Does Clean Energy Have to be Ugly? Plans for Largest Solar Power Op Include High-Voltage Lines in Scenic Vista
What price are you willing to pay to get the oil/coal/gas monkey off your back and switch your community to clean energy? Would you accept a long stretch of high-voltage power lines across your favorite scenic vista?
It’s a question I’ve taken on before in a post titled, “What Do I WIMBY (Want In My Backyard)?,” and it’s now cropped up in the news. The place: Southern California. The plan: San Diego Gas & Electric Company’s proposal to build one of the planet’s biggest solar power installations in the desert, along with wind and geothermal facilities. The opposition: environmental groups like the Center for Biological Diversity.
Why? Because the Sunrise Powerlink clean-energy project calls for 150 miles of high-voltage power lines, including spans through the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the Cleveland National Forest and other protected parks and preserves. In fact, state and federal agencies analyzing seven potential routes for power lines ranked the path through Anza-Borrego as the second-worst in terms of potential environmental damage.
The Center for Biological Diversity says its opposition goes beyond just aesthetics, though. It claims the main reason for the Powerlink project is access to cheap, polluting energy from Mexico, a charge San Diego Gas & Electric has dismissed as a “myth.” The center, in turn, has offered testimony arguing that the utility’s contracts for renewable energy “aren’t viable.”
“The project would ravage habitat, contribute to global warming, and even pose a significant threat to people from wildfire,” reads a project summary from the center.
Which position will carry the day? California residents might know by August, when the California Public Utilities Commission could give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to the proposal.
Please don’t call the Sunrise Powerlink a “clean energy” project. It’s a power line and it can carry dirty power as easily as renewable power. If you dug a little more deeply, you’d see that the renewable energy involved is really a smokescreen. Sempra energy (SDG&E’s parent company) didn’t invest billions in LNG terminals, pipelines and gas-fired power plants in Baja not to use them. Now they want to get that dirty power, produced without following any of California’s environmental laws, to the market in Southern California, which is what this is all about. Please don’t be duped by SDG&E’s greenwashing.
If those power lines reduce our subjectivity to foreign powers and our cost of living, then I believe they ARE BEAUTIFUL and an addition to any scenic view. And there are plenty of open spaces as or more scenic for the nostalgic.
ps Just like the wind turbines, I will consider them a work of art. Not science.