Massachusetts Gets It

Ian Bowles, Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs, gets it.  He published an op ed piece in the New York Times yesterday called Home Grown Power.   Here is a link to the piece.

Here’s what Secretary Bowles has to say about new transmission lines -

But as Congress translates this grand plan into legislation, lawmakers should resist calls to add an extensive and costly new transmission system that would carry electricity from remote areas like Texas, the Great Plains and Eastern Canada to places with high energy demands like Boston, Chicago and New York. This idea is being

promoted by energy companies and by elected officials who see it as an economic development opportunity for their particular state or region. Long-distance transmission lines are needed, they argue, to ensure that the president’s energy goals are met.

But there are better — and cheaper — ways to get more clean power flowing to the big cities.

Renewable energy resources are found all across the country; they don’t need to be harnessed from just one place. In the Northwest, the largest amount of green power comes from hydroelectricity. In the Northeast, the best source may be the wind over the ocean, because it blows harder and more consistently there than on land. Offshore wind farms have been proposed for Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island. In the Southwest, solar energy can be tapped on a large scale. And in the Southeast, biomass from forests may one day be a major source of sustainable power. In each area, developing these power sources would be cheaper than piping in clean energy from thousands of miles away.

So AEP and Allegheny Energy are going to spend our money on huge power lines which they say will feed growing demand for power on the East Coast, while all the states on the East Coast are busy developing their own local sources of power.  PATH and TrAIL are white elephants that are obsolete before they are even built.