Column by George Sibley
Power – May 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
THE CITY OF GUNNISON is about to climb onto the “wind power” wagon, and I’m opposing it.
Huh? How can I be so retro as to be against renewable energy?
Well, I’m not against renewable energy. But I don’t like the 20th-century way in which we seem to be allegedly developing it. Aspen Skiing Company, for example, is getting a nice green reputation for getting two percent of the power for its ski lifts from the wind. The Gunnison County Electric Association (every electric user in this valley outside of the City of Gunnison) has been offering its patrons the opportunity to buy into wind power for almost a decade now, and the students at Western State College here voted a $4 a term fee on themselves several years ago to invest in wind power. Now the City of Gunnison is considering offering the same opportunity to its electric users.
This raises images of wind turbines sprouting in every “Windy Gap” in the mountains, on roofs all over the valleys; how can this be anything but positive? The fossil fuels that drove the 20th century drove us into increasingly centralized (and vulnerable) systems by their very nature; but the wind, like the sun, is by nature decentralized, god’s bounteous gift to us all.
But that is not the way we are developing renewable power. Instead of investing in decentralized local power, Central Colorado’s power agencies “go green” by sending our money off to the same big centralized power generation and transmission companies — G & Ts — that will continue to burn up fossil fuels to nurture the myth of American abundance until the last burp of gas is burned. Their two-percent investment in renewables is an indicator of where their priorities are, but they are more than willing to indulge our green leanings with a token wind farm or two. Their biggest concern is to do whatever they can to keep us from thinking about decentralizing power in America.
The City of Gunnison, for example, contracts for most of its power with the Municipal Electric Agency of Nebraska (MEAN). Nebraska? To understand why Gunnisonites are buying electric power from Nebraska (isn’t there a big power dam twenty miles downstream?), you have to get a sense of “the Grid” which now produces and distributes nearly everyone’s power.
The best analogy I’ve heard for “the Grid” is to imagine we all live around a lake. If we want to dip some water out of the lake, then we have to contract with someone else to put some water into the lake; otherwise, the lake gets drained. The water we dip out is not the same water we pay to have put in, but water is water. As electricity is electricity. So when MEAN discovered a decade or so ago that it had some excess generating capacity (power into the pool), it put its excess capacity on the market, and Gunnison (needing to dip some power out of the pool) snapped some of it up.
Now, to keep us invested in the big pool, rather than thinking about our own smaller pool, MEAN is building a wind farm in Kimball, Nebraska — and is happy to take a little additional money from Gunnisonites on the promise of investing that nickel or so per person in a little wind power.
IN THE SAME MANNER, patrons of the Gunnison County Electric Association and the Holy Cross Electric Association who want to look green are sending money off to the giant Tri-State G & T, which contracts with some private wind farms on the Colorado-Wyoming border for their token green power.
So instead of shipping our money off to the big centralized power producers, why don’t we create local R & D funds for figuring out how to produce our own renewable power, from these resources that are by nature decentralized? Well, mostly, I think, because by culture we are now conveniently centralized. But real old-timers in Central Colorado will remember that this has not been so for very long.
In the Upper Gunnison valley, Crested Butte first tried electricity with a little coal-fired plant on Coal Creek in 1889 for townspeople brave enough to try the newfangled idea. Gunnison followed five years later with its coal-fired plant. And that is the way it happened in towns and cities all over America: if you wanted electricity, you grew your own.
Farmers and ranchers who lived between towns had to wait until the 1930s, when the Rural Electrification Administration came into being — perhaps the first, maybe the only, true “power to the people” federal agency. It was no “give-away” program; the REA just offered free advice and guaranteed low-interest loans for setting up electric systems over the “uneconomic” distances of rural America. The Gunnison County Electric Association was established in 1936 under REA, and — mostly through volunteer labor — had wire strung to farms and ranches all over the valley by 1941.
THEY ALSO DEVELOPED great plans for a renewable power system, a state-of-the-art hydropower plant for the north end of the valley. They had the turbines and other parts on order in 1941 — when World War II came along and canceled all production except for war production. Instead of a beautiful modern system, the GCEA had to stagger through the war years buying power from the Crested Butte and Gunnison municipal systems.
After the war, there was a big push to centralize power — electrical, political, every kind of power. The government had huge quantities of hydro power in all its New Deal dams, and Congress was eager to declare “power emergencies” to vote for funds to hook people onto that emergent grid. One such power emergency paid for a line over Monarch Pass into the Gunnison Valley, to bring in Bureau of Reclamation hydropower from Green Mountain Reservoir.
That cheap power from the Big Grid outside the valley became addictive — even after it ceased to be so cheap, and ceased to be renewable, and was being provided by the big fossil-fueled G & Ts like Colorado-Ute, which were eventually swallowed up by the even bigger Tri-State G & T. The old REAs like the Gunnison County or Holy Cross Electric Associations collaborated to create those G & Ts but were soon captive to them — kind of like Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.
One has to wonder what kind of a system we would have today if the Jeffersonian farmers and ranchers who made the pre-War REA systems work had had the advantages we have, of increasingly affordable technology for decentralized power production from God’s freely distributed renewable resources. I’ll bet they wouldn’t be sending their money off to wind farms in Wyoming and Nebraska. I just wish we could recover some of that spirit today.
The decentralized power nurtured by the REAs wasn’t just electric power; ultimately all power is political, and from down on the ground in Central Colorado, I think there’s something fundamentally un-American about centralized power, electrical or otherwise.
George Sibley teaches and writes in Gunnison.
