Page 42 RAIN Spring 1986 good environmental reasons for not destroying some of these rivers because of the fish and the wildlife and the flooding problems that would result. The second is that there are probably more economic ways of supplying power throughout the Pacific Northwest than these hydroelectric facilities would allow, those being many of the energy conservation or energy efficiency provisions in the plans put together by the Northwest Power Planning Council. As far as the environmental concerns with cogeneration, indeed they're not totally clean burners. Any time you bum natural gas or waste products, you're going to emit some SO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere. The argument from the entrepreneurs is that the new facilides are so much more efficient, in fact probably twice as efficient as existing facilities, and because the environmental regulations are now quite strict on what type of scrubbers and other systems are required, replacing old, rather dirty generation systems with the new, cleaner-burning cogeneration systems will be a plus for the environment. That's not to say that they're totally pure and totally clean, and I think environmentalists need to keep a very close eye on ensuring that environmental standards are met. RAIN: Would you say the same thing for wind farms, as far as how much space they take up, precluding many other land uses, and the whole aesthetic issue? Munson: Well, there currently is a debate in Palm Springs, California regarding the introduction of a large number of wind machines in the San Gorgonio Pass. A number of the residents think that the entrepreneurs built the windmills either much too close to their property or dismpted their television reception or whatever. To the best of my knowledge, most of those kind of cases have been settled. In other words, the entrepreneurs have admitted that they built their facilities too close to either the highway or to people's homes, and so they just moved them to another area. That seemed to satisfy people. But indeed, if not done correctly, and not done in a way that satisfies the community, it could present some problems. But I think the move toward alternative technologies that overall are certainly cleaner and safer than the existing ones will be a plus for the environment. And the way I think we're going to get that is by opening up the marketplace to some competition from the entrepreneurs, who have proven themselves in those areas where they've been allowed to exist. O O ACCESS: Energy Dynamos and Virgins, by David Roe, 1984, $18.95 (hardcover) from: Random House 400 Hahn Road Westminster, MD 21157 Here is a David and Goliath story sure to inspire any nonprofit activist who has ever gone up against giant institutions in the hope of effecting major societal change. It tells how the tiny but highly talented staff in the West Coast office of the Environmental Defense Fund sought to prove during the late seventies that the plans of America's electric utilities for massive construction of coal and nuclear generating plants made no economic sense. EDF had a simple but revolutionary argument: the environmentally sound strategy of developing conservation and renewables in place of new centralized power plants was also the most economically sound strategy for the utilities themselves. EDF was taking Amory Lovins' controversial “soft path” argument the next step. Lovins' famous 1976 article in Foreign Affairs, setting forth the reasons why an energy future based on conservation and renewables was desirable, captured a good deal of public attention, but the breadth of the Lovins thesis lay it open to charges of impracticality. As author David Roe comments regarding the response of soft path critics: “The [Lovins] calculations might be interesting as global theory, but they did not provide a set of prescriptions that could be applied in the case of this specific power plant, or that, or the next.” EDF sought to remedy this weakness with a test case directed at the nation's largest regulated public utility— Pacific Gas and Electric Company. EDF staffers used airtight economic analysis instead of environmentalist philosophy to win its arguments before the California Public Utilities Commission. As Roe writes, EDF asked “the dynamo builders to look at alternatives on strictly business grounds—to contemplate nothing more controversial than producing more energy for less money. It was an argument that public utility companies could hardly dismiss as being impractical, or ideologically tainted.” EDF practiced a sort of “intellectual judo,” using many of PG&E's own assumptions and methodologies to show that energy growth and the utility's profits could be met better through a soft path strategy than through a massive plant construction program. “Add electricity, or add efficiency to the machines that use electricity; either way, the result is more of the actual service that society wants.” EDF's efforts were “not about forecasting at all. It was about cost.” The new paradigm meant that EDF could protect the environment from large power plants, and at the same time accomplish this goal by helping the large power producers to continue in their primary functions—^producing electricity and realizing profits. In one sense, the idea was simple, but it really amounted to nothing less than a call for a major paradigm shift—a new way of looking at the world that emphasized a decentralized, environmentally sound approach to problems. This was something that had already been noted with suspicion by some critics of the Lovins soft path thesis. For all his technical wizardry, Lovins could easily be perceived as a zealot whose goal was a radical reorientation of societal attitudes and institutions. By adhering strictly to cold numbers—demonstrating that major elements of the paradigm shift made sense, even to PG&E, on economic grounds—EDF also ran up against environmental allies who did chose to emphasize the ideological implications of the new paradigm. (There is an interesting description in the book of how some of Governor Jerry Brown's “small is beautiful” energy specialists responded to the EDF approach.) EDF's ideas, if adopted by PG&E and other utilities, would surely encourage some small-scale, decentralized energy production, but the basic economic power of the large utilities would go unchallenged in the immediate future. For political activists impatient with institutional resistance and inertia. Dynamos and Virgins provides some sobering insights of how difficult major
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