DesertBlog

Palms to Pines Map Now Available

The “Palms to Pines Birding and Nature Trail Map” is now available from Friends of the Desert Mountains, authored by soon-to-be DesertBlog contributor Ruth Nolan, and DPC member Kurt Leuschner. Ruth worked on the project during her sabbatical (2006-07) from her post as Associate Professor of English at College of the Desert. Kurt Leuschner, a natural resource specialist, is also a professor at the college.

The map, released in February, 2008, features 10 trails ranging from the Mojave to the Colorado deserts:

1. Santa Rosa/San Jacinto Monument National Monument
2. Living Desert Reserve - Palm Desert/ Indian Wells
3. Indian Canyons - Tahquitz Canyon
4. Mt. San Jacinto State Park
5. Morongo Canyon (references to Whitewater & Pipes Canyon)
6. Joshua Tree National Park
7. Salton Sea
8. Anza-Borrego Desert State Park
9. Indio Wild Bird Center
10. Coachella Valley Preserve/Thousand Palms Oasis

The map is available for viewing at the Friends of the Desert Mountains website. Copies of the map are available for free to the public by contacting the Friends at their website; at the Santa Rosa/San Jacinto Mountains National Monument Visitor Center located in Palm Desert, CA; and at the visitor centers for the destinations listed above.

For talks and lectures on the map, or for additional hard copies contact:

• Ruth Nolan runolan@aol.com or (760) 964-9767
• Kurt Leuschner, kleuschner@collegeofthedesert.edu (760) 776-7285

Endangered Species Act Under Attack

In its never-ending war on the natural world, the Bush Administration has proposed rules that would gut the Endangered Species Act, one of our nation’s prime defenses against abuse of nature, whether that abuse is carried out by the government, corporations, recreational groups, property owners, or other groups.

Daniel Patterson has a great blog post about it, and the Center for Biological Diversity has an easy way for you to take action.

Wind Energy Update

Following up on our July 26th post: the Bureau of Land Management has scheduled a public meeting for tonight in Julian about its plans to vastly expand areas available for wind energy northward into the Oriflamme Mountain, Banner, Julian, San Felipe Hills and San Ysidro Mountains areas. Here are the details on the meeting:

• Date: Tonight, Wednesday August 13
• Time: 7:00 p.m.
• Place: Julian Town Hall

View a map of the proposed wind energy expansion here. The Banner area is traversed by the Pacific Crest Trail, as are the San Felipe Hills, while Oriflamme Mountain is part of the PCT’s “viewshed” (as well as that of the Sunrise Highway). A big question is how these areas, some of them very remote and rugged, would be connected to the region’s energy grid. Are there existing transmission lines nearby? Or would these wind farms require new transmission lines, and if so, how large?

Perhaps these questions are better answered in a project EIS, but it seems foolish to designate remote, roadless areas as open to wind energy development without some analysis of the existing infrastructure. The Sierra Club’s policy on wind energy provides good guidance here: wind energy is good, but should be developed in or near areas with existing infrastructure such as roads and transmission, and should avoid parks, preserves and critical habitats.

The BLM map also includes an area labeled for geothermal energy development east of Jacumba and south of Interstate 8.

Deadline for comments is August 27, but activists hope to get that extended, considering that this is a significant change to the Final EIS on the Eastern San Diego Resource Management Plan.

Comments may be e-mailed to: caesdrmp@.ca.blm.gov, faxed to: (760) 337-4490, or mailed to: Erin Dreyfuss, Planning and Environmental Coordinator, BLM El Centro Field Office, 1661 S. 4th Street, El Centro, CA 92243.

Baja California wind energy projects are also affecting San Diego County. The Dept. of Energy will conduct an Environmental Assessment of a proposed new transmission line connecting the Baja Wind (Sempra Energy) project in La Rumarosa, Mexico, with the Southwest Powerlink east of Jacumba. The project will also involve building a new substation east of Jacumba. More details on the project, including a map on page 16, are available here. Read the Federal Register notice here.

The Dept. of Energy will hold a public scoping meeting on the new transmission line at the end of this month. Here are details:

• Date: August 26, 2008
• Times: 1 to 3 p.m., and 5 to 7 p.m.
• Place: Jacumba Highland Center, 44681 Old Hwy 80, Jacumba

Deadline for comments on this one is September 3. The Federal Register notice has contact info.

Good News for Bighorn, Bad News for Tortoise

There was good news for Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep last week, as the US Fish & Wildlife Service finalized critical habitat for this population of bighorn, cousins to the desert bighorn of the southwest. The new decision on critical habitat came as a result of a lawsuit by our friends at the Center for Biological Diversity; you can read their press release about the issue here.

Let’s hope the feds make a similar wise decision with the Peninsular bighorn, and withdraw a proposal to reduce critical habitat for this sub-population of desert bighorn by more than half. (Fish & Wildife has been strangely silent on this issue since last winter — maybe they’re just waiting for the end of the Bush administration?)

The Center for Biological Diversity is also on the case of the desert tortoise, and report that a recently announced “recovery plan” for the state reptile is actually not a recovery plan at all. CBD biologist Ileene Anderson had sharp words for Fish & Wildlife’s plan: “Desert tortoise recovery requires on-the-ground action, but this plan’s focus is ‘planning to plan,’ ” said Anderson. “The current recovery plan provides a science-based roadmap to recovery. But the administration has spent the last two years rewriting and weakening the plan because it finds recovery actions to be politically inconvenient. Without an immediate course correction, the administration is effectively pushing the tortoise to extinction.” Read more about the tortoise recovery plan and the Center’s response to it here.

Top photo: Larry Hogue (That’s a desert bighorn from Arizona, not a Sierra bighorn, but you get the idea.)

Bottom photo: courtesy USGS

Writin’ and Rockin’ in the Desert

Need a break from the gloom, doom and snarky sarcasm of DesertBlog? Chris Clarke has some great stuff posted on his Coyote Crossing site: desert poetry, essays, and tidbits from his summer basecamp in Nipton — can you say “hot”? And he doesn’t even have air conditioning yet. Check it out at: http://www.faultline.org.

Need yet more diversion? Ranchita Rocks 2008 is coming up on the weekend of September 12, 13 and 14. This benefit concert supporting the Protect Our Communities Fund to stop the Sunrise Powerlink will feature a long list of bands, including Yonder Mountain Stringband, DJ Bassnectar, and ’60s rockers Mountain, as well as comedy acts, drum circles and other events. Held on six stages at the GoLightly horse ranch in Ranchita, the event will be powered by solar, wind energy and biodiesel.

Early bird pricing has been extended through August 15, so get your tickets now: http://www.ranchitarocks.org.

Next week: back to the gloom and doom with the recently announced desert tortoise “recovery” plan.

Sunrise Powerlink Letter-Writing Opportunity

Last Sunday, the Desert Sun newspaper published an opinion piece on the Sunrise Powerlink by former California Energy Commission chairman Bill Keese, which denied that the Sunrise Powerlink is really about power plants in Mexicali (like the one at the left).  Mr. Keese’s response, titled “Sunrise Powerlink best way to transport renewable energy,” contained surprisingly weak evidence and logic.

In hopes that those of you in the Desert Sun’s circulation area can write a letter to the editor in response to this opinion piece, here are some facts that counter Mr. Keese’s arguments. (One of DesertBlog’s Twitter followers is planning to send in a letter, but the more the better!)

First, in calling the Sunrise Powerlink opposition’s arguments “falsehood and propaganda,” Mr. Keese could not fully deny the opposition’s main claim — that this transmission line is really about carrying fossil-fueled energy from Baja, not renewables from Imperial Valley — but had to equivocate (i.e. throw in some weasel words).

“For starters,” he wrote, “the Sunrise Powerlink is not being built to get electricity from American power plants in Mexico.” That sentence may be technically true, but take the word “American” out, and it falls apart.

The La Rosita power plant outside of Mexicali (pictured above) is owned by InterGen, a global power company headquartered in the Netherlands. Any future power plants could be built by foreign corporations as well. The point is, Sempra Energy (SDG&E’s parent company) has invested billions in supplying natural gas from overseas to a ring of power plants in Mexico and the southwest U.S. that can distribute power to southern California. The ownership of the power plants is immaterial — Sempra simply stands to gain when more power plants are built in Mexico. But it can’t do that without the Sunrise Powerlink (which is designed to be extended into Los Angeles). To believe that Sempra and SDG&E are not going to maximize their investment — by promoting as much gas-fired production as possible — is simply naïve.

If the true purpose of the line were to bring renewables to San Diego, then SDG&E would be happy with the southern route. But the company is so opposed to the southern route that it incorrectly informed the PUC that it would be impossible to build the line on the southern routing because of tribal opposition. SDG&E’s reason for opposing the southern route is that a southern line can’t be extended into the Los Angeles energy market, a key objective for Sempra/SDG&E.

On the other hand, the northern route is designed expressly to allow it to one day extend from Warner Springs into Temecula and the Los Angeles grid: a 500-kv line would extend from the Imperial substation (already tied in to the gas-fired power plants outside of Mexicali) to a substation near Warner Springs. From there, only a 230-kv line would head south to San Diego, with the possibility for another 230-kv line heading north to Los Angeles in the future. If SDG&E’s true goal were to get power from Imperial to San Diego, it would build one 500-kv line all the way to San Diego, or else make the entire line 230-kv (which, by the way, would allow it to be undergrounded, thereby muting at least some of the line’s opposition).

In the face of all these facts, Mr. Keese’s simple contention that the Powerlink is not about getting gas-fired power into the U.S. is exceedingly weak.

Keese’s second big error is that “The opposition to the Sunrise Powerlink emanates largely from the fact that 22 miles of this line would go through an extremely small patch of the 65,000-acre Anza Borrego State Desert Park.” (Come on, Bill, please at least get the size and name of the park right!) Contrary to Mr. Keese’s contention, there are many problems with the Sunrise Powerlink, beyond the fact that it would cross Anza-Borrego. These include:

• lack of reliability due to San Diego’s frequent wildfires in the mountains (the line would have been out of commission during both the 2003 and 2007 wildfires in San Diego, had it existed at that time) and earthquakes and flash floods in the desert
• wildfire ignitions and interference with fire-fighting efforts
• a massive waste of ratepayer dollars on a project that has no guarantee to carry renewable energy (San Diegans heard the same promises from SDG&E with the Southwest Powerlink, promises that have been broken)
• the highly experimental and unreliable nature of the Stirling solar technology the Sunrise Powerlink is supposed to link to
• the fact, pointed out in the EIR, that construction and operation of the line will create more greenhouse gas emissions than would be saved, even if the line carried 100% renewable energy
• the fact that transmission is last on the list of renewable energy solutions in California’s official “Loading Order” for renewable energy, with energy efficiency, demand response and conservation given the highest priority, and actually building renewables and clean energy projects coming in second (a recent New York Times op-ed piece underscored the primacy of efficiency and conservation)
• recent changes in the solar market place, thanks to advances in “thin film” photovoltaic solar technology, which make projects like Southern California Edison’s 250-megawatt rooftop solar proposal more economical than large-scale solar farms in the desert (9 to 12 cents/kilowatt vs. 14.5 cents per kilowatt), not to mention much less environmentally destructive and easier to get through the regulatory process (see this previous DesertBlog post). These changes, occuring in the past several months, make the Sunrise Powerlink even less necessary than when it was first proposed.

Then there’s the absurdity of Mr. Keese’s contention that the statewide pro-Sunrise group, CalCARE, somehow represents a “collaborative” approach. The only “collaborative approach” going on in this coalition of business interests is the usual “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” common to chambers of commerce and business roundtables. (Has the chamber even considered doing a critical analysis the Sunrise Powerlink’s effect on its member businesses’ electricity rates?)

And finally, contrary to Mr. Keese’s statement that “It is is easy to demand cleaner energy without offering viable solutions,” opponents of the Sunrise Powerlink have indeed presented a better alternative to the Powerlink. The San Diego Smart Energy 2020 plan (www.sdsmartenergy.org) provides an energy solution for San Diego that reduces its energy-related carbon footprint by 50% (far more than would be possible with the Sunrise Powerlink), while preserving our backcountry and desert landscapes.

To write a letter to the editor to the Desert Sun, go here.

Different Day, Same Old Spin

Oh, those tricky Sempra/SDG&E PR people! Seems they can spin any report to make it look like their company is leading the way in renewable energy.

Yesterday, Sempra issued a press release touting SDG&E’s #4 spot on the list of top ten utilities in the U.S. for solar power capacity, published by the Solar Electric Power Association. The release was picked up verbatim by the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch.

Wow! Number 4 in the whole United States! Sounds pretty good, right?

Not when you check the graphs published in the SEPA report, which clearly show SDG&E falling far behind its fellow California power companies, Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric, in terms of total megawatts of solar power capacity. In fact, even though it also benefits from California’s highly favorable natural and regulatory climate for solar power, SDG&E’s #4 spot comes in closer to utilities in Long Island and New Jersey than it does to SCE or PG&E. This is hardly something to crow about.

Here are the graphs:

This second graph shows total megawatts per utility on the “customer side” of the meter. This is mainly customers who have photovoltaic solar panels on their roofs. SDG&E moves up in this graph, with a bigger bar, but it’s still closer to Long Island and New Jersey power companies than it is to #1 PG&E (which, after all, has to contend with cloudy Northern California weather).

Clearly, SDG&E can do a lot more to develop its solar capacity on “the customer side of the meter,” rather pinning all of its hopes on projects on “the utility side of the meter” (large-scale solar projects in the desert). The company should concentrate on this area, and on energy efficiency measures (where it also lags), before considering the Sunrise Powerlink.

Bauder Debunks Spin on Sunrise Powerlink

Great article on the Sunrise Powerlink in this week’s San Diego Reader by Don Bauder: “Spinrise.”

The article covers the Union-Tribune’s hatchet job on the Utility Consumers Action Network from a couple of Sundays ago, which claimed that SDG&E ratepayers shouldn’t have to pay for UCAN’s efforts to stop the Sunrise Powerlink. Bob Kittle, the author of the U-T editorial, allowed no time for UCAN’s Michael Shames to provide information rebutting the charges, which came straight from SDG&E/Sempra. Nor does he seem to have checked with the California Public Utilities Commission about its intervenor system, even though he calls for dismantling it. And since the editorial appeared, the paper has refused to print a response from UCAN. Thus, many San Diegans are left with the false impression that their utility bills are higher because of UCAN. Bauder’s article corrects this scurrilous charge (our rates are actually much lower than they would be without UCAN’s efforts), and many more.

Bauder reports that several U-T subscribers cancelled their subscriptions in response to this blatant and biased attack. I too was tempted to cancel my subscription, until I remembered the great work being done on the Sunrise Powerlink issue by business writer Dean Calbreath, and Craig Rose before him (and Bauder, of course, was once a business columnist for the paper). We can only hope that the upcoming sale of the U-T will result in more of this type of balanced coverage, and less of the blind boosterism and political hatchet jobs we’ve come to expect from our city’s major daily newspaper.

Think Globally, Generate Locally

Confirming what desert conservationists and consumer advocates have been saying for quite a while now, a recent article in Public Utilities Fortnightly shows the true costs of concentrated solar power (CSP) farms vs. rapidly developing photovoltaic (PV) technologies.

With recent developments in thin film PV technology, “rooftop solar” is now cheaper by the kilowatt-hour than the large CSP thermal collectors that are being proposed on nearly a million acres of California deserts. These advances have made it possible to begin developing industry-scale PV facilities in the 20 to 50 megawatt range, such as that proposed by Southern California Edison, and already widespread in Germany. This new economic model even has a new name: “Distributed Central Solar.” The numbers work out to between 9 and 12 cents/kWh for photovoltaics and 14.4 cents/kWh for concentrated solar thermal.

Factor in the huge environmental costs of the large solar thermal facilities, problems with cooling (thousands of acre-feet of water used for wet-cooling, greater expense and loss of efficiency on the hottest days — when the energy is needed most — with dry cooling), and the likelihood that new large transmission lines will need to be built, and it looks like PV wins hands-down. Cheaper, built on already-developed land, connected directly to the facilities that use them (or to existing 69 or 115 kV lines), low maintenance, much lower associated greenhouse gas emissions, what’s not to love?

The article points out that only CSP’s momentum in this country, combined with the need to ramp up thin film production, may provide a temporary advantage to large-scale solar. But in the long run, the article concludes, “DCS (photovoltaic) plants will likely gain a large foothold in the market as economic forces drive the industry toward the most efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally-benign solar electric technologies.”

So, the market may actually decide the most environmentally friendly source of greenhouse-gas-reducing solar power — if only the irrational exuberance of some for covering the desert in solar collectors can be tamed while thin film ramps up.

Read the full article. 

Photo of thin film solar technology installation from Technology Review/Blitzstrom GmBH

Wind Energy Expansion in Eastern San Diego

In a surprise move, the Bureau of Land Management has proposed an increase in acreage where wind energy development would be allowed in Eastern San Diego under its Proposed Eastern San Diego Resource Management Plan. The old version of the plan already allowed increased wind energy development on about 6,000 acres of land, by reclassifying it from “beautiful” to “ugly” (using the bureaucratic terms VRM Class II and IV). Due to protests by the wind energy industry, and the current climate of “build renewables anywhere no matter what they destroy,” the BLM has now decided that this was not enough additional acreage for wind development. The agency will now allow just about any type of development in lands in eastern San Diego it still considers “beautiful.” The changes will make “an additional 27,327 acres available for renewable energy in the planning area.” The lifted restrictions also allow an additional 27,000 acres for mining and 31,000 acres for vaguely described “land use authorizations.”

The additional lands now subject to wind energy development include many acres bordering Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, notably the Chariot Canyon and Oriflamme Mountain areas. The Pacific Crest Trail also views or traverses many of these areas.

The one ray of hope is that Wilderness Areas, Wilderness Study Areas, and Areas of Critical Environmental Concern have been excluded from the expansion. But with the current thinking among many who call themselves environmentalists – that global warming is the only environmental threat worth considering — can it be long before these areas too are called upon to produce renewable energy? And with some “greens” denying that “mere scenery” has any value at all, can long-dead proposals such as damming the Grand Canyon for hyrdoelectric power be far from revival? When environmentalists team up with industry, is any place safe from development?

These are dark times indeed for public lands advocates.

Read the Bureau of Land Management notice here.