Silence of the fans in insane power struggle
Mark Riley, Herald Correspondent in the Mojave Desert, California
t looks like a scene from The War of the Worlds. Hundreds of creatures with fans for heads stand at the edge of the Tehachapi Range, staring at the uninviting landscape of the Mojave Desert below.
Their blades whirr furiously as the wind screams off the desert plains and rushes over the mountains at gusts of up to 90km/h.
From a distance, it seems as if these propeller-headed aliens are advancing in rows, crawling down from the hills in battle formation to invade the sparsely populated plains below.
"It's quite a sight, isn't it?" asks Ed Duggan, as he battles to stay upright against the ferocity of the wind. "We'll be able to make plenty of power today."
Mr Duggan is the aliens' master - project manager at Oak Creek wind farm, one of California's largest "green" energy suppliers.
The creatures are his wind turbines - modern windmills that form part of a renewable energy system providing about 30per cent of California's electricity.
They are the sort of operations that could help keep the United States well within the goals of the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse gas emissions if they were able to operate at, or near their capacity.
But, even as California suffers its most disastrous power shortage, the Mojave wind farms are prevented from generating anything like their maximum outputs because of a combination of bureaucratic cock-ups and big business conspiracies.
"You see those turbines over there," says Mr Duggan's mechanical specialist, Michael Burns, motioning towards a row of turbines that are not spinning.
"They aren't broken. They are turned off. We had to shut them off because Edison [the utility company] doesn't have the transmission capacity to take all our power."
Mr Burns does a quick mental calculation and says the farm could produce about 10 megawatts more per hour if it were allowed to operate to capacity.
"That is 240 megawatts a day, which is enough power generated every day on this farm alone to supply about a half a million homes with electricity to last them a month," he says.
The transmission lines connecting the eight wind farms in this part of the Mojave to the local power grid were built in the 1970s and '80s, at a time when the utility companies thought these alternatives to California's belching, gas-fired power plants were just another foolish environmentalist fad.
Southern California Edison and the other big power utilities did not see the use in spending tens of millions of dollars to upgrade the lines. As far as they were concerned, the wind farms would all be blown over within a few years.
They were wrong. Quantum leaps in wind turbine technology and handsome tax credits offered by the State Government to encourage investment in alternative energy sources inspired a rush of wind farm development, bringing online bigger, more sophisticated and significantly more efficient operations.
By the early 1990s, the Mojave operations were generating more electricity than the Edison lines could carry. Plans were formulated to increase transmission capacity, but utilities would always balk when it came to putting up the capital to get work started.
Until a few months ago, Southern California Edison was paying the farms what it called "curtailment fees" not to run a certain number of turbines. The wind farmers were happy because the amounts they were paid not to generate electricity were the same as they would have received if the turbines were feeding power into the system.
Edison flicked the switch on the deal in November, when the energy crisis first peaked. Suddenly, the utilities stopped paying the turbine operators for making electricity and stopped paying them for not making electricity.
Oak Creek wind farm is continuing to operate by drawing on its own cash reserves and it estimates that it will be able to remain in business for about another eight months, if the power crisis lasts that long. Other, smaller operations are already beginning to close because they cannot meet running costs.
This week, California's Public Utilities Commission approved a record 46 per cent rise in electricity charges to customers to help cover the estimated $US14billion ($28 billion) debt racked up by Southern California Edison and its main rival, Pacific Gas & Electric, because they have been forced to buy wildly expensive power from neighbouring grids to make up their own shortfalls.
The State Governor, Gray Davis, a Democrat who once had illusions of seeking the US presidency, ran a mile from the price rise this week, leaving it to his bureaucracy to break the bad news.
The utilities commission has tried to sell the price increase as a necessary evil, arguing that it is the only way to keep the utilities afloat and to avert more frequent and more disruptive enforced black-outs.
Not surprisingly, it has been a tough sell.
Angry consumers have organised rallies in the streets of several big Californian cities, including the State capital, Sacramento, to voice their outrage over the action.
That unrest, though, could play directly into the hands of the consumers' political targets - including Governor Davis and President George Bush.
Mr Bush came to power with a platform of increasing significantly America's ability to produce its own energy sources, including oil and electricity.
Under the long-held political verity of "tough times demand tough measures", Mr Bush is now using the popular dissent over California's power problems and the threat, whether real or politically contrived, of such a crisis spreading nationally to justify his decision to turn his back on Kyoto and side with his big business allies in the oil, gas and electricity industries.
Meanwhile, back on the edge of the Mojave Desert, hundreds of fan-headed aliens are sitting idle when they could be spinning out enough power to carry California out of its crisis.
"If people knew there wouldn't be a power shortage if all the wind farms could work at capacity, then something might just happen to get the lines built to carry our power," Michael Burns says.
"The way things are, it just don't make any sense."
Story Picture: Ed Duggan, project manager at Oak Creek and his idle 'aliens' waiting to unleash their clean power.
-- Anonymous, April 09, 2001