In California, the names of two important public projects – one now approved, the other still in our dreams – have taken on boogie-man status in the public mind. The one just approved is the Sunrise Powerlink in San Diego County. The other still in our dreams is the Peripheral Canal around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The Sunrise Powerlink has been called a $2 billion boondoggle, a blight on the environment and an open faucet to dirty coal-fired energy plants in Mexico. In reality, it’s just a big power line, like many others that drape our state and country.
The Peripheral Canal – which has never been built – also has been called a giant boondoggle, a blight on the environment and an open faucet to drain water from Northern California to Southern California. In reality, it’s just a big canal, like many others that cross our state and country.
What’s important is how we use the canal and the power line.
The Delta is in a very bad state for both environmental protection and fresh water conveyance. The current situation, in almost everybody’s view, is untenable. Drawing water through the water using fragile dikes and manmade islands is not working. To some, the answer is to stop exporting fresh water altogether and use conservation and desalination plants to take the place of Delta water. (Note that the Peripheral Canal is no longer a north-south problem; the Bay Area and regional farmers have become dependent on Delta water over the years.) But near unanimity among urban and business water users holds that cutting off Delta water experts would be a disaster for the state.
Ending all exports might be the most environmentally sound decision, if you don’t include humans in the environment. The second most environmentally sound decision, one that does include human needs, is the Peripheral Canal.
Similarly, opponents of the Sunrise Powerlink say that conservation and distributed renewable energy are the best solution. But I can’t find any report (link me up if you can) that shows that distributed renewable energy and conservation alone will end our need for major power sources, those 500 to 1,000 megawatt power plants. Distributed renewable power with energy storage for permanent load shifting will increasingly become more important. But it won’t replace the need for big power plants. Not yet, anyway. But who says those big plants can’t be green? With the Sunrise Powerlink, Imperial Valley can build giant renewable energy stations, just like the 800 megawatts of solar photovoltaic in two stations coming online by 2013 in San Luis Obispo County.
The canal and the power line are merely conduits for resources – water and electricity — that human civilization needs to survive. Whether we use these conduits in an environmentally sound way is up to us — through our State Legislature, regulatory agencies and the ballot box.
If we drain away all the fresh water from our rivers or rely only on dirty coal-fired power plants for electrons, we’re doomed. But, if we don’t build vital infrastructure for water and electricity just because we’re afraid we might misuse it, we’re also doomed.
Posted by jgogek 
