December 5th, 2007
NIMBY, but I still want the electricity
There are some modern tehcnologies that can be wireless, especially digital tech from radio and TV to data and Internet. Not so with electricity. There are those damned wires. Almost as bad as all that plumbing needed to move water around. Here’s the Wiki piece on wireless energy transfer and it doesn’t find promise in moving electricity through space like radio waves.
So getting electricity from where it’s generated is becoming one of the green issues of our time. Like placement of highways or electricity-generating plants themselves, it’s often an issue of NIMBY. You can have the greenest tech in world to make the electricity. Solar, say, or a million puffing joggers generating free wind. But you still need those miles of copper wire to deliver the juice. “Gimme the power, keep those lines out of my sight and beware my property values.”
Those of us old enough to remember the building of the American Interstate Highway System will recall endless condemnation battles over the land used. Now we may be approaching such a series of legal wrangles as the nation tries to add transmission lines. It is was no surprise to read that the U.S. government has backed off a plan about to give power companies the right to condemn land to build more transmission lines. The current political wrangle features states’ power vs. the federal government’s.
How big a deal is this? Well, in the 1990s as our energy use expanded in the U.S. we built over 9500 miles of transmission lines. Of course, undergrounding might be less objectionable but it is far more expensive and we Americans always have better things to do with our money.
A newsman since 1969, Harry Fuller has worked for CBS, ABC, CNBC Europe, CNET and was founding news director at TechTV. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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