From the by M.D. Fletcher |
September 2011 |
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Well, here we are in beautiful September. I can tell it's September because the chile crop is coming in, the kids are back in school and the mile-wide and inch-deep politicians who normally would have absolutely nothing to do with us were recently back from the Neverland cesspool that is Washington D.C. and were then currently making the obligatory photo-op rounds with various locally elected officials and other assorted perennial glad-handers. Particularly popular this go-round was the three celebrated alternative energy projects strewn across Luna County by a couple of different entrepreneurs and one very battle-weary regulated electric utility. The politicians eat this stuff up because they, after all, were the ones who passed all sorts of legislation designed to make each of these extremely expensive and woefully inefficient projects economically possible. You see, if forced to face the cold, hard scrutiny of real dollars and cents, none of these deals would have ever gotten off the ground. The fact is, all of these so-called new technologies have been around for decades; they were never placed into commercial operation because in terms of willing investors (outside of alternative reality havens like the Screen Actors Guild and the NFL), really stupid rich people have always been extremely hard to find. The vast majority of the rest us have to work each and every day for a living. Politicians don't. They work to get elected. Then they work to get re-elected. In between times, they do whatever their political and special interest aristocracy tells them to do which lately, by the way, amounts to absolutely nothing about anything. But back when as a country we still had a pot and a window, the idea was to wean the nation from foreign energy dependence. Never mind that as far as the generation of electricity, we have the largest coal reserves in the world, and never mind that nuclear power represents a proven, safe, economical and highly efficient generation technology. Never mind all that. So what if wind, solar and biofuel don't make economic sense; the politicians can make it happen. Their big thumb on the scale is free money - our money - and lots of it. |
The wind farm recently developed in northeastern Luna County (at some place whimsically named Macho Springs) is a good example of poor economics coupled with backward engineering. Windmills have been around forever. They're just not very reliable; hence, the poor economics. Then this fundamentally primitive design is simply and massively super-sized. On a good day, it takes 28 of these behemoths to generate 50 megawatts of ultimately unreliable power. In stark contrast, we have a natural gas-fired generating station in Hidalgo County with a 5-acre footprint that can ramp up to 160 megawatts of dead-certain power in eight minutes. Guess which project needed a politician's Midas touch. The biofuel project down near Columbus has, for the last three years, been in the very early stages. However, millions have already been spent on things like preliminary design work and environmental impact statements (entirely taxpayer-funded) and stroke 'n stoke meetings with local dignitaries (still taxpayer-funded). If successful, the algae-based fuel will be similar to corn-based ethanol, except without the corn. Both processes require more energy to produce the fuel than the resultant fuel delivers, so naturally this makes perfect sense to politicians. The third player in this road show triad is the photovoltaic farm recently completed by our friends at PNM who, like all electric utilities in New Mexico are required by state law (as interpreted by the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission) to add big blocks of alternative energy to their generation portfolios. After having barely survived a very contentious and for them, unsuccessful rate case in front of an openly hostile PRC, I suspect PNM would like nothing more than to just get this unrelated and relatively peripheral project behind them. But the politicians love it. They know what's good for us and don't mind spending our money to rub our noses in it. And when it gets their picture in the media, that gentle reader, is political gold. But it's September and they're back in Washington, busily feeling our pain while they're picking our pockets. But by golly, they're not here. September is a beautiful time of year. |
