Neighborhood aversion worsens power crunch

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Monday, May 7, 2001

Neighborhood aversion worsens power crunch

By Seth BorensteinSun News Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON | The Bush administration's new energy policy, which calls for 1,900 new electric power plants, 38,000 miles of new natural gas pipelines and lots more electric power lines, faces one major obstacle: we the people. Americans want more power, now. But they don't...

WASHINGTON | The Bush administration's new energy policy, which calls for 1,900 new electric power plants, 38,000 miles of new natural gas pipelines and lots more electric power lines, faces one major obstacle: we the people. Americans want more power, now. But they don't want more power lines, power plants or gas pipelines anywhere near them. Power companies and policy-makers call a person who resists a "NIMBY," as in "Not In My Back Yard." A hard-line NIMBY is a BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone) or simply a NOPE (Not On Planet Earth.) Whatever the name, experts say community resistance has done more than environmental rules or oil cartels to generate America's current power crunch. They predict that nimbyism will be a major impediment to Bush's energy plan. "Everyone wants their lights to go on ... but no one wants their facility nearby," said former Ambassador Richard Sklar, just appointed head of California Gov. Gray Davis' energy task force. "It's rampant in this country and it's spreading across the world."

"The fact is people don't want the stuff around them," said Karl Rabago, a former Texas public utility commissioner. If Bush proposes lots of new plants, Rabago predicted, the administration is "going to run into [NIMBY] a lot." Such objections are solidly grounded, said Rabago, now managing director of Rocky Mountain Institute, an Old Snowmass, Colo., nonprofit that encourages energy conservation. Proximity to power plants, gas lines and transmission lines tends to depress property values and raise environmental and health concerns, he said. New electric power lines are especially important - and especially difficult to site. The capacity of the U.S. electric transmission system dropped by 16.2 percent from 1989 to 1998, according to the Edison Electric Institute, a Washington-based trade association for power companies. In the next decade, power line mileage is projected to grow 4.2 percent - but demand for electricity will likely grow by more than 20 percent.

But stringing new interstate transmission lines is "almost impossible," said Tim Gallagher, an official at the North American Electric Reliability Council, a Princeton, N.J., consortium that promotes them.

Environmental standards are rarely a problem with a new power plant, experts said; new plants are designed to meet them. But nimbyism can be a problem even for clean-burning natural gas plants, said Robert Burns, an analyst and attorney at the national Regulatory Research Institute at Ohio State University in Columbus.

Nuclear power, which the Bush administration is trying to revive, confronts the highest hurdle, experts said. "I don't think anybody at the state commission level - and those are the people who would deal with siting issues - considers it back on the table," said Burns. "If we see a new nuclear power plant in the U.S. it will be on an existing site," said Paul Joskow, the director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research in Cambridge, Mass. "It would be insane to build a new nuclear power plant on a new site."

http://web.thesunnews.com/content/myrtlebeach/2001/05/07/front/A01-2136941.htm

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), May 07, 2001


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