An energy war is sizzling in Arizona, with utilities pitted against the solar industry, environmentalists and even some free-market Republicans. The fight basically boils down to dollars: How much can an Arizonan with a solar system save on his electricity bill, and what will those savings cost other ratepayers? The savings are currently sizable, thanks […]
Jonathan Thompson
Jonathan Thompson is a contributing editor at High Country News. He is the author of Sagebrush Empire: How a Remote Utah County Became the Battlefront of American Public Lands. Follow him @LandDesk
Posted inSeptember 2, 2013: Of Sparrows and Sodbusters
Moving on up in the oil patch
Are the West’s energy fields the last bastion of the American Dream?
Posted inSeptember 2, 2013: Of Sparrows and Sodbusters
The Green Tea Party?
“Clean energy does not need to be a partisan issue. In fact, it’s really bad if it is,” said Amanda Ormand, a renewable energy consultant and expert on solar energy issues. “Making energy political is not in our best interest.” Ormand told me this in a bustling coffee shop in Tempe, Ariz., this past spring. […]
Posted inGoat
Energy update: renewables, coal and gas by the numbers
About a year ago, many of us in energy news land were busy scribbling out coal’s eulogy. Natural gas and renewable energy were slowly taking over the electricity fuel mix, putting coal — our favorite cheap electricity generator for generations — against the rope. It was only a matter of time before natural gas, its […]
Posted inGoat
Deregulation talk shakes up Arizona energy scene
The Arizona energy fight that everyone’s been yapping about lately is the effort by the state’s largest investor-owned utility, Arizona Public Service, to tweak state regulations regarding how the utility compensates homeowners for energy they produce from rooftop solar panels. That show – over the decidedly un-sexy-sounding issue of net metering – has a wacky […]
Posted inGoat
Impressions of a county fair: heifer rituals, deep-fried pickles and all
It’s so noisy at the fairBut all your friends are thereAnd the candy floss you hadAnd your mother and your dad. — Neil Young, Sugar Mountain. His face was like leather, so much so that the only expression that showed up behind the utterly opaque mirrored sunglasses was a sort of perma-smirk that reminded me […]
Posted inGoat
Climate change is already pummeling energy infrastructure
A massive cold front settled over the American Southwest in the early days of February 2011. The mercury in Albuquerque hit seven below zero; snow birds in Tucson shivered in sub 20-degree temps; and Nogales, on the border with Mexico, reached a frigid 11 degrees. While such temperatures may seem balmy to northerners, they wreaked […]
Posted inGoat
Are the West’s energy fields the last bastion of upward mobility?
Imagine, for a moment, a child born in Gallup or Tohatchi or Church Rock, NM. We’ll call him Jonny Gallup. He’s an average, healthy kid, but life’s not easy. His mom works at a mini-mart gas station, and his father does odd jobs but has a tough time finding anything stable. Combined, they usually make […]
Posted inGoat
Renewable energy transmission projects create tension among greens
In mid June, I received two very different press releases from two environmental groups announcing the same event: The Bureau of Land Management’s release of the Final Environmental Impact Statement on the proposed SunZia high voltage transmission line that would stretch from central New Mexico to the fringes of Phoenix, Ariz. The document is the […]
Posted inWotr
Durango life requires a hefty commute
Could this Colorado town benefit from high-density development?
Posted inJuly 22, 2013: Red Rock Resolution?
Is the Rainbow Gathering a natural disaster?
THE WEST Sizzling, blistering, brutal: Whatever adjective you use to describe the West’s recent heat wave, it’s not strong enough. Normally cool places like Portland and Seattle hit the 90s. Phoenix soared above 104 every day in June, reaching 119 once, and a few nights the low was a baking 91 degrees. Rattlesnakes huddled in […]
Posted inGoat
Number crunching utility rates in the Arizona solar war
Last week, after months of rhetoric and hype, the first shots were fired in what has been billed as Arizona’s solar war, when Arizona Public Service, the state’s biggest utility, proposed a new rate structure that is far less favorable than the current one for homeowners with rooftop or backyard solar. Arizona’s Corporation Commission, the […]
Posted inGoat
BP’s annual review paints a grim picture of global energy use
It’s a bit like Christmas time for energy geeks, and Halloween for environmentalists. Every summer, bp, née British Petroleum, releases its Statistical Review of World Energy, a big fat pile of data detailing the world’s energy production, consumption and trade. Energy geeks revel in it. Nowhere else can one find so much up-to-date information in […]
Posted inGoat
The American West and the Energiewende: Part II
Peter Stehr is an apple farmer. But when he had a heart attack in 2002, he decided he needed to diversify his income, so he and some associates got a loan and put up a few .6 megawatt wind turbines in his orchard. Today, one of them still spins over a row of apple trees, […]
Posted inGoat
The summer of our discontent
Confession: While my homeland dries, and pillars of smoke pour out of some of my favorite places, I am far, far away in a place where I must jump over puddles in the park and almost swim my way through air thick with oxygen and humidity. I’ve moved my mobile office to Manhattan for a […]
Posted inGoat
Tribes battle austerity with energy development
The Albuquerque ambience, as we rolled into town to cover a tribal energy conference, was tinted with doom. It was 7:30 on a June evening, and the car thermometer read 99 degrees. To the north, a massive plume of smoke rose up from the newly ignited Jaroso fire, joining the plumes of the Tres Lagunas […]
Posted inWotr
It’s too soon to end Arizona’s solar incentives
There may be no better place on the planet to generate solar electricity than Arizona. The entire state shows up as a big red stain on solar radiation maps, and the state’s numerous canals, fallow fields, zombie subdivisions and parking lots — not to mention its nearly 3 million rooftops — are like a big blank […]
Posted inJune 10, 2013: Paradise at a Price
The affordable housing quandary
(This editor’s note accompanies an HCN magazine cover story about conservation goals in Jackson, Wyoming, colliding with the need for affordable housing.) Last summer, I moved back to my hometown of Durango, Colo., with my wife and daughters. It’s been a bittersweet experience — sweet because my family has been here for generations, and it’s […]
Posted inJune 10, 2013: Paradise at a Price
Wildfire’s silver lining
Boulder County, on Colorado’s urban Front Range, mostly missed the building boom that hit the prairies to its east a decade ago. Any land that wasn’t protected as open space was already developed. (The county has one of the most densely developed wildland-urban interfaces in the country.) What was left was pricey and strictly regulated. […]
Posted inGoat
Our favorite wildfire and weather apps
It’s springtime in the West, that time of year when brooks babble abundantly with snowmelt, cute baby wildlife prance around verdant meadows, blossoms cover tree branches like virgin snow, and it all goes up in flames. Hoping to keep as close an eye on the burning West as I do on my runs and bike […]