Local Energy News

Renewable Energy's Missing Logic

2010-08-22T23:42:29Z

This editorial ran in the Opinion section of Sunday's Santa Fe New Mexican...click here to read it. I wrote it in response to Staci Matlock's article on Tres Amigas from a couple of weeks ago. You may want to read that one first to fully enjoy the satire here! - Mark.

Imagine that you’re sitting on big piles of sunshine and wind and you’re thinking, “Geez, how am I going to get this stuff to market?” when in rides a tall stranger in a Stetson hat. He comes from humble roots – a “ranch kid” from southern New Mexico, and even though he left the state to attend West Point and become a power player in electricity, his firm handshake and his love of western art convince you that he’s still a New Mexican at heart. “The solution,” says the stranger, looking natural in cowboy boots, “will only cost a few billion dollars.”

The tall stranger in this case is Phil Harris, the man being hailed as the “mastermind” of a proposed electric transmission project called Tres Amigas. Harris’ big idea is to build an electric “superstation” that ties together three giant electricity grids so that gigawatts of power can flow between them. This, according to Harris, will “unlock the potential” of New Mexico’s vast renewable energy resources by enabling us to sell sunshine and wind to California.

Does spending a few billion dollars on a system to ship wind and sunshine around the country strike you as odd? I’m pretty sure Californians have sunshine and wind already, but who knows...maybe they would prefer a nice imported brand. Hello...customer service? Do you have anything in a dry, desert wind with hints of pinon and juniper? Great...put it my bill!

The problem with claiming that multi-billion dollar transmission projects like Tres Amigas, Sun Zia, and High-Plains Express are renewable energy projects is that it isn’t even remotely credible. Big transmission lines are for one purpose only: to support big, central power plants like coal and nuclear. And while we continue to invest in obsolete central-power infrastructure, the rest of the world is charging ahead with far more efficient electricity based on distributed power. With distributed power, we wouldn’t need to build any more big, ugly, expensive, inefficient power stations, and we wouldn’t need all these big, ugly, expensive, inefficient transmission lines to haul power over long distances. Instead, independent developers would build lots of small, nifty, clean, efficient power stations, near the loads where they’re needed. This has huge advantages: efficiency goes to the moon, costs go down, reliability improves, and lots of new players come into electricity markets, bringing innovation and private capital with them.

So I don’t think Harris’ superstation is so super after all, and I sure don’t think it has anything to do with renewable energy. No, my guess is that Tres Amigas is a component of a poorly conceived plan to revive the nuclear power industry here in New Mexico. Harris built and ran a nuclear power plant years ago, and this past April he admitted being approached by developers who want to locate nuclear power plants near his project. And why wouldn’t they? We’ve got a nuclear fuels plant going in down in Eunice, New Mexico, and there’s a big push under way to allow our nuclear waste dump in Carlsbad to take high-level waste. All we need is a few reactors and his multi-billion dollar super thingy, and we’re the new, nuke capital of the U.S.

The debate over whether nuclear power is a good idea is a completely separate issue. The question for now is, why are big power-line developers all claiming that their wires are for hauling sunshine? Instead of hints of pinon and juniper, I’m starting to pick up a strong scent of green goo. Whew...check your boots, fellas! And then put ‘em outside where the sunshine can dry ‘em out, assuming you didn’t sell it all to California already.

Getting Beyond the Oil Age

2010-08-18T06:34:37Z

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!

I hope to see you there, and I'm looking forward to the discussion!

You can download a flyer of the event here.

Mark on "Living on the Edge" with David Bacon

2010-07-08T20:40:11Z

I was on David Bacon's "Living on the Edge" program at 6:30p Thursday on KSFR 101.1 FM in Santa Fe, discussing the need to "Free the Grid". I don't think the shows are archived, so I hope you got to hear it live.

What do you think about a state-wide movement to make the grid a public asset dedicated to the public interest?

Free the Grid

2010-07-08T06:53:43Z

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?

Mark on Talk1260 KTRC Saturday

2010-06-25T23:15:25Z

I will be on Kim Shanahan's "Green Building" radio show Saturday (today) at 1:00p talking about how to revolutionize the electric utility grid by creating municipal utilities, building active microgrid networks, and interfacing the electric grid with district heating grids. We will even talk a little about how the BP oil spill should be helping us put these plans in context. Let's get MOVING, people!

So tune in to KTRC 1260 AM on Saturday, and enjoy!

Mark on KUNM News, June 15, 2010

2010-06-16T05:55:20Z

I was interviewed by Jim Williams on KUNM news tonight for a segment that aired right before Obama's address to the nation on oil disaster in the Gulf. Jim and I discussed the larger issues of corporate power that brought us to such a dangerous place, and how to get a handle on turning things around.

I hope you will listen to the segment and let me know what you think!

Obama's Address on Gulf Oil Falls Flat

2010-06-16T05:25:01Z

Obama just gave his flattest speech ever in an address to the nation that was supposed to show us how tough he’s getting on oil companies. Instead he just tossed out a few military references, calling the disaster an “assault” and a “siege”, and referring to the oil slick as a “menacing cloud”. Then he repeated something BP had told him about how much oil they plan to capture by such and such time, and in a clear nod to BP’s legal team, he even used their catch-phrase about paying “legitimate claims”. What a chuckler that was, and obviously it will be fodder for Stewart and Colbert tomorrow.

As for what to expect going forward, Obama apologized to all those hurt by the 6-month drilling moratorium, but said we needed time to learn all the facts. (The House Energy Committee is actually doing a terrific job of this.) He advised that we need new technologies and precautions and standards, alongside better enforcement, in order to resume drilling, but the clear message to me was that we are doing our best to resume drilling. Damn the gusher wells, full speed ahead!

Obama did a pretty fair job explaining oil-resource degradation, announcing to the whole world that our oilfields are terribly depleted and explaining that it will continue to get more difficult for us to extract oil, but he countered this by saying that not meeting this challenge would be unacceptable and that discoveries “will someday lead to entire new industries”. It hard to imagine conveying less urgency than that, and the talk about how tough we are as a nation is sounding pretty thin at this point.

The speech was devoid of specifics except for things like how many National Guard troops have been deployed. He said that in order to accelerate the transition he would be open to ideas from either party, from which I gathered that any ideas independent of a major political affiliation are dead in the water.

Obama closed by saying that we needed faith and courage to meet the challenges we face, and that we should pray and remember that God is with us even during storms. Lovely sentiments, to be sure, but it seemed an odd time to deliver them. It was time to say that he would get us off this runaway train of corporate excesses, crack down on the power of energy multinationals, and re-empower communities to meet their energy needs with local, independent production. He missed that opportunity by a mile of deepwater.

Commercial Building Energy Efficiency Class in Albuquerque

2010-04-19T05:56:01Z

Mark Sardella will be teaching the fundamentals of how to make commercial buildings more energy efficient this Friday, April 23, 2010, at the new American Solar Energy Institute office in Albuquerque. We'll cover commercial energy audits and assessments, and then I'll show how to benchmark a building using Portfolio Manager -- the EPA's online rating tool used to qualify buildings for the Energy Star Commercial certification. We'll discuss the most common opportunities for savings, how to evaluate their financial return, and how to drive down a carbon footprint with on-site energy.

The three-hour class will run from 9 a.m. until noon this Friday, with an overflow class in the afternoon if the morning session fills up. The fee for the class, located at 504 Yale Boulevard SE in Albuquerque (map), is $60.

To register, email us or call 505-821-9695 or 505-401-0945.

Santa Fe County Commissioner Candidate Forum Tonight

2010-04-06T06:34:56Z

Ask them about democratic electricity for Santa Fe!

The Sierra Club in Santa Fe is hosting a forum tonight (Tuesday, April 6th from 7-9 p.m.) for the candidates running for commission seats, and it should be a good venue for getting them to talk about the future of energy in Santa Fe. What kinds of questions would inspire candidates to forego their practiced lines about solar panels and instead talk about real issues like who’s going to own all this green energy stuff and who should be able to decide how it gets made and distributed?

Here are some of my ideas for questions...please feel free to steal them (it’s flattery).

The Buckman Direct Diversion will use banks of 900 horsepower pumps to push 15 million gallons of water a day (at full build-out) uphill through 15-miles of pipe. Electricity rates have risen four times in two years, and are slated to go up again this month. Do we know what it will cost to run the pumps two years from now if electric rates keep rising the way they have been? What about in four years?

Sales of electricity in Santa Fe County total more than $80 million dollars annually, all of which goes to a utility company owned by Wall Street investment houses. If that money were instead going into Santa Fe County’s coffers, what would you spend it on? Would it be enough – $80 million a year in perpetuity – to build a system that sourced all of its energy from local, renewable sources?

Biomass to thermal energy – or burning wood and other plant materials to create heat, is the by far the most used, most cost-effective renewable energy technology in the world. Is it appropriate here, and if so, what would you do to promote its use?

Are there any examples in the world of a community that made it a policy to purchase energy, to the greatest extent possible, from local, independent energy producers?

To hear the answers to these questions, come to the forum tonight at 7p at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 107 w. Barcelona Road in Santa Fe. It's free and open to the public!

New Mexico Legislature Promoting Nuclear Power

2010-02-08T04:42:33Z

Nice to see the progressive community here in New Mexico heading to the Roundhouse today to protest Senate Joint Memorial 38, which calls for nuclear energy to be declared “green”. As repulsive as it is to see another attempt to dress nukes up as green energy, there are three energy bills sailing through the legislature unnoticed that have far greater consequences for the future of nuclear energy in New Mexico.

To really understand how bad these bills are, it helps to first be aware that billions of dollars worth of new transmission projects are being planned in the Southwest to support the hundreds of new nuclear reactors that are on the drawing board across the country. Most of the projects are cloaked in green language and being promoted as clean. Here’s a sampling of some of the worst bills this year, along with a couple of bad memorials:

Senate Bill 190 – William Payne. This bill declares that third-party developers of renewable energy projects are not public utilities subject to regulation, but in doing so it strategically avoids addressing cogeneration projects -- leaving them in limbo with the courts. Worse, it requires the commission to give utilities cost recovery (“shall approve...rate riders”) for all the nasty things utilities always claim happen when renewables are connected to their grid: problems with frequency and voltage regulation, necessity to maintain reserve power for when the sun goes behind a cloud or the wind stops blowing – the usual lies. When it comes to accounting for the benefits created when distributed renewables are connected to the grid, the “shall” language is conspicuously absent and the commission is only required to “give due consideration” to them. How sweet!

House Bill 85 – John Heaton. This bill changes the procedure by which new transmission projects are approved, as well as the standard by which their costs can be passed along to ratepayers. It even allows the commission to bypass the public hearing process on transmission projects, assuming nobody complains (or finds out).

House Bill 98 – Jose Campos. As if the Renewable Energy Transmission Authority (RETA) wasn’t powerful enough, this bill gives it access to the Public Project Revolving Fund and exempts it from the Inspection of Public Records Act. RETA already has, from prior legislation, the right to designate transmission corridors, condemn and seize property through eminent domain, issue bonds without limit, and set (transmission) rates without hearings. It was also declared exempt from all state laws except one: the tort law (it can’t be sued). Seems like a lot more power than you would need for building renewable energy projects. RETA has always been a cover for building nukes. I can’t believe how gullible we are – why would renewables need transmission lines?

House Joint Memorial 35 – Janice Arnold-Jones. As a memorial it doesn’t carry the force of law, but this bill takes the first step towards saddling New Mexico ratepayers with billions of dollars in costs for new transmission projects, including Tres Amigas. Tres Amigas is a multi-billion dollar scheme to connect the three major U.S. power grids together with a DC tie in Clovis, New Mexico. This will enable nuclear power plants built nearby to access all three major U.S. power markets. The claim, of course, is that its purpose is to help us sell renewable energy to California. They have sunshine there too, no? Seems funny to bottle it and ship it to them fromhere, but an awful lot of people are drinking that Kool-Aid.

Senate Joint Memorial 41 – John Heaton. Again no force of law, but this memorial requests that Bill Richardson includes nuclear energy as a central component of his clean energy policy initiatives. Reference my article from last week that showed that at least 27 of the 65 nuclear power plant sites in the U.S. are now leaking radioactive Tritium into the ground water. When nukes are believed to be clean...uh...Houston, we have a problem.

As you can probably tell, I'm not a big fan of our state's legislative process!

To read the bills for yourself, visit the New Mexico Legislature website.