PNM is traveling around New Mexico hosting public meetings, complete with cookies and coffee, to discuss the future of electricity in the state. This past Tuesday’s meeting at the Santa Fe Community College drew about 30 members of the public, and although I could only stomach the first hour, that was enough to reach an important conclusion: Investor-owned utility companies such as PNM will never provide community benefits. They simply can’t.
Inherently, many of us know that we should be angry at PNM. We sense that something isn’t right with them, even if we can’t finger exactly what it is. We think they should burn less coal, stop raising rates, and give their executives a pay cut. These issues surface at public meetings, and although they may be true, they distract us from a much larger realization.
The real problem with electric utilities is that their business practices are every bit as dangerous as Wall Street banks flying high on derivatives or multinational oil giants hooked on deepwater drilling. Electric utilities continue to build central power plants connected to interstate transmission corridors – a practice so dangerous that it has taken the world’s climate to the ragged edge of instability. And, like the bankers and the oil barrens, they do it because it solidifies their power and ensures that we will continue to depend on them.
The ability of the electric power system to inflict great harm on communities and the planet is well established, but it’s ability to do the opposite – to yield enormous benefits – has barely been explored.
The electric power system is little more than a network of wires, connecting us all together so that we can exchange energy. Ignore the fact, for the moment, that these exchanges currently consist of you writing checks to the world’s biggest polluters, and imagine instead the best possible scenario. Imagine that all of your neighbors have generators of various types and sizes, and whenever one of them has a little more than they need, they can share it with you the same way you might share vegetables from your garden. This kind of trading is not just efficient or economical – it’s the kind of exchange that builds community.
Now for the part that took me a long time to see: There are no insurmountable challenges, technical or regulatory or otherwise, preventing us from operating our electric power system in ways that benefit communities. That’s not to say there aren’t challenges, but many of them have already been overcome. Denmark declared their entire network of wires to be a public asset dedicated to providing public benefits, and they gave every Danish citizen the right to generate electricity and use the wires to provide that electricity to others. The Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands showed that large numbers of distributed generators could interact in beneficial ways when connected to the electric network using a “plug-and-play” architecture similar to that used by the internet. So much of the heavy lifting needed to transform the grid has already been done.
Is the United States ready for a publicly owned power grid dedicated to public benefits? Mostly we still occupy ourselves with minutiae, setting standards for big, obsolete utilities and then requiring them to hold public meetings so that they can pretend to care about the communities and ecosystems they are busily destroying. But to paraphrase Al Sharpton, when asked whether America was ready for a black president, he shot back that Americans weren’t ready to let blacks sit down on the bus. But it didn’t matter, he said, because WE were ready.
So I guess the only question is, are we ready to free the grid? I know I am. Won’t you join me?
Tuesday, August 17, 2010 at 11:34PM 
I'll be giving a lecture and leading a discussion this Sunday morning at 11:00 at the Travel Bug in Santa Fe. The lecture will be about how we should respond to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. After reading hundreds of articles on the topic, and watching dozens of hours of eyewitness testimony from guys on the rig, I have a pretty good idea what happened. This one had a lot of people musing about "game over" scenarios for the planet, so I think our response needs to measured with that in mind. I don't think increasing regulation is going to do it for me!
Renewable Energy's Missing Logic
Imagine that you’re sitting on big piles of sunshine and wind and you’re thinking, “Geez, how am I going to get this stuff to market?” when in rides a tall stranger in a Stetson hat. He comes from humble roots – a “ranch kid” from southern New Mexico, and even though he left the state to attend West Point and become a power player in electricity, his firm handshake and his love of western art convince you that he’s still a New Mexican at heart. “The solution,” says the stranger, looking natural in cowboy boots, “will only cost a few billion dollars.”
The tall stranger in this case is Phil Harris, the man being hailed as the “mastermind” of a proposed electric transmission project called Tres Amigas. Harris’ big idea is to build an electric “superstation” that ties together three giant electricity grids so that gigawatts of power can flow between them. This, according to Harris, will “unlock the potential” of New Mexico’s vast renewable energy resources by enabling us to sell sunshine and wind to California.
Does spending a few billion dollars on a system to ship wind and sunshine around the country strike you as odd? I’m pretty sure Californians have sunshine and wind already, but who knows...maybe they would prefer a nice imported brand. Hello...customer service? Do you have anything in a dry, desert wind with hints of pinon and juniper? Great...put it my bill!
The problem with claiming that multi-billion dollar transmission projects like Tres Amigas, Sun Zia, and High-Plains Express are renewable energy projects is that it isn’t even remotely credible. Big transmission lines are for one purpose only: to support big, central power plants like coal and nuclear. And while we continue to invest in obsolete central-power infrastructure, the rest of the world is charging ahead with far more efficient electricity based on distributed power. With distributed power, we wouldn’t need to build any more big, ugly, expensive, inefficient power stations, and we wouldn’t need all these big, ugly, expensive, inefficient transmission lines to haul power over long distances. Instead, independent developers would build lots of small, nifty, clean, efficient power stations, near the loads where they’re needed. This has huge advantages: efficiency goes to the moon, costs go down, reliability improves, and lots of new players come into electricity markets, bringing innovation and private capital with them.
So I don’t think Harris’ superstation is so super after all, and I sure don’t think it has anything to do with renewable energy. No, my guess is that Tres Amigas is a component of a poorly conceived plan to revive the nuclear power industry here in New Mexico. Harris built and ran a nuclear power plant years ago, and this past April he admitted being approached by developers who want to locate nuclear power plants near his project. And why wouldn’t they? We’ve got a nuclear fuels plant going in down in Eunice, New Mexico, and there’s a big push under way to allow our nuclear waste dump in Carlsbad to take high-level waste. All we need is a few reactors and his multi-billion dollar super thingy, and we’re the new, nuke capital of the U.S.
The debate over whether nuclear power is a good idea is a completely separate issue. The question for now is, why are big power-line developers all claiming that their wires are for hauling sunshine? Instead of hints of pinon and juniper, I’m starting to pick up a strong scent of green goo. Whew...check your boots, fellas! And then put ‘em outside where the sunshine can dry ‘em out, assuming you didn’t sell it all to California already.