Elisabeth Rosenthal’s latest article in The New York Times Sunday Review is the latest rehash of one of the oldest debates surrounding energy—the ongoing flap over where to site the technologies needed to transport energy from where it is produced to where it is consumed. What is particularly striking in this debate is how locked in this debate seems to have become around what Rosenthal calls “a reality that Americans seem determined to forget: Large-scale energy is typically produced in remote places and inevitably needs to be transported to the populated areas where it is used.”
As the United States confronts the challenge of transforming our energy systems to pre-vent climate change, we need to cast off old orthodoxies and re-imagine the energy future in as flexible a fashion as possible. The “reality” is that, yes, in the past, we often produced energy in remote places and moved it somewhere else before consuming it. But that hasn’t always been the case. During World War II, the US Army built the Clinton Engineering Works to give atomic bomb builders access to the massive electricity being produced just upstream by Norris Dam. In the process, they created the largest concentration of industrial production in the world in Oak Ridge, TN, a town that did not exist be-fore the Manhattan Project. At the same time, they built another mammoth set of indus-trial facilities—the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactors—at Hanford, WA, in order to access the power produced just upriver by Grand Coulee Dam, at the time the world’s largest hydroelectric facility.
Nor need we, today, consider only solutions that involve long-distance transport of energy. The truth is that, if the transmission of energy imposes high costs on energy consumers, those consumers will have a strong incentive either to reduce consumption or to move consumption to places closer to energy transmission. We have worked for over a century in this country to maximize the ubiquity of energy—to make it available every-where for the same price. But that choice was a business and a policy choice. There is nothing inherent in energy production and use that requires it to be made available at the same price in every location. We can, if need be, if we so choose, move large-scale energy consumption to those places where large-scale energy production is available. Arizonans take note: your economic future will be far better off producing solar energy locally and then luring manufacturers to Arizona with promises of cheap, clean, inexhaustible energy than it will be if you produce that same solar energy and transmit it to California or New York.
As Germany, New Jersey, and Oregon have proven, it is also possible to produce lots of solar power even in places that are cold, cloudy, and far from the equator. In other words, we can also move energy production closer to energy consumption. Somehow distributed energy production seems “inevitably” to be ignored when discussing energy transmission. Even if we can’t produce all energy locally, however, we can produce vastly greater amounts than we do currently. Indeed, distributed energy generation has a raft of ad-vantages: (1) energy is produced very close to where it is consumed; (2) energy consumers derive direct economic benefit of energy production and consumption (and therefore have an incentive in supporting it); (3) energy consumers become educated about the costs of energy production and so, at least potentially, have some incentive to minimize energy consumption; and (4) the high costs of transmitting energy (in building infrastructure, destroying vistas, and losing energy in transmission) disappear.
So, in truth, the question posed by the Keystone XL pipeline and other large-scale energy transmission projects is not whether those whose lands and values stand in the way of these projects will inevitably buckle under the pressure and/or the side payments of some of the world’s largest companies—companies whose business model happens to depend on moving energy long distances. In reality, we have three choices: we can move power, we can move production, or we can move consumption. We need to be smart about all three if we are to have any hope of achieving a sustainable energy future for United States in the 21st century.
As the United States confronts the challenge of transforming our energy systems to pre-vent climate change, we need to cast off old orthodoxies and re-imagine the energy future in as flexible a fashion as possible. The “reality” is that, yes, in the past, we often produced energy in remote places and moved it somewhere else before consuming it. But that hasn’t always been the case. During World War II, the US Army built the Clinton Engineering Works to give atomic bomb builders access to the massive electricity being produced just upstream by Norris Dam. In the process, they created the largest concentration of industrial production in the world in Oak Ridge, TN, a town that did not exist be-fore the Manhattan Project. At the same time, they built another mammoth set of indus-trial facilities—the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactors—at Hanford, WA, in order to access the power produced just upriver by Grand Coulee Dam, at the time the world’s largest hydroelectric facility.
Nor need we, today, consider only solutions that involve long-distance transport of energy. The truth is that, if the transmission of energy imposes high costs on energy consumers, those consumers will have a strong incentive either to reduce consumption or to move consumption to places closer to energy transmission. We have worked for over a century in this country to maximize the ubiquity of energy—to make it available every-where for the same price. But that choice was a business and a policy choice. There is nothing inherent in energy production and use that requires it to be made available at the same price in every location. We can, if need be, if we so choose, move large-scale energy consumption to those places where large-scale energy production is available. Arizonans take note: your economic future will be far better off producing solar energy locally and then luring manufacturers to Arizona with promises of cheap, clean, inexhaustible energy than it will be if you produce that same solar energy and transmit it to California or New York.
As Germany, New Jersey, and Oregon have proven, it is also possible to produce lots of solar power even in places that are cold, cloudy, and far from the equator. In other words, we can also move energy production closer to energy consumption. Somehow distributed energy production seems “inevitably” to be ignored when discussing energy transmission. Even if we can’t produce all energy locally, however, we can produce vastly greater amounts than we do currently. Indeed, distributed energy generation has a raft of ad-vantages: (1) energy is produced very close to where it is consumed; (2) energy consumers derive direct economic benefit of energy production and consumption (and therefore have an incentive in supporting it); (3) energy consumers become educated about the costs of energy production and so, at least potentially, have some incentive to minimize energy consumption; and (4) the high costs of transmitting energy (in building infrastructure, destroying vistas, and losing energy in transmission) disappear.
So, in truth, the question posed by the Keystone XL pipeline and other large-scale energy transmission projects is not whether those whose lands and values stand in the way of these projects will inevitably buckle under the pressure and/or the side payments of some of the world’s largest companies—companies whose business model happens to depend on moving energy long distances. In reality, we have three choices: we can move power, we can move production, or we can move consumption. We need to be smart about all three if we are to have any hope of achieving a sustainable energy future for United States in the 21st century.
