D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
July 2009
Nauru and New Mexico
How much will New Mexico sacrifice for the energy gluttony of neighboring states?
By Joel Chinkes
This past May, I was at the New Mexico First Town Hall held on the topic "Growing New Mexico's Energy Economy." I think I was the only participant intent on shrinking, not growing, our energy demands, and glad to "Just Say No" to our neighboring states' energy waste.
New Mexico First was founded 23 years ago to identify solutions to the state's toughest problems. It is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that engages citizens in public policy discussions in order to improve the state. Co-founded in 1986 by US Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and since-retired Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), the organization brings people together for multi-day town hall meetings. These town halls use a unique consensus-building process that enables participants to learn about a topic in depth, develop concrete policy recommendations addressing that topic, and then work with fellow New Mexicans to help implement those recommendations with policymakers, mainly state legislators. This was the 37th town hall, and not the first one on the topic of energy.
The Madness of Crowds
Living as we do in our wide-open spaces, it's hard to focus on how millions of our fellow Americans survive today, cheek by jowl. Those charmingly curvy subdivision streets, intended to keep lush new neighborhoods from resembling military housing at Camp Furlong, result in nearly every house being turned this way and that relative to the sun, hence unable either to capture correctly or to avoid the sun's warming rays. These built-in inefficiencies mean each house needs extra doses of heating and air conditioning to keep its occupants comfortable.
Take a closer look inside those suburban tract homes, seemingly stretching in unbroken line from Phoenix to Tulsa to Indianapolis, and up and down both coasts. In almost every house, half the lights and appliances are turned on all the time. Any gizmo with a remote, such as a TV or a garage-door opener, is constantly alert, listening for its master's beep, even when the whole family is at work or school, gone off on vacation, or tucked into their beds at night. Devices with clocks or "settings" memory are never off, either.
Here's the cost: Suppose the radio remote inside the garage-door motor head uses a measly 5 watts. Five watts times 24 hours a day times 30 days a month equals 3,600 watt-hours, or 3.6 kilowatt-hours (kWh) for each house, each month. Multiply by the number of appliances in each home, and that's when it gets interesting — and a concern for public policy. Idle loads like this benefit from on/off switches, but when you multiply the "normal" arrangement by millions of houses, cities and suburbs, the demand adds up.
Conservation is gaining traction, however. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on existing commercial and industrial efficiency cash incentives being extended to individual households in Connecticut, and on US Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) advocating efficiency rewards nationwide. Welch says, "Your first dollar spent you'd want to spend on what would give you the most return. I have been astonished about how neglected efficiency is when it's the low-hanging fruit."
The numbers are compelling: Replacing incandescent lights with LED lights saves over five times the CO2 per dollar spent, compared with installing wind or solar generation.
New Local Power Plants
The new 92-megawatt solar thermal (not photovoltaic) plant recently announced by El Paso Electric for the Santa Teresa area is claimed to support 30,000 homes. That's a super-inefficient average of 3,067 watts per home, or the equivalent of leaving three hair dryers running all day long in each house. The fuel for this is free, but the engineering design calls for using ground water to make steam, which then spins a conventional generator, same as if the heating fuel were natural gas. The fairly new natural gas power station outside of Deming, also in a dry desert area, has a row of cooling towers that send water vapor into the air, to drift away, gone forever.
Although local energy developers might do better on water conservation, some distant power stations have taken decisive steps. The PG&E power plant in Antioch, Calif., cut its water intake from 40,000 gallons per minute to only 1.6 gallons by using a "dry" cooling technique that recirculates water in a closed system, reducing evaporation. Craig Cox, executive director of the Interwest Energy Alliance, a trade group that represents power-project developers, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal: "The more we wean energy companies off consumptive use of water, the better for everyone."
Shafting Our Neighbors, or Being Shafted?
Let's look at the energy relationship of New Mexico versus our western neighbors, Arizona and California. New Mexico happens to have a low-density population sitting on a big pile of energy resources. There's coal to dig in the northwest Four Corners area, wind blowing steadily all along the eastern border, oil and gas to drill for in the southeast, and world-class solar energy beaming down right here onto the southwest quadrant of Desert Exposure Country. Geothermal energy and plenty of uranium are glowing in the ground, too. Hydro power is our only weak spot.
This natural abundance is quite a temptation to the large population centers outside our borders. They want to buy it, and enterprising souls from near and far want to get rich selling it. But we have seen this movie before.
Great Britain used to be covered with oak trees, until they built a fleet of wooden sailing ships for world domination. Now they have neither. Texas and Pennsylvania used to have gushers of oil, and West Virginia used to have mountains of coal. Now these places are denuded of their assets, with large areas needing cleanup at taxpayer expense.
History suggests some interesting parallels between New Mexico and the remote Pacific island nation of Nauru. Nauru is, or was, a phosphate rock island. Its main economic activity used to be the export of phosphate that originated as sea-bird guano. The formerly rich folks of Nauru have nothing left now but their barren rock, all the phosphorus-rich bird poop having been harvested faster than sea-birds could lay down another layer. Nauru briefly had the highest per-capita income of any nation in the world. When the phosphate reserves were used up, and the land and air had been ruined by mining, the island's wealth vanished. Nauru briefly became a tax haven and money laundering center. More recently, it has accepted aid from the Australian government, and in exchange keeps their prisoners and detainees, something like the federal prisoners at the Luna County lockup.
Growing New Mexico's Energy Economy?
On May 31, the Associated Press reported from Shiprock, NM, about the plight of 15,000 former uranium mine workers and their dependents, who are now seeking compensation for their industrial diseases and subsequent family birth defects. Their health problems, thought to be caused by uranium dust and radioactive radon gas, date to the 1950s and 1960s. Unfortunately, the victims didn't keep their pay stubs as proof of employment. Ninety-two percent of their claims for relief under existing laws are rejected for lack of documentation, according to people close to the scene.
If New Mexico takes the option to dig and drill all its oil, gas, coal and uranium, and generate electricity for our neighbors so they can essentially waste most of it, will we be any better off than Nauru when our minerals are gone? We'll have all the holes in the ground, and a dusty view of the mountains, cluttered by miles of power lines. (Perhaps we can use the money to build spaceports, and enjoy the ride while it lasts.)
Even if we just stick to geothermal, solar and wind, not mining, we'll still have lots of power lines running from here to Phoenix and beyond. For example, the Deming Headlight recently reported on a BLM public meeting to tell local folks about the SunZia Southwest Transmission Project. It is mostly going to be on federal land, and the public's opinion is apparently not really needed. The SunZia preliminary study corridor shows the possible route of one or two 500-kilovolt transmission line(s) beginning in wind-rich Lincoln County, blocking views all the way across sunny Luna County and southwest New Mexico, into Phoenix.
The Relaxed Solution
There are plenty of easy ways to pick the "low-hanging fruit" of energy waste, which we've grown accustomed to because of years of artificially low energy prices. We already have more than enough power plants in New Mexico to meet all our local needs. By increasing use of our solar resource, pushed by federal and state incentives, we can make our own household energy at or close to home, and greatly reduce the load on our coal-burning plants.
The New Mexico Association of Counties is working on model ordinances to enact both solar-district bills passed by the legislature in the last session. These bills will allow local governments to finance solar equipment on individual residences, with the homeowner paying back the "loan" over many years through a small voluntary additional property tax assessment, paid for with energy savings.
If Phoenix or Los Angeles can't figure out how to get along without exploiting New Mexico's land, air and water, then maybe that's just too bad for them. It may seem cruel, but when New Mexico's energy economy shrinks instead of grows, what's the harm? We already have fewer railway trackmen, shoe repairmen, elevator operators and telephone operators than we used to, but thanks to the miracle of free-market capitalism, our economy adjusted itself anyway.
For more information, visit these websites: www.nmfirst.org, www.blm.gov/nm/st/en/prog/more/lands_realty/sunzia_southwest_transmission.html, www.nmlegis.gov/lcs/_session.aspx?chamber=H&legtype=B&legno=572&year=09, www.nmlegis.gov/lcs/_session.aspx?chamber=S&legtype=B&legno=647&year=09, www.nmlegis.gov/lcs/_session.aspx?chamber=S&legtype=B&legno=257&year=09.
Joel Chinkes teaches a solar electricity course twice a year at the Mimbres Valley Learning Center in Deming, and can be contacted at SolarGuy@PhotonHarvest.com
Most people's electricity bill, except for the bottom line in dollars, is cloaked in mystery. Close to nobody graduates from high school knowing what a kilowatt-hour is, although for their next 50 years everybody buys kWh by the thousands at ruinous cost. A "watt," named to honor the memory of James Watt (Scotsman, 1736-1819), is a speed measurement. It says how fast, at any instant, you are generating or consuming energy. 746 watts = one horsepower. A "watt-hour," like its big cousin, the "kilowatt-hour," is a measurement of how much energy you have generated or used over a period of time.