New Mexico Mercury

The extent to which the fossil fuel industry’s powerful lobbies have New Mexico’s vision of its future in their thrall can best be seen in a head-shaking omission. New Mexico is not competing to be the solar and wind power capital of the world. And we all can guess why.

It’s not about the price of technologies, not about batteries, not about the “intermittency” of wind and solar sources. These matters are handily dismissed by money, incentives, legislative will, and executive vision. It’s all about who will lose money from transitioning to renewable energy and who won’t. 

In the long run, wind and solar power companies – those that emphasize decentralized energy especially -- would put money in our pockets. We’d save on the cost of electricity. We wouldn’t be as helplessly dependent on centralized power sources that are vulnerable to extreme weather conditions. We wouldn’t be fueling our lives with materials that create greenhouse gases and could well cause a massive die off of many billions of our species, and other species as well, from weather catastrophes and rising sea levels.

Solar and wind power seem so sensible, so vastly less dangerous than our current system. The other day, Denise Tessier of Albuquerque Journal Watch and I were talking about flying into Albuquerque and seeing all those flat roofs with no solar panels and no small wind turbines on them. The wasted potential for this sun-saturated state is simply staggering.  Why isn’t it possible for most people in one of the ten sunniest states in the country, and one of the windiest, to have decentralized solar and wind energy devices supplying power to their homes? Could it be that the entire governmental and regulatory structure overseeing energy in our state and nation is owned lock, stock and barrel by the fossil fuel industry? Gosh, I wonder. 

Conventional wisdom argues that the costs of transitioning to renewable, decentralized energy sources outweigh the benefits. But that would be the costs to the fossil fuel industry in loss of business, not to us. Natural gas fracking would be seen for the environment disaster it is, if the fossil fuel industry and the government hadn’t sold it as a “clean fuel.” What’s cleaner than solar and wind power? Nothing.

This is obviously not an earth-shattering revelation.

If New Mexico wanted a model for how to proceed to decentralizing its power systems, ridding itself of fossil fuels and moving into renewables, all it would have to do is turn its gaze to Germany, which plans to produce 35 % of its energy needs from renewables in seven years, and 100 % by 2050.  New Mexico is looking to reach 20% in renewables by 2020, and no long range plans that I know of for a completely renewable energy portfolio. And that’s true for the United States as a whole.

According to a government projection from Renewable Energy Technical Potential, New Mexico has the capacity with concentrated solar power plants, of which we have none in works at the moment, to produce four times the amount of electricity used by the whole country.  So there’s clearly enough sunlight to power virtually every house and building in the state using the sunshine alone.

When it comes to wind energy, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory report of 2010 makes it obvious that New Mexico could produce more than all of its current use of electricity on wind power alone.

Germany’s photovoltaic plants are gigantic and numerous and growing all the time. Despite Fox News’ bogus and hilarious assertion that solar power works in Germany because it has more sunshine than we do in the United States, solar power works in Germany because of the incentives of its tariff system and other regulations, along with overwhelming public support that stimulates and bolsters investment. When compared to New Mexico’s 320 to 330 days of sunlight a year, Germany is a wet, dark, cloudy place with something like only 70 fully sunny days a year.  Yet, since the l990s Germany has invested billions of dollars in solar and wind research. On a single sunny day last year, because of all its vast centralized and decentralized solar capacity, Germany produced 22 gigawatts of energy from the sun, “half of the world’s total and the equivalent of 20 nuclear power plants,” according to off-grid.net.

In Germany, solar panels are everywhere, on the roofs of homes and the roofs of barns, along train tracks and highways, on office buildings, even covering mounds of coal tailings, and filling up old, and heavily polluted, Soviet era military bases.

Activists in California have long embraced the idea that “decentralized renewable energy generation represents the single most immediate and feasible means to produce renewable energy at a board scale without reliance on long-distance transmission lines.” California has three major programs that stimulate decentralized energy. The Renewable Electricity Standards requires that all California utilities get 33% of the electricity sales from renewables by 2020.  The Million Solar Roofs Program has $3 billion in seed money to fund some 3,000 megawatts of roof top solar electricity by 2016. A megawatt is one million watts. An average house uses somewhere  between 800 to 1500 kilowatts a year. A kilowatt is one thousand watts. And California also has something called the Self-Generation Incentive Program for users of small energy projects, including solar and wind projects, micro turbines, and fuel cells.

It would be amiss not to praise PNM’s Solar Energy Customer Program where one can make use of various tax incentives to makes a system that plugs into PNM’s energy grid. If one generates more energy than one uses, PNM will write you a check for the difference. For one friend, this amounts to $52 a month. Good for them, and good for PNM.

And one can’t ignore the recent New Mexico Land Office auction of 40,000 acres for a large, revenue producing wind farm operation, that will add to the state’s other wind enterprises, including the Caprock Wind Ranch, the New Mexico Wind Energy Center in east central New Mexico, and the Macho Springs Wind Farm near Las Cruces.

Still this all amounts to less than a hill of beans when compared to Germany, or even California or the wind rich plains of Wyoming.  Who knows if national energy policy will change to a renewable strategy in the lifetime of older Americans like myself. But one day, when the grid system has failed here once too often, or when coal pollution regulations raise fossil fuel energy prices high enough, or when some climate change incident makes it clear how backward we have been as a nation when compared to Germany and other countries such as Japan with solar and wind power, we will see a massive shift. I do believe it is only a matter of time. But what misery we’re causing our selves and the planet in the meantime.

(Photo by Active Solar)