Energy Quest Sets Up Power Struggle
About 100 miles north of Reno, outside a desert town named Gerlach -- whose slogan is “where the pavement ends and the West begins” -- a quarrel is simmering that highlights the competing visions for the future of electricity production in the United States.
And in a curious political twist, Los Angeles may find itself playing a deciding role in the dispute, a showdown between “green power” and coal power.
Near the site of the annual Burning Man festival, a subsidiary of San Diego-based Sempra Energy is proposing to build a coal-fired power plant that could supply enough electricity to California and the Pacific Northwest to light up 1.5 million homes.
Nearby, green-power advocates are pushing an equally ambitious proposal to harness the force of the wind, as well as the heat of the sun and the Earth’s core, to create enough electricity to power 1.2 million homes.
Both proposals would connect to the same high-voltage transmission line in order to move electricity to consumers. But there is only enough space left on the electrical freeway for one of the two -- at least at the current sizes. So government regulators and politicians must make a choice.
That choice is between coal-fired power -- a heavily polluting form of fossil fuel energy that could be counted on to help curtail the West’s chronic electricity shortages -- and renewable power. The latter is a less-proven option that promises a future free of the emissions that cause smog and acid rain and that contribute to global warming.
Los Angeles, which recently had its own debate over investing in coal or renewable energy, may wind up resolving the dispute, because the city Department of Water and Power runs and partly owns the transmission line that passes through northern Nevada.
The Los Angeles City Council would have to agree to allow one of the projects to connect to the line, which moves megawatts between Sylmar and Oregon. So would the other owners: Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank and Southern California Edison. Decisions are not expected for months.
Sempra representatives said their proposal, Granite Fox Power, would bring badly needed electricity to Western states, including California, where the managers of its power grid recently warned of “critically thin operating margins” that could lead to shortages this summer. The plant, which Sempra expects to be operational by 2010, would provide jobs and tax revenue to a corner of Nevada whose main economic benefactor is gambling and, they contend, would produce 80% less pollution than most coal plants.
“This is not your father’s power plant. This is a new-technology coal plant with sophisticated designs,” said Michael R. Niggli, president of Sempra Generation, an arm of Sempra Energy.
Proponents of green power said their proposals -- the most advanced of which is an office complex of sorts for geothermal, wind and solar generators called the Nevada Energy Park -- also would add jobs and boost tax coffers, without dirtying the air.
Unlike Sempra’s plan, however, the green-power proposals do not have sufficient financial backing at this time, and even supporters concede that they may not come together for years.
“The renewables are a little ahead of their time right now, but in the long run, this has to start taking the place of fossil fuels,” said David Rumsey, a retired California real estate developer, who owns a ranch near Gerlach that he hopes to turn into a wildlife refuge. “The difficult political decision in Nevada is: Do we take this old-fashioned coal plant, or do we wait?”
Although the Granite Fox plan might be less polluting compared with coal plants built decades ago, it would still spew an estimated 4,400 tons of nitrogen oxide and 2,500 tons of sulfur dioxide every year, said Phyllis Fox, an air quality specialist hired by Rumsey. Sempra’s preliminary figures predict it would emit 3,315 tons of each of the contaminants, the main ingredients of smog and acid rain.
Last year, in a decision praised by environmentalists, Mayor James K. Hahn and the City Council pulled out of a plan to invest in more coal-fired electricity in Utah and proposed requiring the city to obtain 20% of its power from renewable energy by 2017. Proponents of green power argue that city leaders should now back up their commitment by blocking the Nevada coal plant and perhaps investing in the Nevada renewable projects.
“It’s very much in L.A.’s court,” said Jon Wellinghoff, a Las Vegas lawyer and an advocate for green power in the West. “They’re sitting on the line.”
DWP officials have received a proposal by Sempra to connect to the transmission line. But many questions need to be answered, notably whether the new link would affect the line’s ability to reliably move power to Los Angeles customers, said John Schumann, the department’s director of power system projects. Meanwhile, DWP officials and Councilman Tony Cardenas recently traveled to Nevada to learn more about the rival renewable projects there.
Though virtually unknown outside the headquarters of western utilities and halls of power in Sacramento and Carson City, Nev., the proposed coal plant has aroused strong passions in Gerlach.
The town of fewer than 500 residents, a gateway to the Black Rock Desert, relies heavily on tourism, including hunters, hikers and the annual hordes that make the pilgrimage to the Burning Man festival.
“What Sempra is trying to do is create a sense of inevitability,” said Don Asher, an author and freelance writer, who founded an opposition group called Keep California’s Pollution in California. “But the reality is [that] this power plant can be stopped. This is a nightmare of old thought. This is not ‘clean coal.’ We can wait for the renewable energy. We don’t need mercury and smog dumped on us for the next 30 years.”
Similar debates are taking place throughout the country, as public and private utilities weigh the benefits of additional coal power -- the nation’s most plentiful and inexpensive fossil fuel source -- against the prospect of renewable energy, which is becoming cost-competitive due to advances in technology.
More than 100 coal-fired power plants are being proposed across the U.S., as energy companies seek to take advantage of electricity shortages and a coal-friendly regulatory climate in Washington to revive a source of power that had fallen out of favor due to its polluting emissions.
Simultaneously, a growing number of states, including California and Nevada, are passing “renewable portfolio standard” laws that require utilities to invest in green power, hoping to propel a burgeoning market in biomass, wind, solar and geothermal energy.
Sempra representatives say that building a connection to the type of transmission line that moves through Nevada is extremely expensive -- estimates range from $130 million to $150 million. Right now, Sempra is the only player with enough money to pay for it.
The coal plant would need a capacity of 1,450 megawatts, but Sempra is proposing to build a bigger connection. It would contain enough excess space for about 200 megawatts of renewable power to get to market -- a link that otherwise might never become available, backers argue.
“Obviously, there are some folks from the environmental community that have questions and doubts about Granite Fox. But from an economic standpoint, renewables alone would not generate enough power to make a project viable,” said former Nevada Gov. Robert List, a lobbyist for Sempra. List also is an investor in a wind-power venture that hopes to piggyback on the coal plant’s connection.
Green-power proponents consider 200 megawatts of renewable power to be a mere fraction of what northern Nevada is capable of producing. They point to a recent California Energy Commission report that listed the region as an exceptional location for renewables.
Although no current renewable project has the financing to build a connection, that could change in the near future, said V. John White, a Sacramento environmental lobbyist, who is executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies.
“If we put that coal plant in now, we foreclose that conversation [in Nevada] -- all for a coal plant for which there is no customer currently in California,” White said. “It’s getting late for anyone to do old-fashioned coal. Global warming is becoming a significant issue, and California is beginning to look at where its power is coming from.”
Attitudes may be different in Nevada, however. Richard Burdette, the energy advisor to Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn, said green power may indeed be the electricity source of the future. But for the time being -- and for years to come -- he believes coal’s reliability cannot be beaten.
“Nevada has some of the best renewable resources in the country, and I am one of the biggest supporters of renewables around,” Burdette said. “But we are still going to buy two-thirds of our energy from fossil fuels two decades from now. There is just no viable alternative.”
