Today’s guest post is from John Farrell, a senior researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit think thank and consultancy that promotes strong and independent local communities. We’ve all heard about the benefits of local food; the ILSR is looking at energy independence on a local scale—the idea that states and even cities and towns can produce much of their own power. Farrell, 30, saw signs of this during a recent visit to Denmark.”There are wind turbines everywhere,” he told me, “but in small little clusters.” Is smaller better? Or do we need scale to produce energy, food and consumer products more efficiently? In this column, Farrell argues that instead of building massive new electricity transmission lines, we should develop ways to produce energy closer to home. His column originally appeared in Grist.
The last thing renewable energy needs right now are new transmission lines.
This statement is heresy in the green community, but there’s a danger that the increasing focus of green energy advocates on a new nationwide transmission superhighway may undermine the pursuit of near-term renewable energy goals.
People are excited by renewable energy. It’s clean. It’s limitless. It’s local. It’s the one kind of energy source that anyone can harness. Public polls show substantial majorities of Americans in every state favoring more renewable energy.
And states have an abundance of renewable energy assets. A new report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance—Energy Self-Reliant States—shows that every state has the potential to meet its renewable energy goal or mandate and that 3 in 5 states could get all of their electricity from in-state renewable resources. Almost every state could get at least 20 percent of its electricity from rooftop solar photovoltaics (PV) alone.
These renewable assets can be tapped for significant local benefits. A single wind turbine, for example, creates $1 million in economic activity, according to the American Wind Energy Association. And that’s just a generic, utility size turbine. Locally owned wind projects can create twice the jobs and 3 to 4 times the economic impact of absentee owned projects.
The benefits from locally harnessed renewable energy create a feedback loop, building even greater public support for clean energy.
People are not so excited about new high-voltage transmission lines.
Transmission legislation moving through Congress would preempt longstanding state regulatory authority over transmission line approval and siting. The goal is to speed the construction of a $100 to 200 billion interstate transmission superhighway, bringing solar power from the Southwest and wind from the Great Plains to the coasts.
Why is this problematic? Let’s ignore for a moment that most people wouldn’t care to live by a 150 foot tower running through a 200 foot swath of denuded landscape. Or to have their land seized for this purpose by eminent domain.
Many states oppose the new transmission superhighway for two reasons. One, it’s expensive. Two, it undermines efforts to reap the economic rewards of renewable energy self-reliance.
In a New York Times Op Ed, the Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs, Ian Bowles, wrote:
Lawmakers should resist calls to add an extensive and costly new transmission system that would carry electricity from remote areas like Texas, the Great Plains, and Eastern Canada to places with high energy demands like Boston, Chicago, and New York … Renewable energy resources are found all across the country; they don’t need to be harnessed from just one place.
In May 2009, the governors of 10 East Coast states wrote to senior members of Congress to protest. Requiring their residents and businesses to pay billions of dollars for new transmission lines that would import electricity from the upper Midwest and Southwest into their region “could jeopardize our states’ efforts to develop wind resources … “ They added, “it is well accepted that local generation is more responsive and effective in solving reliability issues than long distance energy inputs.”
Nine of the 10 Eastern states whose governors signed the May 2009 letter could get over 80 percent of their electricity from in-state renewable resources, according to Energy Self-Reliant States. And local energy also means fewer legal battles over the siting of unsightly transmission towers, a fact that politicians in that region are unlikely to have overlooked.
It’s not just state energy self-reliance and economic benefits hanging in the balance. A recent study released by Duke University’s Climate Change Policy Partnership throws cold water on the renewable energy transmission passion. It found that the proposed interstate transmission links from regions with low-cost electricity (e.g. the Great Plains) to regions with high-cost electricity (e.g. the East Coast) could enable coal power as easily as renewables, with poor results for carbon emission reductions and other environmental goals.
The evidence undermines the conventional wisdom about high-voltage, long-distance transmission and should raise red flags among advocates. To the people in affected states, a new transmission superhighway is costly, anathema to local energy generation, and a potential enabler of coal-fired power. It creates winners (in the sunny Southwest) and losers (in the “import states” on the East Coast).
A victory for interstate transmission may be at the expense of broader public support for renewable energy.
Renewable energy does not have to be harnessed in a few, select areas and shipped across country. And public support for clean energy may hinge on the opposite.
The ubiquity of renewable energy means that the transition to a clean energy economy can also be a transition to a new, local energy future, where the economic and environmental benefits of powering the economy are everywhere the sun shines.
At last, some sense about the superiority of “going local” when it comes to renewables. The road to renewables seems to follow the same law as much of other human endeavor does — especially when the Big Kahunas, like T. Boone Pickens, stand to gain from “remote renewables” and can dominate the discourse. But let’s also give a mention to not just locally produced, but community-owned wind power. On Sea Change Radio, I reported on Juhl Wind Development, a publicly-traded company that helps communities build wind projects for their own use [http://www.cchange.net/2008/07/16/the-community-building-power-of-wind/].
But let us not forget also that even locally-sourced renewable energy can pave the road to Hell, as we saw from this week’s report from Science on how biomass energy can end up destroying healthy, carbon-eating forests and end up increasing carbon emissions. Ian Bowles, mentioned above, has been pushing 5 biomass plants in Massachusetts. You can find a debate on the merits and flaws of biomass on Sea Change Radio [http://www.cchange.net/2009/07/29/biomass-or-biomess-a-debate/]. I ran into one of the show’s debaters, Chris Matera of MA Forests.org at yesterday’s 350.org event in Northampton, MA, and he told me a member of his organization was the one who pushed to get the information that resulted in the Science report out. It looks likely that new accounting rules will be developed to prevent biomass sourced from healthy forests from being counted as offsets for carbon emissions. Which goes to show that “local” activists can have a “global” impact.
Correction to above: the law the road to renewables follows I mentioned in the first sentence: the one paved with good intentions that leads to a very hot place!
What happens when there is no “local” wind? Don’t you need transmission lines for that?
Do people like high, noisy wind power towers better than silent power lines?
@Jacob,
There are places where there is no wind and tradeoffs may be required, such as tapping solar power instead of wind.
The point of my commentary is not to argue that everyone should be self-sufficient (e.g. off the grid), but that we should prioritize local self-reliance when the cost is similar to that of building an interstate transmission superhighway. There’s a lot of middle ground.
Yes, by all means, let’s avoid building transmission lines that can ensure power can be wheeled as needed nationwide. If a brownout hits one area due to overload, why should we be able to bring in power via another route or source? National security and energy stability is soooo overrated. While we’re at it, let’s get rid of the interstate highway system so we can enjoy the additional productivity of small, locally distributed roads with varying degrees of efficiency connecting them to other transportation routes, and lots of different tolls and stop signs at random points.
John, a few comments on your column.
First of all, I think setting up an either-or choice between utilizing local renewable energy resources or better, more remote renewable resources is the entirely wrong way to look at energy policy. Too often we get sidetracked into these kind of debates and lose track of what Bill McKibben calls the “fierce urgency of now” (http://www.thestar.com/article/607657) – i.e. the need to do everything we can as soon as we can to change the carbon trajectory of our economy to avoid the worst consequences of severe climate change.
There is no reason why developing local renewable resources is or should be mutually exclusive with developing resources that are currently more remote. For example, offshore wind in the Northeast is actually highly complementary with wind from the Midwest, since offshore wind blows more during the day while Midwestern wind produces the most at night.
Right now there are over 300,000 MW of wind plants waiting to connect to the grid, but are unable to do so because of the inadequacy of our power grid. That number is not a typo – 300,000 MW is more than 10 times the amount of wind we currently have installed. We need all of that wind energy and more to be developed as soon as possible if we are to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
Also, your article overlooks the fact that developing local renewable resources will still require a large amount of transmission. In the Northeast and other highly populated regions, the best renewable resources are still located at considerable distance from where people live. Developing those resources will require large amounts of new transmission lines.
Similarly, you also attempt to claim that people in the Northeast would be net “losers” from building transmission to bring in wind from the Midwest. In fact, every study that has looked at the issue has found that consumers in the Northeast would realize net benefits to the tune of over $15 billion per year if transmission were built to bring in low-cost wind energy to offset their use of high-cost fossil fuels. (http://awea.org/pubs/factsheets/Transmission_and_Consumer_Savings.pdf) The only people who might not like new transmission are fossil fueled power plant owners in the Northeast who don’t want competition that will limit their ability to charge exorbitant prices for electricity, but you won’t see me shedding any tears for them.
Michael Goggin,
American Wind Energy Association