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Electric transmission lines near Richvale, California. DAVID R. FRAZIER/DANITA DELIMONT AGENCY/DRR.NET -
H. David Nahai says the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power “agonize(s) all the time” about the effects of new transmission lines through the desert. KEVIN SCANLON -
In the path of powerlines? An endangered desert tortoise. PHOTO COURTESY DONNA THOMAS, CALIFORNIA DESERT COALITION -
An LADWP survey stake in Big Morongo. PHOTO COURTESY DONNA THOMAS, CALIFORNIA DESERT COALITION -
April Sall is interviewed while California Desert Coalition members protest the Green Path North Route in January. PHOTO COURTESY DONNA THOMAS, CALIFORNIA DESERT COALITION
One hundred
and fifty miles east of the city of Los Angeles, the Mojave and
Colorado deserts converge in towering granite rock formations and
strange succulent plants — Joshua trees raising their arms to
heaven like ancient prophets. From Interstate 10, everything looks
brown and barren, but oases of spring-fed green hide a little ways
in, with just enough water to sustain several hundred species of
birds, lizards, bugs, bobcats, desert tortoise and a ragged herd of
peninsular bighorn sheep.
Austin Puglisi had planned to
build his dream home here. Not your typical desert dream home, the
one with the high fence to protect it from wind and the irrigated
lawn to mimic the lush Midwest. Puglisi wanted to build a tiny
shack and set the rest of his 54-acre parcel aside for wildlife. He
would use only local water and recycle it into the aquifer. He
would get off the grid and live far from its influence. So it came
as a shock, one day last winter, when Puglisi discovered that the
grid was coming to him.
On federal land just a few yards
from the boundary of his property, Puglisi spotted a bright orange
stake marking the spot where a metal disk had been anchored in the
ground with concrete. Engraved on the disk were the words, “Los
Angeles Department of Water and Power.”
“From what I
could tell,” says the 47-year-old Puglisi, “it looked like some
kind of utility project was either going right through my land or
on the ridge right above it.”
Puglisi was flabbergasted.
“We had just secured our building permit,” he says. “We had put in
our solar-powered well. Now it looks like we have to put the whole
thing on hold.”
His neighbors were finding similar clues
in other places. Unfamiliar trucks were lumbering across the
Kickapoo Trail through the Big Morongo Canyon Preserve; helicopters
were landing on the boundaries of birdwatchers’ desert hideaways.
The men who emerged from the trucks and helicopters cheerfully
identified themselves as surveyors for the Los Angeles Department
of Water and Power, and handed out fliers detailing plans for their
brand-new renewable electricity transmission project, the Green
Path North.
In some circles, this was awfully good news.
The LADWP had begun planning the Green Path North three years ago,
in part to access carbon-free, always-on power from geothermal
fields in the Imperial Valley near the Salton Sea, 180 miles away.
The utility appeared to be moving ahead aggressively on
renewable-energy transmission — and that meant it might soon
deliver on its long-stalled promise to bring green power to its 4
million customers, who currently rely on coal burned out of state
for close to half their electricity.
“The LADWP wants to
be a leader in the field of renewable energy,” affirmed the
utility’s new general manager and CEO, H. David Nahai, shortly
after he moved from the utility’s board of commissioners to its
executive branch in December. And a significant piece of that
effort, he said, will be “building the transmission to bring it
home.”
But for Puglisi, who also volunteers with several
desert conservancies, the markers signaled a new threat to a
landscape that local environmentalists had long worked to preserve.
Small nonprofits like The Wildlands Conservancy and the Mojave
Desert Land Trust have spent years cobbling together private and
public funds to buy up hundreds of thousands of acres of the
Mojave, preserving them for marginal species like the fringe-toed
lizard and the endangered peninsular bighorn sheep. If the survey
markers indicated anything, it was that 85 miles of 160-foot-tall
steel towers, occupying a footprint 330 feet wide and buzzing with
500 kilovolt wires, would soon be cutting across the path those
sheep use to get to their only source of summer water.
Worried calls to the utility invariably met with the same response:
No route had been decided upon, and any discussion with the
community over the transmission project would be premature. The
utility confirms only that the Green Path North has to extend south
from the desert town of Hesperia to a substation near Palm Springs,
where it will link up with existing transmission to the Salton Sea
and Arizona’s Palo Verde nuclear plant. It could do that via any of
six different routes, including one down the Interstate 10 freeway
corridor, which would expand a right of way owned by another
California utility, Southern California Edison, and require the
condemnation of 3,500 properties.
—-
By the time of Puglisi’s discovery in late 2007, however, the LADWP
had already submitted an application to the Bureau of Land
Management for a right of way following the markers through the Big
Morongo Preserve. A few months later, it petitioned the federal
Department of Energy to include that route in the West-Wide Energy
Corridor (WWEC), a process set forth by Congress in the Energy
Policy Act of 2005 to fold hundreds of energy-transportation
projects into a single environmental review. The way it looked to
Puglisi, the L.A. Department of Water and Power — the same agency
that 85 years ago built an aqueduct to suck the Owens River Valley
dry — was setting up for another desert land grab. “Los Angeles,”
Puglisi observes, “doesn’t give out very much information.”
More to the point, Los Angeles is in a hurry. The city
needs to meet the renewable energy goals imposed by its
green-minded mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, who wants 20 percent of
the city’s power to come from renewable sources by 2010, and 35
percent by 2020. And it also has to catch up with the rest of
California. None of the state’s other utilities, from the
investor-owned Southern California Edison to the public Sacramento
Municipal Utility District, emit anywhere near the 13 million
metric tons of carbon dioxide that LADWP does every year. And while
the public utility was previously exempt from a state anti-global
warming law, it may soon be subject to a statewide cap-and-trade
system taxing all greenhouse gas emitters, public and private.
So the LADWP, which currently derives only eight percent
of its energy from renewable sources — up from three percent in
2006 — has had to scramble to find green power. And the Mojave has
long been a natural place to look.
“The wasteland of the
desert is the goldmine of our future energy needs,” writes the
octogenarian energy expert S. David Freeman in his book,
Winning Our Energy Independence. Freeman, who
helped guide energy policy under both the Nixon and Carter
administrations, ran the L.A. Department of Water and Power from
1997 to 2001. He wears cowboy hats and speaks in a Tennessean’s
exaggerated drawl, and retains an environmental hero’s glow in
Southern California, where he’s now busily greening the city’s
soot-choked port.
The 55-year-old Nahai, by contrast, ran
his own private real estate law firm before coming to the utility.
He wears elegantly cut suits and delivers his words in a refined,
British-inflected English. But in all the important ways, he is
Freeman’s philosophical heir: Next to the challenge of weaning his
city off coal, all other concerns pale.
“The effects on
the environment and the repercussions (of transmission) — we
agonize over it all the time,” Nahai says. “But I remain convinced
that those Salton Sea resources are the only fuel to replace coal.
And it is in the best interest of the state and all of its citizens
that we access them.”
A year ago, Nahai described this as
acting on behalf of the “greater good.” The wording was
unfortunate, echoing as it did the same utilitarian principle —
the greatest good for the greatest number — Franklin D. Roosevelt
used to justify the Owens Valley water deal. Desert residents
seized on it. “Whose ‘greater good’ are we talking about?” gripes
April Sall, who manages two preserves in the Mojave for The
Wildlands Conservancy. “What about the greater good of future
generations who won’t have this land to enjoy?”
—-
A serious 28-year-old with a blond ponytail and a rosy tan, Sall is
a third-generation citizen of this desert. Her family has lived
here since her grandmother came out as a young single woman in the
1920s and built her own house in the rocks. Sall left the area to
earn a biology degree at Humboldt State University, but later
returned, determined to defend her home. “There was a lot of great
conservation going on up on the North Coast with the Redwoods,” she
says. “There were not as many people working to save the desert.”
Sall and her allies find many parallels between the Los
Angeles Aqueduct and the Green Path North. In 1906, William
Mulholland inveigled Gifford Pinchot into declaring the Owens
Valley federal forest so the city wouldn’t have to buy off private
landowners; now the LADWP has asked the federal government to
classify its preferred route as a federal energy corridor. Congress
granted a right of way for the Los Angeles aqueduct only after the
city promised it would use the water solely for non-industrial
purposes; the LADWP hopes to smooth the way for its transmission
line by dedicating it only to green power.
“The general sentiment that we’re finding as desert
residents and biologists is that Los Angeles thinks the desert is a
place to dump things,” says Sall. “First it’s their trash, then
their nuclear waste. Now it’s their energy projects.”
Almost since George Westinghouse built an
11,000-volt power line to transport electricity 20 miles from
Niagara Falls to Buffalo, N.Y., the transmission of electrical
power has stirred up trouble. Cities go dark when there isn’t
enough of it; expensive wind projects go underused because no one
can agree on who will front the money for the power lines. Because
there’s a financial incentive for utilities to own transmission —
it means they don’t have to pay “wheeling fees” to use another
company’s lines — sometimes more transmission gets built than
anyone really needs. Most of the time, however, energy companies
complain that energy is like food: There’s plenty to go around, and
no one would starve if only the distribution were better.
It was with that complaint in mind that Congress in 2005 designated
routes through federal lands in 11 Western states, plus more
potential transmission through private land in the Southwest and
Northeast. If local and state governments attempt to block these
corridors, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission can step in
after a year and, under the provisions of the energy bill, push the
projects through. Consequently, the protests of the Mojave
activists are being echoed throughout the West. The sweeping
environmental impact report for the West-Wide Energy Corridor
designates more than 6,000 miles of corridors — and completing
them will require rezoning some 165 wilderness areas.
The
Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance is fighting a transmission
corridor that will plow a route along Utah’s Moab Rim. In Oregon,
conservation groups oppose a proposed gas line that would bore
under rivers in the Mount Hood National Forest. According to the
map of proposed transmission routes issued by the Department of
Energy, the state of Nevada could be divided up like a quilt to
transport energy straight through the Desert National Wildlife
Complex. “No opening of any wilderness areas in this state to any
energy corridors ever,” Bill Huggins of Friends of the Nevada
Wilderness told the Department of Energy at a public meeting in Las
Vegas. “Absolutely not.”
“It’s hard to see which Western
constituency could possibly support this,” said Amy Atwood, a staff
attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, at meeting in
Portland, Ore. “But the answer, of course, is that the constituency
that supports this doesn’t live in the West. It lives on Wall
Street and in D.C., and it is attempting, essentially … to sell
off as much of our public lands as possible for energy development
before public outcry rises to the degree that such policy choices
will no longer be tolerated.”
Some of these battles have
clearer lines than others. An energy corridor devoted to bringing
more oil out of Utah likely serves no environmental agenda. Come
out against a project that brings wind energy down from Wyoming,
however, or moves electricity from large-scale solar installations
to coal-dependent cities, and you come out against polar bears and
in favor of cataclysmic drought, all to prevent a localized
disturbance in your backyard. No matter how pristine that backyard,
or how many rare species it contains, saving it can’t possibly
trump saving the coasts from rising seas.
All this has
inspired some California leaders to suggest that only
conservationists now stand in the way of renewable energy. In an
April 18 speech at Yale University’s Climate Change Conference,
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that “the Germans,
the French, the Canadians, the Japanese, they all want to come out
to California and put solar power plants in the Mojave desert and
in other places. The only thing is that the problem is getting that
new energy to the power grid because of environmental hurdles.”
“I think Gov. Schwarzenegger so wants to see progress
that he’s becoming impatient,” says Carl Zichella, the Sierra
Club’s regional staff director for Southern California. “I share
the governor’s impatience, but we’re working as fast as we can.”
Moving large utilities off coal and onto renewables, he says, “is a
little like turning the Exxon Valdez around.”
For the past year, Zichella has been part of the
Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative (RETI), a statewide
consortium of energy companies, land-management agencies and
environmental groups devoted to solving the myriad problems
associated with bringing carbon-free power to market. He’s also
participating in the Western Governors’ Association’s Western
Renewable Energy Zones project, which had its kickoff meeting May
28 in Salt Lake City. The WGA foresees adding 30,000 megawatts of
“new clean and diverse energy” to the Western states’ grid by 2015.
“Avoiding protected areas of the desert is going to be a
neat trick,” Zichella says, “but that doesn’t mean it can’t be
done. The thing people have to keep in the back of their minds is
that FERC has the authority to build lines. That makes it incumbent
upon us to make sure those lines are dedicated to renewable energy,
and that we’re not facilitating the development of coal.”
Zichella is reserving judgment on the Green Path North until the
L.A. Department of Water and Power officially announces a route,
hoping the utility will choose to work with Southern California
Edison to share a right of way along the freeway corridor. He is
less diplomatic, however, about another proposed transmission line
to the south, San Diego Gas & Electric’s Sunrise Powerlink.
“The Sunrise Powerlink is an example of a project that has been
jammed through without public support or environmental safeguards,”
Zichella says. “It would be a mistake to allow it to be built.”
Like the Green Path North, the $1.5 billion, 150-mile
Sunrise Powerlink has been pitched as a way of transporting
geothermal from the Salton Sea and solar power from large-scale
projects the desert. Its preferred route also cuts through pristine
bighorn sheep habitat, in California’s much-beloved Anza Borrego
State Park. A report issued in January by the California Public
Utilities Commission flatly concludes that the investor-owned
SDG&E’s preferred route for the Sunrise Powerlink would
devastate the wilderness. The report goes on to recommend several
alternatives, including upgrading existing transmission lines that
the California Independent System Operator has declared critically
congested.
Schwarzenegger, however, likes the Sunrise
Powerlink just fine — and not, his office says, just because the
San Diego utility’s parent corporation, Sempra Energy, donated
$25,000 to his inaugural committee. (Shortly after he announced his
support for the Powerlink, Sempra poured another $50,000 into a
redistricting effort the governor wants on the next state ballot.)
The environmentalists, he told the Yale audience, are engaging in a
“kind of a schizophrenic behavior. They say that we want renewable
energy but we don’t want you to put it anywhere.”
David
Hogan of the Center for Biological Diversity says that it’s not
that simple. He doubts whether the Sunrise Powerlink will carry as
much renewable energy as it does natural gas-fired power from a
plant Sempra recently acquired in northern Mexico. “Sempra has
invested billions in a liquefied natural gas facility in Baja,” he
says, “and they need a way to get that to market. That’s what the
Sunrise Powerlink is for.”
Other Powerlink opponents
doubt the viability of the Salton Sea fields, claiming that the
utilities have an inflated sense of how much power lies waiting
there or how much can be harnessed without draining half the sea.
But a seismic survey commissioned by CalEnergy, which already
operates a 340 megawatt operation at the site, shows that the
Salton Sea geothermal fields (SSGF) may be hotter and deeper than
anyone guessed, with enough steamy brine to spin out 2,330
megawatts for more than 30 years and power more than 2 million
homes.
“We think it’s the largest geothermal field in the
planet,” says CalEnergy’s vice president, Vince Signorotti. And
while CalEnergy has not taken an official position on either the
Green Path North or the Sunrise Powerlink, Signorotti does have an
opinion about transmission in general. “I think what we need to do
as a state is take a step back and look at what’s happened in the
last 30 years. Have we kept pace with the development of new
transmission? The answer is clearly no. And that’s irresponsible.”
—-
Early on, when LADWP’s survey markers
started to appear in nature preserves and on private property, a
group of desert activists calling themselves the California Desert
Coalition set out to document them using GPS coordinates. Two of
those activists, Ruth Rieman and Donna Thomas, led residents and
journalists on regular visits to the sites, to show off not only
the markers but the area’s dramatic mesquite-covered washes,
thousand-foot bluffs and, this spring, its wildflowers. But when
the two women hiked out to the Big Morongo preserve in April, they
found that all the survey markers had disappeared. Only mounds of
disturbed soil remained.
“They
didn’t brush out their tracks,” Rieman muttered disapprovingly.
“I ordered all of those markers taken out,” Nahai says.
“I wrote personal letters to all of the property owners that were
affected to explain that the markers were being removed, and that
they were not intended to indicate a decided pathway. We’re going
to have a very open and visible process before deciding on a
route.”
The move was intended, he adds, “to alleviate
anxiety.” Instead, it seemed only to compound suspicions.
“There’s no question there’s an urgency about the greenhouse gas
situation and the need for California to make a statement. It’s a
question of how they do it, and the process they take to arrive at
it,” says Joan Taylor, chair of the energy committee for the Sierra
Club’s desert chapter. “Trespassing on land and putting monuments
in and building brand-new transmission corridors through
ecologically sensitive areas, and then lying about it — that just
isn’t a good way to start.”
Nahai, who takes pride in his
environmental credibility — he’s a father of three who often
invokes his children’s future when making his case for the planet
— appears pained by the controversy. He has served on the local
water board, on the board of the League of Conservation Voters, and
it was under his watch as commission chair that the LADWP finally
made good on its agreement to return water to the Owens Valley
(“There it is,” he announced at the unveiling of the
reverse-pumping project, “give it back,” a magnanimous flip-flop of
Mulholland’s 1913 declaration, “There it is, take it.”)
Nahai guarantees that the Green Path North will carry only
carbon-free sources of electricity along its route. In late April,
the LADWP inked an agreement with the Salton Sea-adjacent Imperial
Irrigation District to begin work on its first 200-megawatt plant.
It seems unlikely that the utility will cave to the Mojave
conservationists’ demands.
It comes down to this, Nahai
says: “What is it that we’re going to do as a state and a society?
If we have announced to the world, as we have, that we’re going to
foster and support renewable energy, that we’re going to open our
doors to the renewables industry, then we have got to live up to
our promises.”
And besides, as Schwarzenegger remarked in
his Yale speech, “If you can’t put solar panels in the Mojave
Desert, where the hell can you put them?”
“How about on
the rooftops and parking lots of the cities that actually use the
power?” suggests Taylor. “If you’re worried about energy security,
generate it where it’s used.” She points to Southern California
Edison’s rooftop solar effort, launched April 2, to put a total of
two square miles of photovoltaic panels atop warehouses in the
inland counties of San Bernardino and Riverside. In five years, the
$875 million project will generate 225 megawatts of electricity at
peak hours, enough to serve 162,000 homes.
Yet even that
kind of massive solar project only nicks away at the needs of
coal-fired Los Angeles, which in the summer of 2006 hit a peak load
exceeding 6,000 megawatts. LADWP will spend $300 million over the
next 10 years to install 280 megawatts of locally generated power.
It broke ground in March on the Pine Tree Wind Farm in the Mojave’s
Jawbone Canyon, a project that the Audubon Society fought bitterly;
it will soon be the largest municipally owned wind project in the
nation. The city has passed a green building ordinance requiring a
20 percent increase in energy efficiency for all new construction.
But to meet its 35 percent by 2020 goal, Nahai says, it still needs
transmission to the Salton Sea.
Vince Signorotti
agrees. “I don’t believe any of the (utilities) are going to get to
their magic number without the Salton Sea being developed,” he
says. “It’s just an incredibly important
resource.”
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Walking on a Wire.
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