Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Jon Ralston:

Look past superficial to find summit substance

It would be so easy to snicker at the National Clean Energy Summit as a Harry Reid production, designed to promote a Democratic agenda, snipe at Republican policies and hype renewable energy.

It would be so easy to chuckle at the disparate cast of characters populating the stage — most notably, Byron Georgiou, cruelly shoved out of the 2012 Senate race by Reid but given a chance to hawk his electric cars at the summit, and Gov. Brian Sandoval, a token Republican who obliterated Reid’s son last year and now, like a certain ex-GOP senator who will not be named, was brought closer to the majority leader Tuesday.

And it would be easy to sneer at the obvious payback to MGM Resorts International for its full-throated support of Reid in 2010 — the summit took place at the troubled CityCenter, which may be a green building but has been hemorrhaging green since its construction, and featured both an MGM board member (solar advocate Rose McKinney James) and its CEO (Jim Murren).

But all of that, while amusing, would miss the substance that percolated through the expected rhetoric and hyperbole. And there’s infinite room on Twitter for all of this snark, including to ridicule pathetic potshots at the Reid-sponsored summit from a couple of defrocked, sad hack journalists who lost their jobs after a nationally exposed jihad to defeat the majority leader.

As I have written before, Nevada has been schizophrenic on this question, as has the nation. And with good reason, perhaps.

“This is a real Rubik’s cube of complexity,” said California Gov. Jerry Brown, who shed more sunshine than moonbeams during a gubernatorial panel. “We are constrained by NIMBYism, by environmentalism and by the money.”

It is the very abstruseness of this subject that allows the brickbat-brandishing naysayers to so easily attack the potential, in the same way that climate change deniers reduce a complicated issue to sound-bite silliness.

Renewable energy is more expensive than fossil fuels and will be for some time, which leads to states engaging in a tax-incentive sweepstakes competition to woo renewable companies that, as Brown pointed out, know “there is real money to be made.”

This results in what critics, such as the Nevada Policy Research Institute, describe as government picking winners and losers, a process often plagued by capriciousness and corruption. But government has to be involved in some way, if only to prevent ratepayers from being defrauded and/or overcharged in the clean new world.

What was most interesting to me about the daylong conference was what was not talked about — or at least not to excess: jobs. This is the most overhyped aspect of renewable energy because these solar plants don’t produce that many permanent jobs. This is a fundamental, strategic error by proponents and an easy target for critics.

Consider that the gubernatorial panel, which included Sandoval, Brown and Gov. Christine Gregoire of Washington, talked less about the jobs possibilities and more on the transformative effect on economies. And if ever there were a state that could capitalize on its natural resources to transform a one-dimensional economy, it is Nevada.

But it won’t be … easy. “Transmission lines are expensive and ratepayers don’t want to pay any more than they have to,” Brown warned. And Sandoval vetoed a bill last session partly, he said, out of fears ratepayers would not be protected as a huge transmission line is built in the state.

People don’t trust government, but they trust the power company even less. Nevertheless, exporting energy is part of Nevada’s future — perhaps it is Nevada’s future.

Gregoire couldn’t have been more enthusiastic. “We’re exporting,” she said. “We’re exporting like crazy.”

But so many assumptions have to come true and so many assurances must be soothing for this to work. Sandoval talked about synergies with California, but Brown, while paying lip service, also insisted “we will build indigenously as much as we can.”

So what happens if you build a power line that costs hundreds of millions of dollars, with the intent of exporting the energy to California, and then the energy is not needed?

What happens? Disaster.

Thus, that Rubik’s cube Brown spoke of.

NV Energy CEO Michael Yackira, speaking at the summit, sounded all of the right notes. It seems like only yesterday Reid was pounding the utility for those rural coal plants. But, as so many before him, Yackira, too, now worships at the Temple of Reid. But NV Energy has been hampered by mixed messages from the state and inherent skepticism about its commitment to clean energy, mostly because of the expense.

But if all of those folks who crowded into Aria on Tuesday can get on the same page, maybe there’s more room on the renewable bandwagon, even for those who would snicker, chuckle and sneer.

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