Coyote Crossing

I want you to pick up your phone today and call California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at (916) 445-2841. You may be on hold for a few minutes after you choose the voice mail option for “express your opinion on a hot issue.“ You’ll talk to a human being after a short wait. Tell that human being that the Sunrise Powerlink transmission line routes now proposed for Imperial and San Diego counties are

1) destructive of desert wilderness in Anza Borrego State Park and nearby wildlands;

2) dangerous, given that the lines are expected to spark catastrophic wildfires in the backcountry every 15 years or so, and;

3) unnecessary, given that rooftop solar is a cheaper and more reliable way of providing southern California with electrical power.

You can also, if you choose, point out that Arnold has a good record on environmental issues (which, I am pained to report, he really does, for a Republican) and that he has a chance to keep that record intact here.

If you don’t want to use the phone, the DesertBlog has email links for you with pre-formatted messages. They also have links to more info.

Here’s the background.

Sunrise Powerlink is a project of Sempra Energy, a San Diego-based natural gas company and an indicted co-conspirator in the Enron-era gaming of California’s electricity markets. Sempra is owner of San Diego Gas and Electric company. One of the less-noticed aspects of the deliberate energy shortage in California in 2000-2001 was Sempra’s development of a power generating infrastructure in Baja California, centered on building gigantic Liquid Natural Gas (LNG)-fueled generating stations. An LNG terminal was finished this year in Costa Azul. The LNG is pumped out of the ground in Indonesia, chilled to cryogenic temperatures, then shipped on tankers to Costa Azul, where it is warmed back into a gas and piped to generating stations in the border town of Mexicali, Baja’s largest city.

A side note: aside from being yet another way of burning fossil fuels, LNG facilities and the ships that supply them are quite dangerous. LNG is highly explosive. An LNG tanker, or a pipeline or storage tank, presents a vulnerable target of opportunity for terrorism. A rocket-propelled grenade hit on an LNG tanker in a harbor could rival the World Trade Center attack in levels of carnage. This is one reason Sempra built the Costa Azul terminal in expendable Mexico rather than, say, Long Beach.

In order to get the electrical power from Baja to San Diego, Sempra/SDG&E says it needs new transmission lines from Mexicali to the coast. This makes a limited amount of sense only if we ignore certain tech developments I’ll get to in a minute, and if we also ignore the burgeoning respiratory ailments among kids in Baja that will be excacerbated by burning LNG under Mexico’s lax emissions standards, and if we further ignore that whole global warming issue, about which Sempra’s CEO Don Felsinger is on record as being in that abject flat-out denial typical of energy company CEOs.

And given California mandates to support new, carbon-neutral power generation, Sempra’s stated plan to hook the east end of the Sunrise Powerlink into geothermal, wind, and solar farms in the Imperial Valley’s desert could lead one to decide, after a superficial review, that new powerlines could make sense. Were you to decide that — wrongly, as we’ll see in a bit — there’s a transmission line corridor already in place that Sempra could use along Interstate 8, the route used by the existing Southwest Powerlink transmission lines, at present San Diego’s sole link to California’s grid, an Achilles heel that was the subject of much discussion during the fake power crisis of 2000-2001.

But instead, Sempra wants to run the Sunrise Powerlink through remote bighorn sheep habitat in Anza Borrego Desert State Park, bringing heavy construction equipment in to build towers and right-of-way roads and bringing latrines and noise and diesel exhaust into wilderness. It would be the first time wildland in California is removed from wilderness designation for a private industrial project. It would be devastating to Anza Borrego’s bighorn, whose habitat in California’s part of the Sonoran Desert is already fragmented to hell and back.

Perhaps worse, though SDG&E employees have lied about it in public testimony, the transmission towers are expected to spark huge wildfires in the chaparral west of the desert at least once every 15 years. Last year’s catastrophic Witch Fire, that burned from the outback nearly to the ocean, was caused by an arcing SDG&E transmission line.

And some people estimate that the fuel needed to build the line through remote desert and chaparral would more than offset any carbon conserved by the “green power” farms in the Imperial Valley, even if wildfires don’t release wild carbon on a regular basis.

The proposed Sunrise Powerlink alignment makes so little economic or ecological sense that its Environmental Impact Statement identifies six or seven preferable alternatives, with “don’t build it at all” leading the list.

So why does Sempra want to push a transmission corridor through Anza Borrego? Because the slightly economically preferable, somewhat more environmentally sound alignment along Interstate 8 is too far south for Sempra to hook in to Southern California Edison’s distribution grid, which would allow Sempra to sell electricity to Los Angeles. Sempra and SDG&E downplay these plans, but staffers have privately admitted that a substation along the proposed route exists to hook into LA’s grid.

Publicly, however, Sempra and SDG&E cast their project as a way of keeping San Diego’s lights on with “green energy” from the Imperial Valley.

This is where that tech development I referred to earlier becomes relevant to the argument. It used to be argued that the only cost-effective solar electric generation came from gigantic industrial facilities in the desert, mirrors focusing the desert sun on fluid which, thus heated, runs turbines. Photovoltaics, the kind of solar panels that convert light directly to electricity with no moving parts, were just too expensive for widespread use, it was said, and were practical only for very remote areas, affluent environmentalist homeowners wanting to make a point, and novelty gadgets.

But if that was ever true, it’s changed. In the last few months the cost of thin-film photovoltaics has dropped by half. Southern California Edison announced this year that it was going to spend $875 million to install rooftop thin-film solar panels on commercial buildings in Los Angeles, and that this would generate enough power to supply 162,000 private homes.

Do the math. That’s a wholesale cost of $5,401.25 per household, well within the amortization range of many property owners even if you don’t expect any government or utility company rebates. (Payments on a $5,500 5-year loan at 6% fixed interest would be $106 a month. How much is your electric bill?)

San Diego is even sunnier than Los Angeles, so the power generated per dollar spent would likely be a bit higher. Local generation means less reliance on fragile distribution lines, less energy lost in transmission, and a generally more robust power generating infrastructure, making not only the northern alignment of the Sunrise Powerlink utterly unnecessary but also obviating any need even for the southern route, for the LNG terminals and polluting turbines in Mexicali’s poor neighborhoods, or for Don Felsinger’s executive compensation. A good outcome all around.

And in fact, there’s something called the “San Diego Smart Energy 2020” plan, based on rooftop solar and local generation and efficiency, that would reduce San Diego’s carbon footprint significantly more than the greenwashed Sunrise Powerlink would at best.

So why call Schwarzenegger today? Because the Final EIR for the Sunrise Powerlink is out, and SDG&E is mobilizing supporters to call the Governor’s office, and because Arnold has some historic campaign funding ties to Sempra that are complex enough to cause Federal Election Commission investigators to scratch their heads, so he may well be leaning in a pro-Sempra direction. The more people like us he hears from, the easier it will be for him to do the right thing. California voters’ input is especially important, but we all know Arnold’s paying attention to the rest of the country as well.

I’ve made my call already. (916) 445-2841. Or see here for email links. Your message is important. Please spread the word by linking to this post or DesertBlog, or both: blog posts, Twitter, email, whatever. The bighorn thank you.

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