The Machine

Keeping the lights on?

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" -Mario Savio

About 275 people signed into the recent Department of Energy meeting in Ft. Smith. Many others, myself included, attended without signing anything. For several hours, people railed against Clean Line and the process that brought them there that evening. Roughly fifty speakers were able to make comments. Four of them were in support of the project. Among the “anti” speakers were two area mayors, a county judge, and a county commissioner for Sallisaw, OK. All have drafted letters of opposition or adopted resolutions on behalf of their constituents.

While Ft. Smith was certainly the largest of the DOE meetings, it was most certainly not the only one in which the opposition to this line was expressed both in terms of passion and numbers.

There are two questions everyone involved in this project should be asking, top to bottom:

“Why is there so much opposition?” and “What went wrong with the notification process?”

I actually got to ask a couple Clean Line employees those questions in Ft. Smith. The answer to the first (Thanks, Jason) was that it was because of members of the opposition spreading falsehoods…

Number one, individual members of the opposition are not that powerful. I mean, that’s flattering… and I’m sure Arkansans like to be told they’re lemmings incapable of coming to their own conclusions or doing their own research, but no… We’re not thought magicians.

Number two, way to avoid taking responsibility. Again, if anyone is responsible for any misinformation out there, it’s Clean Line. They a) left a void when they failed to adequately engage the public and b) didn’t take the concerns people had seriously. I can’t stress enough just how big a deal that is. There are two things people need to feel for you if you want them to believe what you say: trust and respect. In Arkansas, Clean Line has apparently flubbed both. So when a young woman’s cardiologist tells her that she will have to sell her house and move away from this line because of her defibrillator (true story), she will have zero faith in a stranger who tells her this line was in the works for six years before she found out about it and that it will put out no more EMF than the cell phone in his pocket.

The second question is just as important and I got to ask it of multiple people… The DOE, Tetra Tech, and Clean Line. The best answer came from Dr. Jane Summerson of the DOE, who acknowledged the myriad of people who have felt left out by this process. The responses from Clean Line reps, as you might expect, were a little more defensive.

Can I say how bizarre it is to stand in front of someone arguing that sending a postcard was going “above and beyond” what they were required to do, while in the auditorium beside you people are literally screaming about revolution, property values, health effects, and asking if there’s a Cousin Eddie in the audience who would bring Mr. Skelly to Arkansas wrapped in a bow for the sole purpose of telling him what they think of his plan and its execution a la Chevy Chase? No, he wasn't serious... I don't think... But if you're looking for a gauge of public opinion... It's hard to explain to those not impacted how this nightmare has taken over the lives of so many people.

Clearly, Clean Line’s idea of “above and beyond” doesn’t come anywhere close to Arkansas’ idea of “sufficient” (or Oklahoma’s for that matter, given the number of attendees from Sallisaw). Their insistence that they did more than they had to is much like a guy who accidently starts a forest fire while burning trash in August and says, “But I was using a burn barrel.” It would be comical if the results didn’t have such a huge and serious effect on the lives of real people.

And still, where does that get us? The way I see it, there are three possibilities. All are speculative, of course. 1) There was an intentional lack of notification. I don’t think that’s true, but I can tell you, I’m pretty lonely in that opinion in this movement. 2) Clean Line honestly didn’t know how ineffective their attempt at notification had been. 3) They eventually realized how ineffective the notification had been, but when they had to make a decision on what to do about it, they opted to put their heads down and push through. Regardless, none of these options makes me particularly excited about these people putting a transmission line through two states and a bit.

Trying to shame us or tell us how lucky we are that we even got a postcard is probably not the best tactic either. Yes, in the past transmission siting was done with very little input from landowners. No, that’s not the way things are going to happen anymore. Just ask SWEPCO. 

Why? 

Because people have had enough. From New York to New Jersey, Rhode Island to Virginia, Wisconsin to Missouri, Nebraska to Colorado, Winnipeg to Germany, they are done with business as usual- whether it's intentional or accidental. (Psst- just saying you're interested in landowner feedback doesn't cut it) 

Yesterday Dave (he'll be posting some good stuff on this soon) and I...mostly Dave... spent hours slogging through testimony on the congressional post-mortem of the blackouts in California and New York in the early noughties (the autopsy that shaped the very policies in play today). One thing became achingly and abundantly clear: Landowners were seen at worst as NIMBY’s or BANANA’s (I wonder where the good senator got that?), and at best as obstacles to swift siting and permitting, but never as true partners in development… Except for this marvelous man, who actually gets it. It’s a long quote, but it’s worth it:

"Deregulation certainly short-circuited utility incentives to invest in transmission because the private interests of facility owners come into conflict with the shared public nature of the transmission system. It is a highway, not a market, and especially when you are asking them to make investments that they--for a system they share with their competitors. It is very difficult.

And moreover, deregulation undermines the ability to account for social and environmental questions and constraints. The social cost of transmission is much higher than its mere economic cost. The fundamental problem with transmission is not inadequate incentives to invest. Utilities were willing to do so before deregulation. The problem is public resistance to building additional transmission facilities for environmental, health, and safety reasons.

For these social reasons, scarcity of transmission in an economic sense is likely to be a permanent part of this industry's landscape. That is what our people tell us.

The benefits of the shared transmission facilities are difficult to allocate. This is a network that is shared. The problem is geographic and intergenerational. Today's investments deserve a long-term, long-distance transaction, maybe tomorrow's core for serving native load.

Now, I understand the pressure to do something in the wake of the blackout, but when it comes to electricity, doing just anything will not help. You have to do the right thing or you will make matters worse.

Right now, you do not need to repeal the Public Utility Holding Company Act to improve the reliability of the system.

I don't need utilities going into non-utility businesses and creative massive multi-state holding companies that escape regulation in order to improve reliability.

We do not need to impose the standard market design. And the regional transmission organizations that are embodied in it are the wrong ones to create. They are dominated by industry, they preempt local accountability, and they have forced utilities into markets for allocating transmission resources with no assurances that the capacity is adequate today, additional capacity will be built or maintained.

We must not rely on industry self-regulation. The proposal to move from voluntary self-regulation to mandatory self-regulation misses the point. The difficulty is not the voluntary versus the mandatory. It is the ``self'' part. We need clear accountability to public authorities.

Do not create private transmission monopolies. Transmission is a natural monopoly, part of a shared network. Transferring control to unregulated companies will simply allow them to increase their profit and exploit their market power.

So that is what you shouldn't do. What should you do? I personally believe we need transmission organizations, but they have to be organized on a very different model than has been contemplated and proposed. Any transmission organization must be based on fairness and public accountability. Fairness 
requires a process for representation of all interests affected by transmission projects. The way to overcome social resistance to transmission projects is to give people a fair chance to present their case, defend their interest. That is what federalism is all about. It is an ugly, tough process, but it works because it empowers the people.

Accountability demands that the local officials who get the phone calls when the lights go out are the people who are making the decisions, who have the ultimate authority. They didn't call the FERC when the lights went out in Ohio. They called the Ohio PUC. The Ohio PUC must have a fair representation in this process.

Accountability also requires transparency. We cannot have this conflict between the FERC and the DOE and the private companies and the NERC over who has got the data and who is responsible for the analysis.

Finally, even if economic incentives were a problem, and I don't think they are, the solution is not to increase the rate of return but to lower the risk, and that is what the utility model used to do. It established a long-term commitment. It established a stable environment. And frankly, all of the 
people who say we can't raise money in the industry are living in the dot-com 1990's, not the post-bust market. Give me a stock that offers a stable dividend, a slow and long-term growth rate, the widow and orphan stocks that the utilities used to be. They will have no trouble raising capital. But it is public policy that must create that environment that will promote the investment. Thank you."

-Mark N. Cooper, Director of Research, Consumer Federation of America

HEARING before the OVERSIGHT OF GOVERNMENT MANAGEMENT, THE FEDERAL WORKFORCE AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA SUBCOMMITTEE of the COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS UNITED STATES SENATE ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS, FIRST SESSION, SEPTEMBER 10 AND NOVEMBER 20, 2003

Landowners are done being treated as collateral damage. We’re not just stakeholders. We’re the people who actually make personal sacrifices for these things without the hope of great return. So, if new transmission is necessary for the new energy economy, you better believe it’s not going to happen in the same way transmission did for the old energy economy. There is no way the people are going to tolerate the status quo any longer.

Clean Line likes to compare its project to railroads, right? But they never talk about the laws and increased unionization that came about as a direct result of workers who went on strike in the 1870’s and 1880’s because their working conditions became intolerable (and there was that 10% wage cut… 10%... sounds familiar). 

I’m not talking about revolution here, but evolution. Know who was missing from the witness line up for those key policy decision-making sessions? The people. 

But we’re all people, right? 

Except that landowners haven’t been treated as such. Not really. In a recent Jonesboro Sun article on the APPROVAL Act, Mr. Skelly mentioned how long they’ve spent working on this line. That they aren't going to give up. Trust me, the families here who stand to lose land they’ve worked for generations or land allotments they were given after being forced from their own homes know how that feels.  So here we are. 

Ask why.

"No Eminent Domain for Private Gain"