Who could object to a ‘green’ power line?

Only 2 percent of the nation's electricity comes from so-called "renewable" sources -- wind turbines, solar panels and geothermal plants.

Environmentalists dream of taking that number up to 100 percent, making all of America's utilities carbon-free.

Getting even a tenth of the way toward that goal will require an awful lot of time and money. For one thing, getting that "green" electricity from the remote, open areas where the wind blows, the sun shines and the land is cheap to the urban areas that consume most of the nation's power will take thousands of miles of transmission lines through this country's mountains and forests, across its deserts, fields and plains.

Who will pay for them?

"Utility executives like to say that we can't afford to build transmission lines that carry only or mainly renewably generated electricity," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev, at Senate committee hearings Tuesday about the difficulties of delivering renewable power from remote generating sites to urban areas,

"They like to say it just doesn't pencil out. But if they say that, I just don't think they've really tried very hard or very seriously to crunch the numbers."

Sen. Reid's solution? The federal government should designate zones with the potential to generate at least 1,000 megawatts of electricity from "renewable" sources, then provide companies with tax money to build transmission lines into those areas. If no private firms take the bait within two years, the federal government would borrow $10 billion by issuing interest-paying bonds, and build the transmission lines itself.

There was no mention of waiting till the "green" electricity is actually being generated in sufficient volume, mind you. As in that Kevin Costner baseball film set in the Iowa cornfields, the theory seems to be, "If you build it, they will come."

But what Sen. Reid and friends don't want to see, of course, is greedy energy companies turning around and using these tax-funded "transmission lines to nowhere" to transport energy from nuclear or coal-fired plants -- the kind of uses that would actually make them profitable without increasing burdens on taxpayers.

So Sen. Reid would specifically bar these tax-funded lines from carrying the kind of power that would make them cost-effective. Under his proposal, the new lines would have to carry 75 percent of their loads from renewable sources. If renewables ended up using only 15 percent of the lines' capacity, they'd have to operate at a maximum of 20 percent capacity.

The whole scheme may have a bit of a Gyro Gearloose feel to it, compared to, say, enacting an emergency seven-year moratorium on any private lawsuit or regulatory action to block or delay the drilling of new oil wells or construction of new refineries or coal-fired or nuclear power plants by private entrepreneurs willing to fund new energy development on their own.

But at least building new transmission lines to deliver power from wind farms and solar arrays -- precisely the kind of "1,000-megawatt green zones" Sen. Reid envisions -- should please the environmentalists. Right?

Think again.

In Southern California, San Diego Gas & Electric and several partners want to build the country's biggest renewable energy center, a massive solar, wind and geothermal complex in the California desert that would generate enough power for 750,000 homes. Delivering that power would require the construction of a $1.5 billion, 150-mile, high-voltage transmission line. Twenty-three miles of that line would cut through the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.

Uh-oh. Not so fast, says the Center for Biological Diversity. "This transmission line will cross through some of the most scenic areas of San Diego," says the center's David Hogan. "It would just ruin it with giant, metal industrial power lines."

(Have the environmentalists ever seen a landscape that wasn't one of our "most scenic areas"? Will they identify any acreage as "a barren landscape better put to some productive industrial use"?)

It's not far-fetched to imagine these litigious environmentalists' objections to the San Diego plan could have a ripple effect, cooling the ardor of clean-energy startups and energy investors elsewhere to spend years and millions of dollars developing renewable proposals, only to face lawsuits and regulatory appeals from anti-capitalist extremists that could make it all but impossible to recoup investment costs, let alone turn a profit.

Which is it? Are we "goners," as Sen. Barack Obama says, facing thousands of species extinctions and death on the frying pan unless we launch a new Manhattan Project to develop non-fossil fuels? Or should we go to the mat defending our scenic mountain views from the "giant metal power lines" needed to bring our cities this new lifeblood of "green" power?

How does that all "pencil out" now, Sen. Reid?