I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
A story in yesterday’s Washington Post used a proposed — and massive — renewable energy transmission line project in New Mexico to highlight the potential battle lines between environmentalists and renewable energy advocates.
Sounds odd, right? Those camps are typically in the same camp.
The Washington Post story fleshed out the big picture:
As the push for renewable-energy development intensifies across the United States, scientists and activists have begun to voice concern that policymakers have underestimated the environmental impact of projects that are otherwise “green.”
As you can see from the above map, the SunZia Southwest Transportation Project aims to traverse roughly 460-miles from south-central New Mexico to Tucson and beyond. The line would carry about 3,000 megawatts of power, mostly for export to energy-thirsty Arizona.
While the SunZia project is technically still on the drawing board, it is one of two projects New Mexico’s two-year-old Renewable Energy Transmission Authority (RETA) is looking to help finance. I interviewed Joanna Prukop, secretary of the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, earlier this week and asked her for an update on SunZia. Prukop is on the board of RETA. (Check out her answer to the left, and see the full interview about renewable energy transmission on tonight’s episode of KNME’s New Mexico In Focus, a weekly show I co-host)
It may be significant that the state’s top energy administrator seemed awfully careful to emphasize that the SunZia project is just an idea right now – Prukop appeared to downplay it and another RETA project by dubbing them only “transmission planning concepts.”
But according to SunZia’s Web site, the language used to describe the project is much less conceptual:
SouthWestern Power Group, Salt River Project, Tucson Electric Power, Energy Capital Partners and Shell WindEnergy Inc. have entered into an agreement on April 30, 2008, to proceed with the development of the SunZia Southwest Transmission Project.
But the looming environmental conflicts in New Mexico and elsewhere are magnified because renewable energy is something of a land hog, the Washington Post story explained.
A team of scientists, several of whom work for the Nature Conservancy, has written a paper that will appear in the journal PLoS One showing that it can take 300 times as much land to produce a given amount of energy from soy biodiesel as from a nuclear power plant. Regardless of the climate policy the nation adopts, the paper predicts that by 2030, energy production will occupy an additional 79,537 square miles of land.
The SunZia project will cut across the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, about an hour’s drive south of Albuquerque and home to the migratory — and very graceful — sandhill cranes. While the wetlands refuge isn’t land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (it’s managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), new Interior Department deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management Ned Farquhar will oversee much of the transmission line’s proposed route through New Mexico — and he seems determined to achieve a green balance. Again, from the Washington Post story:
“Everybody in New Mexico loves the sandhill cranes,” said Ned Farquhar, a former aide to New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D). “We also love our renewable energy. So we have to figure this out.”
Prukup told me the SunZia line “could play a significant role” in carrying New Mexico solar and wind energy to export markets to the west. And meanwhile, SunZia’s manager of generation and transmission projects argues that “as much as 80 percent” of the line’s route would parallel existing lines, and presumably, existing road networks used to service them.
But altering the line to avoid environmentally sensitive areas, like the Bosque del Apache, would add significantly to the cost — about $1 million more for each mile added.
One more complicating factor is that some (almost) endangered birds, like the lesser prairie chicken and the greater sage grouse, appear to narrow their ranges when tall power lines or big wind turbines begin to encroach.
Expect these kinds of concerns, and others like them, to play a big role in the debates to come over making renewable energy a reality.
