KUFM / KGPR
T. M. Power
Threatening Montana’s Future in the Pursuit of Electric Generation Fantasies
Committed opportunists systematically exploit whatever crisis comes along to pursue their private agendas. The current astronomical market price of electricity that has led many Montana industrial operations to shut down provides the perfect opportunity for those who have always found environmental protection an unseemly thing in a masculine, rough and ready, state like Montana.
After all, Montana’s European settlers didn’t carve out a place for themselves here by pussy-footing around and wringing their hands about the environment. They wiped out the beaver, shot all the buffalo, dredged our rivers and streams for gold and them dammed them for irrigation and electricity, dug deep into the mountains leaving shafts and pits the leak toxic wastes to this day, drove many wildlife and fish species near to extinction, belched pollutants into the air that poisoned people, livestock, and land, and clearcut our forested mountains. This is the proud Montana tradition that the current leadership in Helena wants to continue. To these “real” Montanans, Butte’s Berkely Pit and the decapitated mountains that cyanide chemical mining produces are symbols of economic accomplishment to be emulated by the current generation.
But wimpy do-gooders passed outrageously restrictive environmental laws in the 1970s that have delayed or prevented the duplication in the late 20th and early 21st centuries of what our predecessors were able to accomplish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To reverse this pathetic reticence to continue the proud Montana tradition of mangling the environment, these folks have been working for years trying to dismantle the environmental laws the soft-hearted citizens put in place during the 1970s.
The justification for the all-out attack on Montana’s environmental laws is, as Governor Martz put it, the need “to save Montana’s economy” by building more electric generating facilities and more high voltage transmission lines. It would be best if this were done by burning coal because that coal could be strip-mined in Montana. We could again aspire to be an energy factory for the West coast. This would both feed electricity to our industrial facilities and generate jobs and wealth in the state. The only thing that has kept this from happening, they tell us, are those silly environmental laws like the Major Facility Siting Act and the Montana Environmental Policy Act.
It is unclear what the factual basis of these assertions is. What evidence do we have that Montana’s environmental laws are what has blocked the development of electric generating facilities in the state? None at all, really.
It is simple enough to compare Montana with the surrounding states. Wyoming and North and South Dakota also have substantial reserves of coal or lignite. Oregon and Washington have imported coal or burned their own to generate electricity in the past. Idaho proposed to do the same during the early 1980s but never did. This gives us a sample of six states with a variety of environmental laws ranging from nearly non-existent in states like Wyoming to relatively strict in states like Washington. Were these states busily building new coal-fired electric generating facilities during the 1990s? Of course not! They, like Montana, stopped building coal-fired electric generation in the middle of the 1980s because it was simply too expensive a source of electricity and the region was awash in a surplus of electricity. Environmental laws had nothing to do with it. It was straight economics.
The same is true now. These other states are not busily building coal-fired generation; they are doing what Montana is doing: building new plants that will burn natural gas. Continental Energy is planning a 500 mw generator outside of Butte. It has announced that it can and will build that generator within the existing Major Facility Siting Act and Montana Environmental Policy Act. It does not see those laws as a serious obstacle. It is exactly this type of facility that has recently come online in Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon, and Washington.
Washington provides an interesting demonstration of the importance of economic conditions in determining the timing of the construction of electric generation. Washington also has a major facility siting act that requires large electric generating plants to get a permit. During the 1990s several facilities went through that environmental review and obtained their permits but never built the facilities because the output of those plants would cost three to four cents per kilowatthour but electricity could be bought on the wholesale market at the time for between 1.5 and 2.5 cents.
It has only been the recent turn-around in electric prices that has made those gas-fired facilities economically viable again. Several are now under construction or moving towards construction.
Oregon did see substantial construction of gas-fired generation during the 1990s but that was primarily to offset the premature and permanent shutdown in 1993 of the 1,200 megawatt Trojan nuclear plant whose reliability and costs had rendered it uneconomic.
It has not been Montana’s environmental laws that have delayed the construction of additional coal-fired electric generation in the state. It has been the same energy economics that has governed all of our neighboring states. When market conditions are right, new generation gets built, just as Continental Energy is now planning in the Butte area and other companies are doing across the entire region.
Those who are attacking Montana’s environmental laws in the name of an energy crisis they themselves created are pure opportunists who have a vision of our future that mimics our past. For them, every city and town in Montana ought to have a Berkley Pit and a towering chimney with a smoky plume stretching for miles. Nothing else is a decent legacy for our children. They are lost in fantasies of the old economy and want to strand us and our children there too. Sad to say, they may have the power to do that.