DesertBlog

Think the Sunrise Powerlink Fight is Over?

Guess again! While various legal wranglings over the Sunrise Powerlink continue in the courts and before the CPUC, there’s also a lot of new public opposition to this destructive fossil-fuel line, as more residents learn exactly where the new Southern Route would go. SDG&E already got an earful at this week’s Lakeside Planning Group meeting, and its other ear will get a similar helping of vitriol at an open house the company is planning in Lakeside on Wed., Feb 25th. We encourage you to attend. (Details on this and more community open houses in March are available at this SDG&E web page – just ignore all the greenwashing).

As Denis Trafecanty reports below, both the Lakeside planning group’s board members and the local Fire Department are outraged that they were left out of the Sunrise Powerlink planning process. And who can blame them? First, SDG&E insisted that it was the northern route or nothing, and then late in the game switched to accepting the southern route. The map of the many options for the southern route looks like a den of snakes (no disrespect to snakes intended), so who knew where it might end up?

Turns out one spot it will traverse is the scenic El Monte Valley, pictured above with a mockup of the power line included. That first tower would sit on private property, just 30 feet from where the owner plans to rebuild his house that was destroyed in the 2003 Cedar Fire.

Here’s Denis’s summary of the meeting:

“As Yogi Berra once said, “It’s Déjà Vu all over again.” Lakeside residents came out 100+ strong Wednesday night at their Planning Group meeting and the five or so SDG&E reps heard loud and clear how Lakeside felt. The Planning Board voted unanimously to send a letter to our embattled Governor, his cronies at the CPUC, and others to state their complete opposition to the Sunrise Fossil Fuel Line. The Lakeside Planning Group is really upset at SD County for not informing them about what was happening during the power line testimony.

“The Lakeside Fire Dept also attended the Planning Board meeting and said that 1) they were never notified of the towers, and 2) the fire chief reported that the ability to fight fires where the towers are located would be SEVERELY hampered because of not being able to use planes and helicopters.  As this is very rough terrain, ground units cannot get in to fight fires. This would mean that they would have to wait until the fires got to the more populated areas such as Blossom Valley before they could even begin to fight them. By that time, the fire could stand a chance to be too large to fight and could cause a catastrophe like the Cedar and Witch Creek Fires. 

“No matter what SDGE/Sempra says, this line hasn’t passed all the legal hurdles yet.

–Denis T.”

Meanwhile, the national press continues to miss the real story on the Sunrise Powerlink, as in this sloppy report in the Washington Post. The article says that the power line is “designed to carry solar, wind and geothermal energy,” even though this is an engineering impossibility. The line certainly could have been legally required by regulators to carry some amount of renewable energy, but SDG&E successfully fended off this requirement. It is true that the line would be sited near some potential wind and solar resources, but it also would originate at the same spot where existing power from imported Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) enters the country, and where more LNG power could be added in the future. So it’s more accurate to say that the line is designed to carry LNG-fueled power. The Post missed this angle entirely, describing controversy over the line as a setback for renewable energy, rather than as a setback for Sempra’s plans to make the most of its LNG infrastructure in Baja.

As always, we emphasize that there are many alternatives to SDG&E’s proposed power line, such as enacting the San Diego Smart Energy 2020 plan, introducing a real statewide Feed-In Tariff so solar power producers get paid a fair rate for all the power they produce, and paying companies like SDG&E to insulate homes and businesses rather than build outdated infrastructure.

By the way, here’s how El Monte Valley looks without the power lines:

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