The Loma Prietan
March/April 2001
Reviewing & Rethinking the Electricity Crisis
The following article was provided by Rich Ferguson of Sierra Club California.
Now that the electricity deregulation scheme has gone awry, some uninformed people blame the Sierra Club and environmental concerns for California’s woes. Nonsense.
The Sierra Club supported the state’s planning process prior to restructuring (the BRPU) that would have resulted in 1,500 megawatts of planned new capacity but was blocked by the utilities and the FERC.
The Sierra Club did not support the California deregulation legislation that led to the current predicament.
The Sierra Club supported Proposition 9, the ballot measure that would have solved many of the current problems.
The Sierra Club has long argued for cleaner and more efficient power plants that would lower prices.
The Sierra Club fully supports the modernization of California’s aging electricity infrastructure.
Attempts to make the Sierra Club and other environmental concerns the scapegoats for the state’s electricity woes are woefully misguided. California is facing a crisis because growing demand for electricity has outpaced supply. Public investment in energy efficiency was severely cut by the deregulation legislation, on the theory that the “free market” would do the investing. In addition, the utilities were allowed to control the limited efficiency funds, although their conflict of interest is obvious. Even when electricity prices soared, a large fraction of the public efficiency funds controlled by the utilities went unspent. Had energy efficiency been wisely invested instead of cut, California would not be in dire straits today.
New generation technology is substantially cleaner and more efficient than most of California’s existing power plants. For that reason, the Sierra Club and other environmentalists support the retirement of old plants and their replacement by new ones. None of the nine plants recently licensed by the California Energy Commission was delayed by the Sierra Club. In fact, last year the Sierra Club and the American Lung Association of California publicly endorsed a proposed major generating plant near San Jose that was opposed by computer giant Cisco Systems and rejected by the San Jose City Council.
It is true that the Sierra Club opposes expansion of nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams, as do most Californians. However, this opposition has no bearing on the current electricity crisis. No nuclear power plants have been proposed in the United States for more than 25 years. They are very expensive and generate dangerous nuclear waste. California’s rivers are already completely harnessed, with 95 percent of the water taken from some rivers for power production. None of the power plants now on the drawing boards are nuclear or hydroelectric.
The steps that California must take to resolve the current crisis are obvious and have broad support. They are as follows:
• The first priority is to invest heavily in efficiency measures that reduce the need for more power plants.
• The second step is to modernize existing power plants to make them more efficient and reduce pollution.
• The third measure is to maximize California’s use of clean, sustainable energy resources like solar, wind and geothermal.
When these steps are taken, any unmet demand should be filled with new, clean and efficient plants.
The current electricity crisis was created by
those who believed that a hands-off laissez-faire approach to the
electricity system would lower costs. Now that this philosophy has so
obviously failed, they inappropriately blame “environmentalists” and
“excessive regulation.” They are just as wrong now as they were before.