In April 2007, a helicopter landed in a backyard in Johnson Valley, California, a desert hamlet of 440 residents on the outskirts of Joshua Tree National Park. “One of the neighbors went out and asked them what they were doing just a few hundred feet from his house,” Jim Harvey, a local landowner, recalls. “They said, ‘We’re the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and congratulations! You’re the lucky lottery winners of a brand new power line that’s going to come right through the middle of your town.’ ”
That power line is called Green Path North — an 85-mile-long high-voltage transmission wire from Los Angeles through public and private lands, connecting the city to potential geothermal and solar-thermal resources, with the whole shebang to be owned by the LADWP and paid for over the next decade by ratepayers. The cost: up to $1 billion just for the transmission line, plus untold billions for the not-yet-planned power plants themselves. Some 2,000 acres of desert would be sacrificed for a project that would, if it ever gets built, carry about 800 megawatts of renewable electricity — enough for 600,000 homes.
Green Path North is pretty typical of the renewables push in the United States: big, expensive, slow, and spectacularly uncertain. Twenty-eight states have pledged to shift their energy mix to at least 10% renewables, and at press time, Congress was considering a national target of 15% by 2020. But if many of us see this moment as a defining one, a key opportunity to reassess how we create and use energy across the country, the federal government seems content to leave the owners of the old energy world in charge of designing the new one. Big utilities are pushing hard to do what they do best — getting the government to subsidize construction of multi-billion-dollar, far-flung, supersize solar and wind farms covering millions of acres, all connected via outsize transmission lines. Nevada senator Harry Reid has introduced legislation to speed the way for a national “electric superhighway.” (Former Vice President Al Gore is another champion.) “We need to have an efficient way to take energy created in often remote areas and move it to where it is needed,” Reid said this spring on the Senate floor. “A cleaner, greener national transmission system — an electric superhighway — must be a top national priority.”
via Why the Microgrid Could Be the Answer to Our Energy Crisis | Fast Company.
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