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WSJ - REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Wind Jammers
August 18, 2008

In this year's great energy debate, Democrats describe a future when
the U.S. finally embraces the anything-but-carbon avant-garde. It
turns out, however, that when wind and solar power do start to come on
line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many
Democrats.

To wit, 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. 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%.

Only last week, Duke Energy and American Electric Power announced a $1
billion joint venture to build a mere 240 miles of transmission line
in Indiana necessary to accommodate new wind farms. Yet the utilities
don't expect to be able to complete the lines for six long years --
until 2014, at the earliest, because of the time necessary to obtain
regulatory approval and rights-of-way, plus the obligatory lawsuits.

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."

California has a law mandating that utilities generate 20% of their
electricity from "clean-tech" by 2010. Some 24 states have adopted a
"renewable portfolio standard," while Barack Obama wants to impose a
national renewable mandate. But 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.

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 that block transmission in other states. 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.

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.
Similar melodramas are playing out in Arizona, the Dakotas, the
Carolinas, Tennessee, West Virginia, northern Maine, upstate New York,
and elsewhere.

In other words, the liberal push for alternatives has the look of a
huge bait-and-switch. Washington responds to the climate change panic
with multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidies for supposedly clean tech.
But then when those incentives start to have an effect in the real
world, the same greens who favor the subsidies say build the turbines
or towers somewhere else. The only energy sources they seem to like
are the ones we don't have.



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