By David Spence*
Each year I teach an energy law short course at UC-Santa Barbara, and this year my wife and I drove to California from Austin by way of national parks in Utah. The parks were beautiful, and the drive was also a vivid reminder of America’s “all of the above” energy policy, and that all sources of energy entail some costs and risks.
Along the way, we passed hundreds of pumpjacks drawing oil from the ground in West Texas, and drove through New Mexico’s San Juan Valley, which was featured in the anti-fracking documentary Gasland. In the film residents complain of headaches, dizziness and nausea they associate with living near oil and gas wells. Meanwhile, American oil and gas production are at historically high levels, providing export revenue and tempering increases in world crude oil prices.
In Sweetwater, Texas we drove through a forest of towering wind turbines. These Goliaths generate cheap electricity without air or water emissions; they also alter the desert landscape. Some people who live near wind turbines complain of “wind turbine syndrome,” a set of symptoms (headaches, dizziness and nausea) not unlike those reported by San Juan Valley residents in Gasland. Nevertheless, wind power is also on the rise.
In Moab, Utah we passed a uranium mill tailings cleanup project, a remnant of when Moab mines provided uranium for nuclear power plants. Nuclear power still provides more zero-emission electricity than wind or solar, but also produces waste disposal challenges and is now a moribund industry in the United States.
In the Mohave Desert we zoomed by large photovoltaic (PV) solar farms. Today, PV solar represents another emission-free source of electricity, but can disrupt desert soils and habitat. The production of solar panels involves mining (silicon or cadmium, for example) and chemical-intensive production processes the environmental impacts of which are mostly outsourced to other countries.
In the Mohave we also witnessed the massive Ivanpah concentrated solar project (CSP), consisting of more than 100,000 mirrors directing solar energy at three large towers. The concentrated heat is used to produce steam to drive a turbine and generate electricity. Ivanpah consumes 4,000 acres of land, and can kill birds that catch fire as they fly between the mirrors and the towers (known as “streamers”).
We also toured the Hoover Dam hydroelectric plant near the Nevada-Arizona border. Hydropower is America’s oldest source of renewable, clean power, but construction of the massive dam entailed risks we would not accept today: 96 worker fatalities, the flooding of entire towns, and dislocation of their residents.
Our travels also took us close to the Navajo Generating Station, one of the coal-fired power plants at risk of closure due to competition from cheap renewables and natural gas. The plant represents millions of dollars of annual revenue for the Navajo Nation (from coal mining royalties), and despite its deadly air emissions some Navajo resist its demise because it represents an important source of revenue in an economically challenged region.
If you are like most people, as you read about the costs and benefits of these energy facilities, you silently evaluate the importance of each in real time — discrediting or discounting those of your favored technologies while crediting or reaffirming the importance of technologies you dislike.
There is nothing wrong with that. It’s good to have opinions.
But if you care about energy policy, chances are your evaluation was partly the product of a social media feed packed with uncurated “news”: half-disguised attempts to persuade rather than to educate, blasted into the ether by the economically or ideologically self-interested, and landing in a Facebook or Twitter feed that you have tailored to give you more of what you “like.”
In truth the magnitude and importance of every single cost and benefit I listed above is disputed by qualified experts on each side of the question. And even if we could reach a consensus understanding of those impacts with perfect certainty, reasonable people would still differ over how to produce the right balance of security, affordability, and environmental impacts in energy production.
If we recognize that fact, reasoned discussion can produce insight and compromise that is the essence of progress. If we don’t, we stop learning and we impede progress toward a better energy future.
So please, get outside your energy filter bubble.
*David Spence is a Professor of Energy Law at the University of Texas School of Law and McCombs School Business.