn't hit by the San Diego blackout, but since it operates the Palo Verde switchyard, it was peripherally involved.) Most of the time, though, technicians spend their time keeping power flowing to some 1 million customers in the Phoenix metro area from the utility's power generators, which range from shares in coal plants as far away as northern Colorado to small hydroelectric facilities on Scottsdale's canals.
You'd think the stress of keeping all those air conditioners running would wear on Mark Avery, SRP's grid manager. But he's fit, trim and looks no older than 50, with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair. When he tells me that he started his career as an operator trainee in 1974 at Navajo Generating Station in northern Arizona, I have to ask him to repeat himself.
Of all the baffling facts about the grid, perhaps the most mind-boggling, Avery tells me, is its constant need to be kept in balance. "The Western Grid is like a giant bucket," he says, "with a bunch of spouts running in and out, and you have to keep the water level constant." That is, the amount of electricity being fed into the Western grid by thousands of generators must always be equal to the load –– meaning the amount being used by its millions of customers. Lose the balance, and the frequency of the alternating current will drift away from the optimum 60 cycles per second, which could cause equipment to fail and result in outages. In the Western Grid, that balancing act is performed simultaneously by 38 different authorities; Avery and his colleagues oversee one of them.
Each day, using models based on weather forecasts and historical patterns, SRP's marketing team draws up a demand forecast for the following day, and schedules generation from SRP's own array of generators, (or from neighboring utilities if it's cheaper) to "follow" the demand curve. They also schedule plenty of extra backup power -- usually from fast-firing natural gas or oil "peaking" turbines -- to make up for forecast errors or to compensate for a downed power line or plant. The grid operators are then responsible for implementing the daily plan, and for tweaking it as it unfolds with hourly forecasts and scheduling. Over the course of the hour, they make up for energy imbalances -- or deviations from the plan -- by turning generation up or down. Minor, second-to-second bobbles are "regulated" automatically by software, typically by adjusting Hoover Dam's hydroelectric turbines.
Over time, this balancing act has become more and more challenging. Four decades ago, the greatest demand came from big industrial facilities like factories or mines that ran round-the-clock or on a set schedule. The generation sources were also steady and predictable, coming mostly from "baseload power" –– meaning coal or nuclear.
In the 1980s, the demand side of the equation began to change radically. As manufacturing moved overseas and people poured into the region, residential and commercial customers -- whose electricity demand curve has bigger daily ups and downs -- took up a larger share of overall demand. The air-conditioning revolution arrived at the same time: Between 1980 and 2009, the percentage of Western homes with air conditioning shot up dramatically, so that now there are more than 18 million homes with power-gulping cooling systems on the Western grid. On a summer's day in the desert Southwest, the overall electrical load at 5 p.m. can be twice what it was at 5 that morning, mostly due to the energy it takes to cool us all down; it can account for about 30 percent of total peak electricity demand in California or Arizona.
The new sources of power feeding into the grid are even less predictable. Solar and wind energy can swing up and down dramatically during a single hour. A massive dust storm or thunderheads moving in on a summer afternoon can cut production from a photovoltaic array by 80 or 90 percent in a matter of seconds. Wind-power swings are less violent, but can be huge: California's collective turbine output can vary by 3,000 megawatts or more over the course of a day, and by 100 megawatts in an hour. The greater the percentage of solar and wind in the mix, then, the greater the potential for errors in the day- and hour-ahead scheduling, and the more potential for imbalances, instability and outages.
"It's not the same kind of dispatchable, turn a lever, decide a day ahead what you're going to run the next day with any kind of certainty system that we're used to," says Brian Parsons, transmission and wind integration group manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratories in Golden, Colo. Utilities typically respond to that uncertainty by adding two megawatts of natural gas backup capacity for every three megawatts of added wind power, chalking up the expense of building and operating the reserve to wind's "ancillary costs."
For Mark Avery, the variability is virtually a non-issue, because only about 3 percent of SRP's energy mix comes from solar and wind. But in California, where the state has required utilities to get 33 percent of their power from renewables by 2020, it's been a significant source of hand-wringing, as officials scramble to make sure they have enough reserves to cover wind and solar's variability. Fossil-fuel pushers regularly warn that replacing their steady plants with fickle solar and wind will plummet us all into darkness. They point to Germany, which now gets more than 20 percent of its power from non-hydroelectric renewables, primarily solar and wind. That has pushed the transmission system to "the brink of capacity," according to that grid's federal overseer, and renewables-caused voltage swings have resulted in machine malfunctions at Hamburg factories.
But is the problem really with renewables, or with the grid and the way it's run?
In the spring of 2011, rivers in the Pacific Northwest swelled when an unusually ample snowpack melted, and the water backed up behind the big electricity-generating dams of the Columbia River and its tributaries.
The Bonneville Power Administration, which manages the dams and its own grid-balancing area, either had to run that extra water through the turbines, and put thousands of megawatts of additional power into the grid, or spill it over the dams without generating electricity. The decision seemed simple -- produce the power and sell it for a bundle, right? But it wasn't, because of the limitations of the grid and the presence of native fish.
Even during normal water levels, the collective power plants and dams in BPA's balancing area generate far more power than its customers can use. In late April of this year, for example, the dams and a growing number of wind farms together cranked out as much as 6,000 megawatts -- enough for some 6 million homes -- more than BPA's customers could use. So both BPA and many of the wind farms have contracts to sell that power elsewhere, much of it going directly to California by way of the Pacific Intertie, an 850-mile-long, high-voltage DC "electricity superhighway" from near the Columbia River's Dalles Dam down to Los Angeles.
As the massive 2011 snowmelt began, power consumption everywhere was down, due to a combination of the recession and mild temperatures in the Northwest and California. The grid operators had to figure out how to curtail power production in order to maintain balance. Spilling the water over the dams, though, would raise the percentage of dissolved gases, such as nitrogen and oxygen, in the river downstream, which, in turn, could kill migrating endangered salmon with something called gas bubble trauma. So the power behemoth forced the wind farms, which rely on BPA's transmission to get their product to market, to shut down so that it could keep its hydropower operation going full-tilt.
For nearly two months, 2,000 wind turbines sat idle, causing their owners to lose between $2 million and $5 million in potential revenue, even as the dams -- not to mention coal plants in other parts of the West -- continued to generate juice. The wind companies, claiming discrimination, sued BPA and filed a formal complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC. Save our Wild Salmon intervened on wind's side, arguing that BPA was using the salmon-saving argument without basis -- the group believes that the benefits to fish from spilling water offset the harm from gases -- to keep from having to unload its hydropower at "negative prices" (paying others to take the electricity, a not uncommon practice in electricity markets). FERC ruled in favor of wind and sent BPA back to the drawing board. Last year, BPA curtailed far less wind power and compensated wind companies for resulting losses to the tune of some $3 million (mere chump change for BPA, whose total budget is around $4.4 billion).
Most observers agree that's not a sustainable solution; the FERC commissioners noted in their ruling that an expansion and improvement of the grid, i.e., more transmission, could alleviate the pain of all the parties involved by opening up more pathways to market that surplus power. In so doing, the commissioners allied themselves with a growing group of environmentalists who want to change the grid by integrating massive amounts of renewable energy to help combat climate change. Enter the grid-oriented greens.
Amanda Ormond has been involved in energy issues for over two decades, including a seven-year stint as director of the Arizona State Energy Office, and a subsequent career as a consultant, working mostly with renewable energy companies. Today, she is considered one of the region's foremost experts on solar power and is a member of the Western Grid Group, an independent organization made up largely of former utility regulators and state officials, who are devoted to transforming the grid to increase the amount of renewables in our energy mix. Ormond has a wholesome look -- long brown hair cut straight at the bangs, freckles on her nose -- that belies the intensity with which she thinks and talks about these issues.
To those who fret about the destabilizing effects of adding too much solar and wind to the grid, Ormond has a quick response: Cooperate, share and take advantage of the West's geographical diversity to iron out those variable output curves. The concept is called geographical smoothing, and it's been embraced by everyone from grid-oriented greens to scientists and engineers. "The West is very diverse, and that's a good thing," says Ormond. "You want plants all over the place, because the wind's always blowing somewhere."
"The more geographically diverse your (wind and solar) systems are, the less variability," says David Mooney, center director at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. In other words, a dip in output by a wind farm in Tehachapi, Calif., can be offset by turbines in Wyoming; ditto for a solar farm in New Mexico, which might reach peak output two hours before a facility near San Diego. It's also easier to predict fluctuations over a broader area: An MIT study found that when a geographic region's diameter is increased, forecast errors are reduced by as much as half.
To help accomplish this smoothing, grid-oriented greens would like to see the West's 38 balancing areas join together into an "energy imbalance market," or EIM, that would allow them to share both renewables and the natural gas-fired plants that back them up. Electricity sales would take place on a five-minute schedule, rather than an hourly one, because that's more in rhythm with the ups and downs of solar and wind. That would alleviate the need for each utility to build its own backup plants, and would therefore lower the cost of integrating renewables into the grid. "Say a utility has 50 generators," says Ormond, "but there are 4,000 in the West. If you had access to all 4,000, it would be more efficient."
"For renewable energy, it makes zero sense to stay in your small area," says Tom Acker, a professor of mechanical engineering at Northern Arizona University. He compares the utilities' current approach –– building up all their own natural gas reserve plants –– to buying a big SUV for everyday use, even though you really need it only a few days out of the year. Under an EIM, a bunch of balancing utilities would be able to share their renewables and that SUV, not to mention the transmission lines. "The progressive way of thinking is to share ... that is absolutely crucial or we'll never get renewable energy into the system."
Indeed, an energy imbalance market, says Cameron Yourkowski, policy analyst at Renewable Northwest Project, a Portland-based advocacy group, would have allowed wind operators or BPA to put all that surplus power up for bid during the spring of 2011.
EIMs are slowly taking hold in the West. Xcel Energy, which serves most of Colorado's heavily populated Front Range, is pushing for an energy imbalance market to expand the pool of reserves -- both fossil fuel and renewable -- from which it can draw to back up its burgeoning quiver of wind power. And in February, the California Independent System Operator and PacifiCorp announced that they would create a real-time energy imbalance market by autumn of 2014.
But a well-connected market requires a well-connected grid, and that's the catch: The current fossil-fuel-centric grid has left many of the windiest, sunniest places marooned, without a way to get solar and wind power to population centers. How much new transmission is actually needed remains uncertain. "Local groups will say we can do this with rooftop solar," and therefore minimal additional transmission, says Gary Graham, of the Boulder-based Western Resource Advocates. "It's just not the case. You can't get that many solar panels on roofs that fast in the West" to reach his group's goal of 50 to 80 percent renewables by 2050. "You need utility scale." And that, says Graham, could require up to 25,000 miles of new transmission in the West alone.
In today's climate, that would be a herculean feat. Try stringing 600 miles of cable, held up by hundreds of 200-foot towers, and someone will try to stop you, guaranteed. Transmission is notoriously difficult to build because a single line can cross so many jurisdictions, from private land, where landowners only get a one-time payment for an easement that will last forever, to federal, tribal and state lands. While the feds can push a natural gas pipeline across multiple states using condemnation powers, they can't do the same with transmission lines, thanks to a 1935 law. A provision in the 2005 Energy Policy Act established "national interest" transmission corridors -- including one leading from southern Arizona into the San Diego area to alleviate congestion there -- through which the feds could, theoretically, have backstop condemnation authority if the states dawdled. However, courts sympathetic to environmental concerns have mostly hamstrung the law.
About two dozen major interstate transmission lines to enable renewables are in various stages of permitting in the West, but none are proceeding very quickly.
Colorado billionaire Phil Anschutz wants to build a huge wind farm near Rawlins, Wyo., and ship the power to California via Las Vegas via a 600 kilovolt, $3 billion direct current line, the TransWest Express. Environmentalists aren't thrilled about 1,000 turbines in sage grouse habitat. And at a recent pro-transmission conference in Denver, Bill Metcalf, of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, balked at the TransWest line because it is direct current -- meaning few or no on- and off-ramps en route -- so other wind farms along the way won't be able to connect to it, making it exclusively Anschutz's electricity highway. The proposed Sun Zia line from wind-rich central New Mexico to the Tucson area has hit opposition because it could cross through environmentally sensitive areas such as southern Arizona's San Pedro River Valley. In California, a relatively short line, from the wind farms of Tehachapi to the Los Angeles grid, is on hold thanks to resistance from a well-to-do community in its path.
In 2010, FERC tried to push grid expansion by encouraging stronger regional planning efforts, and bringing in stakeholders at an earlier stage. Ormond is somewhat optimistic about how that's working in the West. "Instead of looking just at voltage flows and contingency plans," she says, "they've been looking at: What do we need, holistically, going forward? Let's look at all these possible futures and concentrate on building the paths that are most necessary."
Stringing wire all over the landscape is not the answer, says Ormond, though some wire must be strung. Even more important is putting the tangle of wires we've already got to better use. "If we do a combination of using the stuff we have better, doing some better sharing, adding new technology products like EIM ... then we're not going to need tons and tons of transmission," says Ormond. Operators have to make the grid "smarter" by outfitting it with better monitoring equipment and automating more of its operations: During the San Diego outage, controllers in each of the five affected balancing areas had to call each other on the phone to figure out what was going on. Transmission lines that are filled to capacity only during a few hot days in the summer should be opened to wind and solar for the rest of the year. Rooftop solar and other distributed generation sources should be beefed up with strong incentive programs. Viable energy storage would solve nearly all of the problems posed by intermittent renewables. But technology on a large-enough scale is still years, maybe decades, away.
If the green gridders are a faction of the environmental movement, they are not fire-in-the-eyes activists; they're more like technocratic problem solvers, working behind the scenes with environmental groups, utilities and state and federal regulators to make the grid less carbon-intensive. They're making progress, though it's slow. Rather than opposing new transmission projects outright, as they might have once done, environmental groups such as The Wilderness Society and the Natural Resources Defense Council have taken a role in the FERC-pushed, stimulus-funded transmission planning process and actively push projects that will bring more renewables to the grid so long as their aesthetic and environmental impacts are deemed acceptable.
"I think we are moving in the right direction ... toward a more regionally integrated system," says Ormond. But she worries that progress might be impeded by deepening political partisanship; Ormond worked under two Republican governors, and Arizona's current solar incentives were put in place by a GOP Arizona Corporation Commission. Today, however, Republicans routinely use renewables -- especially news-making failures, such as Solyndra -- as a whipping boy. "Clean energy does not need to be a partisan issue. In fact, it's really bad if it is," she says. "Bottom line is, it's not good for the country."
As the spark that lit the San Diego Blackout hurtled full-throttle across the electrical landscape, various lines, substations and generators tripped off-line, throwing the system out of balance. Grid operators tried to extinguish the flare-ups by cranking up peak generators, but they weren't quick enough. Meanwhile, the various collapses in the system forced virtually all of San Diego's electricity onto one set of power lines, running from San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station southward into the city. At 3:38:21 p.m., the lines tripped, and San Onofre's reactors shut down. Milliseconds later, all of Southern California was without power.
The ensuing 12 hours of darkness cost the city and its businesses an estimated $100 million for everything from spoiled food to lost productivity to government overtime. Officials at San Diego Gas & Electric quickly used the failure to their political advantage, speculating that if the Sunrise Powerlink -- a controversial power line bringing solar and wind power 120 miles from the Imperial Valley west to San Diego -- had been in operation, it might have prevented the outage or helped facilitate a quicker recovery. (The Powerlink started carrying wind power from the also-controversial Ocotillo wind farm this January.)
It took regulators six months to sort through what had happened, and in spring 2012, they released a report detailing the to-the-millisecond timeline, and assigning blame for the outage on poor communication, bad procedures and sloppy planning. Grid-oriented greens were at least somewhat validated: Had better "real-time situational awareness," or a smarter grid, been in place, the whole thing might have been avoided, according to the report. A good energy imbalance market might have given grid operators quicker access to backup, alleviating some of the pain.
One thing is certain: More blackouts will occur. California grid operators worry they could come this summer: San Onofre has been offline for repairs (unrelated to the 2011 outage) since January 2012, and no one can be certain when it will be back in service.
But perhaps the biggest, most insidious threat is our warming climate, which is already attacking the grid on many a front, according to the report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. Weather-related outages have increased tenfold in the last two decades, and it's only bound to get worse. Hotter days mean bigger peak loads; higher loads and higher temperatures strain power lines, causing them to lose more of the electricity flowing through them and to sag into vegetation: The West's biggest outage thus far put some 7.5 million people across seven states into the dark when, during a triple-digit heat wave, a line near Portland sagged into a filbert tree, sparking a cascading outage. And of course, heat and drought exacerbate wildfires, which can take out major power lines as happened in 2007 in San Diego, as well as diminish hydroelectric capacity from reservoirs. Meanwhile, it's our fossil-fueled electricity system that emits the largest share -- some 40 percent -- of greenhouse gases.
We may have reached the point at which adaptation is the best approach. While shopping malls across San Diego shut down entirely, and Hooters turned away customers, some bars fired up generators to keep the lights on, and the customers poured in. An Albertson's grocery store kept the coolers humming with a natural gas-powered fuel cell and had a banner day. They had all effectively thumbed their noses at the 20th century's finest engineering achievement and instead gone back in time to the days of the ultra-local Ames micro-grid. By doing so, they breezed right through what so many others experienced as a catastrophe.
On Sept. 8, 2011, Sasha Seyb, a freelance decorative artisan in her late 30s, who has lived in downtown San Diego for several years, was driving from work on the coast to her home when the outage hit. She first noticed that streetlights were blinking, and then realized that neither her radio nor her cellphone worked. Her first reaction was to panic, thinking some sort of major catastrophe had hit. But after she got home, and the news circulated that it was merely a technical glitch way over in Arizona, she and her whole neighborhood simply breathed a sigh of relief.
"Everybody was outside, the kids were all eating ice cream, adults were drinking their beer and grilling steaks," she says. "It was a giant block-party barbecue. It was a really neat vibe, a nice feeling. And that night, you could actually see the stars for once."
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor at High Country News. He pursues his unhealthy obsession with esoteric topics out of Durango, Colorado.
This coverage is supported by contributors to the High Country News Enterprise Journalism Fund.