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.

The most common source of leakage is from the spent fuel-rod storage pools, many of which have corroded pipes, according to today's AP article.

Details of the tragedy of allowing electric utilities to perpetuate a central-power model fifty years after it became obsolete are clear. To protect their exclusive control over the power grid, electric utilities promoted an obsolete model of central nuke-and-coal model while suppressing their own research showing that distributed generation would revolutionize electric power.

Promoting your business and fending off competitors are standard business practices, but utilities crossed the line when they agreed on propaganda:  A decentralized power system would be unsafe, unreliable, and expensive. Repeat, demonstrate, obfuscate.

We now know that decentralizing the electric power system -- allowing thousands of generators of all types and sizes to run the grid -- would have doubled its efficiency and cut emissions in half. But utilities, with their $300 million annual research budget, have known this for fifty years.

Convincing regulators and the public that 1960’s technology is still appropriate is a remarkable achievement, and not one that should go unpunished. The failure to modernize the grid, and the lies that enabled them to do it, directly caused the excess coal-burning and perpetual nuke re-licensing that is destabilizing our climate and spoiling our drinking water.

When utilities are finally convicted for this crime, what should the remedy be?

Congress just voted to give the nuclear power industry another $54 billion in loan guarantees, so the plan is to start building in 2011.

The Chavez Center won energy awards when it opened in 2000, but when I assessed it in 2001 I quickly realized it was a mess. Oversized pumps pushing against closed valves, electrically heated water being used to flush ice (shaved from the skating rink) down the drain, and the like. Worst of all, the heat removed from the skating rink (that's how you make water freeze) was being thrown away instead of used to heat the swimming pools! So when Phaedra Haywood wrote an article about a decade-long problem of humidity from the swimming pools dripping from the ceiling of the gymnasium, I just had to respond. Enjoy!

Dear Phaedra,

Thank you for your January 12 article in The New Mexican, “Water Torture,” which detailed the decade-long saga of indoor rain at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center. Unfortunately the good folks at the City didn’t tell the whole story.

While I was Technical Director for Rebuild New Mexico in 2001, I was asked to assess the energy performance of the Chavez Center. During the assessment, Troy Houtman, the Natatorium Manager, told me about the humidity migration problem that your article chronicles, and he told me at that time that in order to prevent it the natatorium needed to be kept at negative pressure relative to the rest of the building. So the problem was already well understood in March 2001 – six months before your timeline shows it first being identified.

I wrote a report based on my walk-through assessment and submitted it to Greg Neal, Director of the Chavez Center, in April 2001. I also gave a copy to the State Energy Office, which administered the Rebuild program in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy. My report included sixteen recommendations for improving the performance of the building, including several designed to reduce humidity inside the natatorium and one specifically calling for continuous measurement of the pressure differential between the natatorium and the rest of the building. I even recommended that an indicator or alarm be connected to the gauge so that the out-of-balance condition could be corrected each time it occurred, before rain would start to fall in the gymnasium.

My report was in the City’s hands long before the timeline in your article shows the problem first being identified. It described exactly how to address the problem, and if acted on at the time it would have quickly led to a permanent solution. The alarm on the pressure gauge would have highlighted the set of conditions creating the pressure imbalance, so that the ventilation system could then be adjusted to keep the imbalance from occurring.

This simple solution, if implemented, could have avoided the next eight years of paid consultants, threatening letters and negotiated settlements. And reading your article, it appears that the problem is still misunderstood. Why are we still talking about monitoring temperature and humidity when the problem arises from a pressure imbalance?

Maybe an interesting follow-up article could explore why the City didn’t consider my report, and whether they have any plans to look at it now. Beyond addressing the problem of water dripping from the gymnasium ceiling, the report contained fifteen additional recommendations for reducing energy consumption at Chavez. Back then the annual energy cost was $382,000 – what is it now, and what is the total cost of the failure to act?

This isn’t an isolated case, nor is it anywhere the worst example of costly ignorance on the part of the City. I have no idea what it would take to put an end to it, but it must stop – we simply cannot afford it any more.

Sincerely,
Mark Sardella, PE

Dear Tony,

Great to hear from you, and thanks for thinking of me in the context of the power-grid architecture discussion. As you know, it’s one of my favorite topics!

I think it might be a lot more interesting if, in addition to the technical discussion, you ask the panelists what they believe to be the drivers of technical innovation. For example, instead of just asking, “What does an advanced grid architecture look like?”, you might also ask, “How did we end up, after more than 100 years of development and billions of dollars of research, with an architecture that delivers just 30 percent of the energy in the fuel it consumes?”

I’m not suggesting by any means that panelists should be made to recount the sordid, criminal pasts of Samuel Insull and J.P. Morgan. What I’m saying is that it has not worked well up to this point to set technical goals and then hope that our social, economic, and environmental values will be upheld as a result. It makes much more sense to go about it the other way: set forth the values, establish rules to encourage and reward businesses for honoring them, and let innovation and entrepreneurism drive the technological direction that best advances the values. It’s an old-school conservative approach, true?

It’s beginning to happen, but it only works as well as the values we set forth, and we therefore have to be very specific about what we are trying to accomplish. If we decide we value having lots of distributed resources on the grid, we may end up with that, but it may or may not produce a desirable result.

Denmark has done a pretty good job advancing its values with its power grid. Ten years ago, the Danish government decided that the best way to foster entrepreneurism, innovation, and resource efficiency was to make the transmission system public and re-write it’s charter. The new charter gave every Danish citizen the right, upon connection to the power grid, to upload as well as download, and it required the highest possible end-to-end operating efficiency. They accelerated the process using feed-in tariffs, and the flood of interconnects necessitated development of the active architecture they use now.

If we learn from the Danish model and add to it the value of local self-reliance, it will probably lead to an architecture you described to me years ago:  a network of microgrids wherein each one can island itself whenever it’s beneficial to do so, or re-close with the larger system whenever that is more beneficial.

How do we get there? Again, one could better ask, “Why are we not there?” It’s because the power industry continues to insist that active participation of DR in grid support is dangerous to linemen, that high DG penetration leads to instability, and that plug-and-play interoperability isn’t viable because they need discretion over every interconnect. Those positions are less and less credible all the time. Remember when big tobacco used to claim that their research showed smoking wasn’t harmful, but when we finally took a look it turned out they had been lying for decades to protect their industry?

I’m quite sure you don’t want to stray into a racketeering discussion at an IEEE conference – I’m just showing the futility of waxing technological about an industry that is less efficient now than when it started 127 years ago. If EPRI, with a $300 million annual research budget, wanted an advanced grid architecture, don’t you think we would have had one by now?

I hope this is helpful, or at least thought provoking! Good luck with the panel, and stay in touch!

All the best,  -  Mark

Image by Rube Goldberg Inc.

But no amount of “expert” advice, no accrual of LEED bonus points, and no level of government funding can make the conversion of sunlight to electricity and then back to heat a good idea. Adding unnecessary complexity is always a problem, even if experts tell you otherwise and a government grant will pay you to do it.

Assuming the City and its housing authority can accept that they got it wrong this time, then they also have an opportunity to get it right. As the nonprofit Local Energy has long held, getting it right means starting by stating your values, and then selecting technologies that best apply those values in your community.

We must value energy projects that make efficient use of local resources, and that recycle the money we are paying for energy back into our community. Our research shows that for heating, this can best be accomplished with commonly used hydronic heating systems in which the water is heated with simple, low-cost solar collectors and low-technology, high-efficiency cordwood boilers. Such systems can be supplied and installed by local companies, financed locally, and fueled by the sun and by the local foresters that are working hard to maintain the health of our surrounding woodlands.

On behalf of all the local entrepreneurs who might benefit from opportunities to participate in heating our beautiful city, I have just one message for city officials:  We are here for you, and we await your call.

Mayor David Coss of Santa Fe and the nonprofit Creative Santa Fe are holding a forum to solicit ideas from the community on job creation and economic development. Here's the letter I just sent from Local Energy...I hope you like it!

Hi Kris and the Creative Team,

Here are my ideas for creating jobs and strengthening the local economy in Santa Fe:

In tough economic times, strengthening a local economy must focus on plugging leaks. That means looking at how to make the most of every dollar that is here, rather than looking to attract big outside capital. It’s not like there are huge capital flows out there ready to be captured anyway, other than the federal stimulus money everyone is so excited about. So sure, go after some of that “gummint” money if you want to, but remember that it is short-term and it was all borrowed from taxpayers in the first place.

Every community that has done an economic leakage study has shown the same four main leaks: Food, Interest, Insurance, and Energy. So our community economic plan MUST focus on these four items. We should begin by focusing on the ones that hold us hostage:  Imported food and imported energy.

Plugging the energy-dollar leaks is easy, mostly because my nonprofit recently spent nearly two-million dollars researching how to do it. You begin by building technology-neutral platforms that allow local companies to provide thermal and electrical energy to their community. Thermal is easier to start with because it’s unregulated, and you can start small and interconnect the systems as you move forward. Every building that is heated using water-delivery (i.e. with hot-water radiators, baseboard, or radiant floor) can be easily modified with a Thermal Access Port that allows a third-party vendor to furnish heat to it. And there’s no monopoly on heat sales, so you don’t have to worry about the PNM’s of the world trying to shut this effort down.

Building the heat network is also a prerequisite to building the electric network, because generating electricity typically involves waste heat and you will need a place to dump it. For local electricity you will need a legal strategy, because as we’ve seen, the incumbent isn’t willing to allow new players to come in. But you CAN beat the monopoly if you are creative about it. Hint to City Council:  Local electricity does NOT involve inviting a Baltimore-based company funded by a Wall-Street Bank to connect Chinese-made products to a monopoly power grid. What it does involve, as a first step, is creating a self-generation cooperative that works exclusively behind the meter, installing cooperatively owned power systems of all types and sizes. This allows you to begin right away putting in the locally owned generation that you will need as you prepare for step two, which involves (deep breath please) creating a municipal electric power system. Power for the system would come from (you guessed it) the self-generation cooperative, which would continue installing local generation strategically to reduce power imports and defer any needed line upgrades.

I’ll leave it to the Ag folks to solve the food localization strategy, but be sure that it involves a local greenhouse cooperative building climate-battery greenhouses with moveable radiant blankets for night-time protection. For this component, consider supporting local nonprofits like my own that have been researching and developing such efforts for years. We could really benefit from your support.

Many, many thanks for the opportunity to provide input, and all the best with the effort,

 - Mark Sardella, Chairman
   Local Energy, a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit

I'm wanting to start a Winter Farming Cooperative that enables farmers that want greenhouses to finance them by selling shares of the produce they will grow in them, just like with a CSA. Only I'd like to see dozens of farmers pool their output in solidarity, so the risk and rewards could be spread over a wider base of farms.

Send me an email if you'd like to follow this effort.

Honestly, I can't tell who is the dumbest one here -- the company that is designing the system, or PG&E, or the Wall Street Journal for carrying the story with a straight face. But if regulators allow this to go forward, it'll be the ratepayers that get smoked for sure.