WINONA POST
Conserve power, says BLEW, others (12/10/2008)
By Sarah Elmquist

Opponents to proposed new high-voltage, 345-kilovolt transmission lines which could cross the Mississippi in Winona rallied Monday night at an open house against the project.

One of the new lines would run from the southeast Twin Cities to La Crosse following a route that would cross the Mississippi in either Winona, Alma or La Crescent.

CapX2020, a group of 11 energy companies in Minnesota, held an open house on the project Monday night, a required step for the routing of the lines for Minnesota and Wisconsin permits. Public scoping meetings are expected in February, with public hearings set for early 2009.

CapX2020 spokesperson Tim Carlsgaard said that the lines would be used to carry power from new wind projects and to help meet state mandates for renewable energy. But opponents at Monday’s meeting said that there was no guarantee the power grid wouldn’t haul coal-generated power to more urban areas on the dime of energy rate-payers in Minnesota.

And discussions, which turned into a roundtable debate, included claims from members of Bluff Land Environment Watch (BLEW) and others that the lines simply weren’t needed.

“The best solution is conservation,” said local wildlife enthusiast Richie Swanson. He said that migratory bird populations would be threatened at transmission river crossings and advocated incentives for using less energy. He said that taller towers would simply exacerbate the dangers birds and other wildlife face along the Mississippi. “We live in a world where wildlife is already getting hammered on the river,” he said, rattling off a list of species seeing huge declines in numbers.

BLEW member Joe Morse cited an Xcel CEO who indicated that home energy use had fallen three percent in the last several months. “People are using less energy,” said Morse. “We don’t think that [the transmission lines] are necessary.”

Other locals opposed to the project agreed, denying that they were “part of the problem” of energy consumption, as Carlsgaard claimed.

One man said that he lives in an underground home and uses $8 in gas a month. Others rebuffed the idea that their lifestyles were a source of high energy consumption. “These are the conservationists,” said Swanson. “These are the people you want to work with, not to blow off as if conservation weren’t possible.”

Some questioned who would pay for the estimated $2 billion project and who would profit. Carlsgaard said that the Public Utilities Commission must decide how the project would be paid for.

But some questioned the wisdom in erecting the lines at all, stating that the future would lie in decentralized power generated and distributed in small, local systems through wind and other renewable sources. “Now is the most terrible time to invest $2 billion into antiquated technology,” said one attendee, adding that this decentralized power concept might be bad for Xcel and other companies, but would be the sustainable way of the future.

Morse said that new technology would also change the way that people use power, citing a “Smart Grid” program being tested in Boulder, Colo., which shows users when power is more available and inexpensive so they can choose when to use.

Carlsgaard said that energy companies had invested $100 million in that project, and while it may be used elsewhere in time, it would not curb the need for new transmission lines, which haven’t been upgraded in 25 years.

“The truth is this: people are not using less [power] overall,” said Carlsgaard. He said that while conservation is a good step, it wasn’t going to solve the demand for more power in places like Dakota and Scott counties, where populations have exploded 250 percent since the last upgrade. “Everybody talks about conservation, but in reality, they’re not doing it,” he said.

“But faced with that problem, none of us is profiting from that foolishness,” said Tyler Reinhardt. “That’s why we’re here.”

The process for approval is expected to move forward in early 2009 when the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission is expected to make a decision on a certificate of need for the project.

To view maps for the proposed new transmission lines or to comment on the project, visit www.capx2020.com.

Copyright © 2008, Winona Post, All Rights Reserved.

and on WKBT La Crosse…

• Findings of Fact — Outline
• Proposed Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Recommendations of Citizens Energy Task Force
• Citizens Energy Task Force Post-Hearing Brief on the Merits of the Application for Certificates of Need

This is great stuff.  Read it.  And please, we still need your financial support for this work! Thanks!

Here’s the gist of it:

• Just say NO to the La Crosse line. It isn’t needed for renewable energy or for community reliability and would negatively impact the environment, particularly at the Mississippi River crossing.
• Allow the Brookings line to be built only if there are conditions requiring it be used for wind, not fossil fuel.
• Require the utilities to commit to Minnesota community based wind, not just large corporate wind projects.
• Support conservation and renewable energy, rather than the current plan for the Fargo line which focuses on bulk power exports from North Dakota and could encourage more coal production
• Minnesota has laws requiring 1.5% energy savings, renewable energy standards and prevention of increases in global warming emissions, and the CapX projects as proposed by the utilities do are not consistent with these requirements.

It costs money to make the case in a properly technical and complete manner such that it has a serious impact on the outcome. This is your chance to make a real difference for a sustainable energy future! Please help pay for this effort; please donate now.

… the new technologies are expected to reduce Xcel’s power needs in the region by 7 percent.

Excel’s saying that?  I wonder if they said it in the CapX2020 application’s demand forecast.

Some experts say all this potential energy saving means we should re-think the electrical system from top to bottom.  Smart grid pilot projects on the West Coast have shaved 20 percent from peak demand — more quickly and more cheaply than building new power lines.

(Emphasis mine.)  So while CapX2020 extrapolates old trends to forecast increasing energy usage, other regions are reducing peak demand by 20% using smart grid technology.

The federal government wants state regulators to require utilities to at least consider smart grid technologies before they propose big projects like power plants or transmission lines — including projects like CapX 2020, where several utilities want to build four big new power lines criss-crossing the state.

Yes, CETF wants this too.  I guess we’ll see.

Read the whole story.

WLSU Interview Part 1
WLSU Interview Part 2
WLSU Interview Part 3

“The people in the position to do the best analysis have willfully let us down.”
- Arne Kildegaard

“The utilities have been stacking the deck to make it look like this project is needed,” Maccabee said, “but once you get behind the data, you see how it’s not true.”

If the Twin Cities-Rochester-La Crosse line were not built, she said, power company officials have testified that enhancements to the current transmission lines would not be needed until 2026 or 2028 in Rochester.

“And that’s without studying the conservation aspects,” Maccabee said. “The benefits are not clear and certainly have been exaggerated, and the harms are unavoidable.”

Minnesota State Rep Ken Tschumper also made some good points.

“If we go to more renewables, we don’t need this expensive high-voltage system,” Minnesota state Rep. Ken Tschumper, DFL-La Crescent, said during a forum he organized July 31 at La Crescent’s American Legion for those concerned with CapX2020.

“Renewable systems can feed into the grid as well,” he said.

It’s also the law, Tschumper said, as Minnesota passed a renewable energy standard in 2007 mandating 25 percent of all electricity used in the state be generated from renewable energy sources by 2025.

Renewables are a very important part of meeting future resource needs, Xcel spokesman Brian Elwood said, but the company still needs sufficient transmission lines in order to get the resources to the customers.

Eleven percent of Xcel’s electricity now is generated from renewable sources, Elwood said, and by 2025 Xcel expects 25 percent to 30 percent of its electricity will come from wind energy, along with other renewable resources such as biomass, hydropower, and burning garbage and wastewood.

Read the whole article here. Don’t forget to scroll down and leave a comment.

And then, please, write to Judge Heydinger!

May 15, 2008-New report by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) released today shows huge energy saving through efficiency have already occurred and lots more is available.

It’s the U.S. energy boom that no one knows about. Energy efficiency may be the farthest-reaching, least-polluting, and fastest-growing energy success story of the last 50 years. But it also is the most invisible, the least understood, and in serious danger of missing out on needed future investments. In the first attempt to quantify the overall impact of the hidden U.S. energy efficiency boom, a major new report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) shows that U.S. energy consumption (as measured per dollar of economic output) will have been slashed by the end of 2008 to half of what it was in 1970, from 18,000 Btus to about 8,900 Btus.

However, the ACEEE report, The Size of the U.S. Energy Efficiency Market: Generating a More Complete Picture, concludes that “…our nation is not aware of the role that energy efficiency has played in satisfying our growing energy-service demands…the contributions of efficiency often go unrecognized. The contributions of energy efficiency often remain invisible…” The report also notes that although efficiency is a proven resource, it remains underdeveloped. ”  In short, the evidence suggests that efficiency can make an even larger contribution towards stabilizing energy prices and reducing greenhouse gas emissions – should we choose to fully develop it.”

The ACEEE report was prepared with major support from the Civil Society Institute (CSI). Additional support was provided by the Kendall Foundation and the North American Insulation Manufacturers Association.

Key report findings include:

Given the right choices and investments in the many cost-effective but underutilized energy efficiency technologies, the United States can cost-effectively reduce energy consumption by an additional 25-30% or more over the course of the next 20-25 years.

Annual investments in energy efficiency technologies currently support 1.6 million U.S. jobs. The $300 billion invested in energy efficiency in 2004 was three times the amount invested in traditional energy infrastructure. Investments in energy efficiency technologies are estimated to have generated approximately 1.7 quads of energy savings in 2004 alone – roughly the equivalent of the energy required to operate 40 mid-sized coal-fired or nuclear power plants. Since 1970, energy efficiency has met about three-fourths of the demand for new energy-related services while conventional energy supply has covered only onefourth of this demand.

Total investments in more energy efficiency technologies could increase the annual energy efficiency market by nearly $400 billion by 2030, resulting in an annual efficiency market of more than $700 billion – and total additional investments over the period 2008-2030 of nearly $7 trillion. More at:
http://aceee.org/press/e083pr.htm. Download complete report here: http://valleywatch.net/docs/e083.pdf.