The quest to transform U.S. energy that didn’t pan out
Anyone driving through Somerset County on the Pennsylvania Turnpike can seethe windmills. They’ve been spinning and wringing electricity from the air for nearly18 years.
Those six 200-foot windmills, each generating up to 1.5 megawatts of electricity, were unveiled with some fanfare in the fall of 2001. But the power they generate amounts to no morethan a “rounding error” whencompared to today’s wind projects.
That’s from Michael Skelly, a developer of that project and the principal subject of Russell Gold’s book, “Superpower: One Man’s Quest to Transform American Energy.” The folks who crowded Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museumin Oakland last week to discuss how to stem climate change ought to read this.
It’s not a book with a happy ending.
Is hould confess here that I’ve known Mr. Skelly long enough that it strikes me funny to type “Mr. Skelly.” In the spring of 1986, my friend wasin the Peace Corps in Costa Rica, and I got my newspaper to help finance a trip to visit him so we could both make our way into Nicaragua. The U.S was financing the Contra war to overthrow the Sandinista government at the time. (No heroes, we spent mostof our time infiltrating cantinas.)
Mr. Skelly moved to Houstonand got into the wind industry when he and it were stillyoung. “Superpower” opens in 2009 with him in the Oklahoma panhandle on a hot summer day. “The wind rarely stopped blowing ... the sun was also relentless.” That adds up to a wind-and-solar energy gold mine, but it’s too far from big cities for that tremendous power to light much.
He decided to build “a power line that stretched across three states, held aloft by 150-foot-tall towers,” to get the juice to Memphis, Tenn. He co-founded Clean Line Energy Partners and, by the end of 2009, had put $1 million of his own money — mostly earned through his previous wind-energy work
— into this project.
Theline would cost between $3.5billion to $4 billion, privately financed, with no moneyfrom government — if it could reach Tennessee. By 2015,it had backing from the Sierra Club and the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce, andthe proposed 720-mile route didn’t require knocking downa single house. When the U.S. Department of Energy backed this idea for cheap energy to power 1.5 million homes, it looked like a lock.
Then it failed, a death by a thousand cuts.
Therewas the Tennessee Valley Authority, which nibbled but never bit on buying this power. There was the powerful Republican U.S. senator from Tennessee, Lamar Alexander, who flat out hates big windmills. (He has owned property on Nantucket Island, Mass., where a proposed wind farm threatened to mar the view.) And there was grassroots opposition from Arkansas residents who resented “a bunchof elites from Houston trying to impose their business plan, their climate solution, on rural Arkansas,” Mr. Gold wrote.
The lesson on high power lines may be “we don’t want to look at it,” Mr. Gold said. Maybe under ground lines alonga railroad corridor wouldbe an easier sell, he said, but a network of high powerlines akin to interstate highway sis unlikely because “youcan line up 10 counties ina row and that 11th county canbury you.”
He nonetheless expects the politics of climate change to shift relatively soon. Those “who expect to be alive in 2075” cansee that every credible lookahead points to warmer climes, Mr. Gold said. And our country has a tremendous energy asset yet untapped.
“Wehave a superabundance of wind in the middle of thecountry,” he said. “It’s a pretty good solar location, too, in places. If we can find a way to effectively build the transmission lines, we’ll be in great shape.”
Mr. Skelly’s company sold its best assets and folded. Some ofwhat they accomplished mayyet bear fruit — “the second mouse gets the cheese,” he says— but there will be nothing as ambitious as the long line to Memphis.
“Ifwe can’t build in these super windy places because there’s no transmission, we’ll haveto build in less windy places— and the power will cost you more.”
Helost money and spent the mostproductive years of his working life on a project that fizzled, but he tells me, “You gotto risk it to get the biscuit, right? ”He has taken a salaried job as an investment banker, andhe’s not big on regrets.
“Ifyou don’t want your heartbroken, don’t do stuff you love. Heartbreak is OK.”