Not long after Enron, one of
our larger humpty-dumpties, had its great fall, I heard a supporter
say he missed its CEO, because “Ken Lay was a visionary. He wanted
to cover parts of Texas with wind turbines and export that clean
energy to the rest of the country.”
Yeah, a visionary.
Wind or natural gas or hog manure was all the same to Enron:
vehicles of enrichment. But Enron’s biggest crime
wasn’t financial trickery. It was its betrayal of the
nation’s stab at electric deregulation. Until Enron and the
little Enrons turned deregulation into a scandal, it had the
potential to break apart monopolistic utilities and open the way to
innovation, as happened in the telephone industry. Once Enron and
the gang of energy traders almost bankrupted California, the
restructuring of a stodgy industry came to a halt.
To
understand what electric utilities are, and why they must be shaken
up, imagine that Thomas Edison — dead since 1931— comes
to life and tours a “modern” coal-fired power plant. It would all
be familiar to him except the computerized control room. The plant
would be bigger and hotter and operate at a higher voltage, but the
underlying technology would be the same.
Worse, a recent
report by the industry’s research arm, the Electric Power
Research Institute, says that for every $100 Americans pay to a
utility, they spend another $50 on losses from outages, brown-outs,
voltage fluctuations and the like.
As if the industry
didn’t have enough problems, this fall in Colorado along came
ballot Initiative-37, which, now that it has passed 53 percent-47
percent, requires utilities to begin selling electricity from
renewable sources such as wind, solar, flowing water, the burning
of used french-fry oil. My local electric utility, on whose board
of directors I sit, voted to back the initiative.
That
made Delta-Montrose Electric Association part of a tiny minority.
On the other side were Colorado’s major utilities, spending
millions of customer dollars. For giants like Xcel, it was about
family values: They are happily married to coal, and another
partner in the bedroom is anathema.
They have a point.
Winds start and stop without a moment’s notice while
coal-fired power plants work best flat-out. Ask a coal plant to
quickly change speed to make up for a drop in wind generation
elsewhere on the system, and you will see a spectacular pile-up.
But rather than figure out how to add renewables to their
mix, and rather than think, “Maybe we should begin phasing out of
coal and move into wind and efficiency,” Colorado’s utilities
spent their customers’ money begging voters to let them
remain in the early 20th century.
The utilities are not
the only ones wind power will trouble. It will give lots of us
fits. I live within a few miles of three mines that produce 1
percent of America’s coal. But if not for train whistles and
crossing gates, I wouldn’t know I live in a coal valley.
Underground mines occupy few acres above ground.
By
comparison, wind turbines take up lots of land and are visible from
far off. Ask the people on Cape Cod who object to possible turbines
off their shores. Ask bird-watchers, who fear that whirling
propellers will knock hundreds of thousands of birds out of the
sky.
Why then did I — half utility beast and half
environmental beast — back renewable energy on election day?
First, because integrating wind into the electricity mix will force
utility executives and engineers to innovate, or to make way for
those who can. With deregulation dead, wind is the only modernizing
tool for a horse-and-buggy industry.
Second: Wind is not
a utopian idea. Wind is pragmatic, central-station power, like
coal. Its problems can be solved.
Third: After seeing
photos of melting polar ice caps in National
Geographic, I believe in global climate change. We must
cut our use of fossil fuels.
There is also beauty. I
visited a large wind ranch on the arid, windy plains of New Mexico
recently, where 136 turbines snake for miles along the edge of a
low cliff. Except for a recurring whoosh, the machines were silent.
What I most remember are the shadows of the immense blades sweeping
across the ground toward me. I stood in the near silence and in
those racing shadows until our tour bus left.
The wind
machines added to the beauty of that land, as windmills add beauty
to Holland’s coast. I could live among them, as I now live
among coal trains. All I ask is that some of the electricity the
turbines create out of thin air comes to me.
Ed
Marston is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He writes in
Paonia, Colorado.
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