‘Unless you are willing to live naked in a tree and eat nuts for the next 30 years, coal’s going to be part of the portfolio’

Articles — By forcechange on December 29, 2008 4:54 pm

This is what the Governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer told the Christian Science Monitor for an article about wind energy and transmission lines.  Schweitzer was making this statement, not as an argument against alternative energy, but as a matter-of-fact regarding the state of American energy production.

Montana, like most of the central states in the U.S., sits on tremendous wind resources.  However, as is the problem with almost all regions with high winds, it is a long distance from the population centers that consume the most electricity.

As a result, Schweitzer has been a big supporter of proposals to conduct a massive upgrade of our nation’s transmission grid.  He recently called on the federal government to spend $15 billion to build the next-generation grid to link out-of-the-way regions like Montana, with population centers on the east and west coasts.

However, like the controversial Sunrise Powerlink project in San Diego, opponents argue that new transmission lines into Montana would also be used to support that state’s production of dirty coal power.

This conflict between building new transmission lines and the type of electricity that is carried upon them is going to continue for the foreseeable future.  It seems to us that really the only way to avoid this problem is to increase the cost of generating coal energy through a carbon tax until the clean energy like Montana-wind is cheaper than the dirty energy like Montana-coal.  As we’ve noted before, such a tax would be justified as simply internalizing the extensive externalities of coal energy that are borne by the planet and society at-large.

Regardless, one thing is for certain– there can be no transformative shift to renewable energy sources without a massive upgrade of our transmission lines.

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