Lighting the fuse on the skyrocket

During a meeting the other day, I got into a brief tiff with a newsroom staffer over funding of high-speed trains.

He basically said, “It would be cool.”

I said it would be inefficient, expensive and never pay for itself, leaving me and others who would never ride it to pay for it out of our taxes. That was fine by him.

It would also be cool to have a lot of solar- and wind-generated electricity, but someone has to pay for it and the means to get it to the customer from remote locales. Today an editorial in The Wall Street Journal explores that topic.

According to the editorial, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Jon Wellinghoff, a former member of the Nevada Public Utility Commission and a longtime backer of renewable power, is pressing to have everyone share the cost of new power transmission lines to reach renewable sources — such as the one dubbed One Nevada that will reach from Las Vegas to Ely. The U.S. Department of Energy has agreed to guarantee $350 million in loans for the project.

“By some estimates the cost of building out new transmission lines to accommodate renewable energy and other new electric power sources could exceed $160 billion,” the WSJ reports. “Wind and solar proponents insist that renewable energy standards can only be reached if transmission costs are shared by everybody. This sounds like an admission that these energy sources are inefficient sources of power that can't compete in the marketplace without subsidies.”

That is on top of current subsidies that are more than 20 times greater per kilowatt of electricity than conventional power sources.

Sen. Harry Reid is big proponent of renewables and spoke often about the potential for jobs while on the campaign trail. He was at the groundbreaking for the One Nevada transmission line.

But the editorial today notes Govs. Jan Brewer of Arizona, Jim Gibbons of Nevada, Christine Gregoire of Washington, Ted Kulongoski of Oregon and Arnold Schwarzenegger of California oppose the plan to socialize the cost, writing a year ago that it is "inappropriate to assess the cost of transmission build-out to customers that cannot make use of the facilities, or who elect not to because they can access more cost effective options that do not rely on large, new transmission investments to meet environmental goals."

Normally the utilities would foot the bill and recoup the cost from the ratepayers. The socializing of transmission line costs, according to the WSJ editorial, is analogous to “taxpayers underwriting the cost of tankers and truckers that transport oil to service stations.”

Sounds like Wellinghoff is ready to light the fuse on the skyrocket.