the greens are blocking the very transmission network needed for renewable electricity to move throughout the economy. The best sites for wind and solar energy happen to be in the sticks -- in the desert Southwest where sunlight is most intense for longest, or the plains where the wind blows most often. To exploit this energy, utilities need to build transmission lines to connect their electricity to the places where consumers actually live.
It seems obvious that you'd need to join the energy source to the consumer, doesn't it?
In California, hundreds turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. The environmental class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park. "It's kind of schizophrenic behavior," Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. "They say that we want renewable energy, but we don't want you to put it anywhere."
It gets better:
Wind power has also become contentious in oh-so-green Oregon, once people realized that transmission lines would cut through forests. Transmissions lines from a wind project on the Nevada-Idaho border are clogged because of possible effects on the greater sage grouse.
Fucking hell! Some trees and some sage grouse are more important than saving the planet! How the fuck does that work then? I suppose they want the transmission lines around all these critters and greenery, leading to even greater losses in the miniscule amounts of energy created.
In addition to other technical problems, the transmission gap is a big reason wind only provides two-thirds of 1% of electricity generated in the U.S., and solar one-tenth of 1%
So, that is three-quarters of 1% of US energy that is currently produced by "renewables", the greens themselves are fighting vital infrastructure and their target for renewable energy is ...? Well, Barack O'Blimey wants 10% across the whole nation by 2012. California has mandated 20% by 2010.
I predict a
Amusingly, it's the rugged, God-fearing and mostly Republican Texans who are doing the best at making use of green energy.
Texas is now the wind capital of America (though wind still generates only 3% of state electricity) because it streamlined the regulatory and legal snarls
Putting their legislative money where their mouth is.
By contrast, though Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor Ed Rendell adopted wind power as a main political plank, he and Senator Bob Casey are leading a charge to repeal a 2005 law that makes transmission lines slightly easier to build.
Amazing! "We'll create lots of 'clean' energy but we'll just leave it to rot."
the states, with the exception of Texas, didn't make transmission lines easier to build, though it won't prevent them from penalizing the power companies that fail to meet an impossible goal.
How very New Labour of them.
3 comments:
Our own Greens are the same. They want uncontrolled immigration but oppose plans to expand airports to cope with the extra travellers, and protest about building new houses to put them all in. Seems there are shades of Green, all of them dark.
There are a lot of underground power lines here. The environment coped. It grew back over the filled-in trenches.
Nature is nowhere near as feeble as the average Green mind, fortunately.
There was an article in the FT this week that said one of the reasons why they might keep nuclear power stations open is because windfarms on north coast would need too many power lines and too many NIMBYs/greenies would be complaining.
> though it won't prevent them from penalizing the power companies that fail to meet an impossible goal.
Who will then pass this on to their customers through higher prices, and their staff through lower wages.
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