Recently published opinion pieces worthy of comment

Two opinions in a recent Sunday paper deserve some comment. Oilman Harvey Yates makes light of efforts to reduce the use of oil in the economy, noting it would be nearly impossible for a county to go near carbon neutral (“I’m an Oil Magnate: Let’s make a deal,” My View, July 3).

Let’s pick a county, as he challenges. Taos County would be all solar, save the ski valley, today for electric needs. Cars are traded. If we eliminated oil subsidies and used them for clean transportation, it’s easily conceivable Taos residents might be using electric or hybrid vehicles in 10 years. Similarly, all heating systems are someday replaced. What those of us who care about the planet want is a transition. Yates talks in Proud Boy style belittling the idea and hardly deserves attention.

On the other hand, Bryce Zedalis has a fine opinion piece (“Electricity piracy looms over New Mexico,” My View, July 3) on the costs to society of cryptocurrency mining.

He notes the huge demand for power by crypto mining operations will raise rates and reduce reliability for other consumers. He’s right, although publicly owned utilities are requiring crypto miners to provide their own investments for transmission and generation. We don’t have that, so his concerns are real.

Unsaid, however, is the fact every new electric load impacts other consumers. Every new electric car, air-conditioning unit, business and apartment has an incremental cost to the electric operation as a whole, and anytime those new connections don’t bring their own investments, their cost is shared to all others.

That’s why, for a decade, I’ve been suggesting every new connection be required to have solar panels to equal its demand on the system. That kind of requirement adds little to a new home or business unit’s cost and will repay that investment while relieving the demand on the grid network.

Note an electric vehicle has 10 times the demand of a typical Santa Fe home, and a hybrid will have two to three times the electric demand of a typical home.