Last month, our DesertBlog reported on problems with the Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative. Chief among those problems was a demonstrated lack of concern for the impacts these large-scale solar and transmission projects will have on wildlife and habitats. Now you have a chance to voice your concerns over RETI’s misguided direction at a public meeting this Saturday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., in Palm Desert. Go here for more details on the meeting, and here for full background on RETI. We’ve also posted a comment letter on the RETI process, signed by the Desert Protective Council, the California/Nevada Energy Committee of the Sierra Club, and other organizations. The letter is highly critical of the conclusions RETI has come to so far, as well as the way this process is being run. You can find it here.
Here is a list of concerns you might want to address in your comments at the public meeting:
RETI’s basic premise is flawed. RETI simply assumes that we need large-scale renewable projects in remote areas and new transmission to go with them. In making this assumption, RETI ignores the ongoing revolution in photovoltaic solar technology, which makes it possible to cost-competitively produce significant quantities of power right where the power is needed. If we can generate electricity on rooftops and parking lots, why scrape the desert? And even if remote projects are required, engineer Bill Powers has made persuasive arguments that no new transmission is needed — we simply need to boot carbon-fueled energy off of the existing transmission lines and push forward with energy efficiency measures (which are the first thing we should be doing anyway).
RETI has refused to consider even the most basic conservation principles. Even if one accepts the notion that remote, large-scale solar and wind projects are necessary, there is a rational way to carry out these projects. This rational approach would require these projects to be built on already disturbed lands (such as abandoned farmland), near existing transmission lines and water sources. But this rational approach has so far been rejected successfully by the industry representatives in the RETI process. This has resulted in a plan that could place industrial-scale developments in wilderness areas, national monuments, areas of critical environmental concern, critical habitats, and other areas that have been designated for protection, not development. Simply put, it’s cheaper for companies to build their projects on free public land, even though one such project might wipe out 80% of the rare Mojave milkweed’s known population in California, to list just one of a long list of environmental impacts. And building these projects far from existing transmission is a boon for utilities, which reap much of their profit from building new transmission lines.
RETI engages in an elaborate shell game. You’ll often hear that large concentrating solar power plants provide energy much more cheaply than photovoltaic installations. We’ve already reported on one way in which this is like comparing apples to oranges. In its cost comparisons, RETI has its own suspect number crunching — it assumes that two proposed transmission lines, the Sunrise Powerlink and Green Path North, are already built and paid for. Readers of this blog will know that neither line is anywhere near breaking ground, let alone being paid for. In truth, these transmission lines would add billions to the amount ratepayers across the state will pay for remote renewables, yet these billions are left uncounted in RETI’s cost comparisons.
The RETI website promises a transparent process. So far the process has been transparently biased in favor of corporate profit and against environmental protection. The bottom line for us is pretty simple: scraping more desert for human uses, when there are ready alternatives that accomplish the same goals, is not “green.”
We hope you’ll be able to attend the meeting this weekend and give the RETI stakeholders a piece of your mind.
