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Regarding the article “NV Energy CEO addresses plans for $1 billion power plant” (Las Vegas Sun, Oct. 22):
For Pete’s sake! Why would we build a new fossil fuel plant when Nevada’s home-grown renewables are competitive with gas? Competitive already — right now!
Building new gas plants is a bad risk, both environmentally and financially. Natural gas power plants are big carbon emitters, and the worst kind of carbon to boot: Methane is 25 times more powerful at trapping radiation than carbon dioxide. Financially, natural gas plants are a risk; the cost of carbon will rise in many ways, not just through a “carbon tax,” which seems to be inevitable. But so will the price of natural gas. Commodities prices rise, through normal cost-of-living increases and lower prices of clean-energy sources, but the natural gas prices will rise as exploration and mining companies come up against more public opposition and more difficult extraction processes.
The sun will always be a free source of fuel for electricity. Nevada is full of sun, even with climate changes happening around the world.
Nevada should be a leader in exploiting this free natural resource that does not pollute the atmosphere.
The utility needs a new business paradigm — one that provides the service of the transmission and distribution grid. The major businesses of our state are already maneuvering to ditch the utility because they have run their numbers and decided it is bad for their business. If the utility is bad for the big casinos, it makes me wonder how it can be anything but bad for other ratepayers.
The Public Utilities Commission of Nevada regulates our utility; NV Energy is a regulated monopoly. The PUCN needs to help the utility reach that new business model providing the service that all electrical users will continue to require, the transmission and distribution systems. We are looking to the PUCN to help Nevada move in a significant way into the new renewable-energy economy that all of us can benefit from. Ditch the studies and the market analyses about natural gas. We want solar.
The writer is the conservation chairwoman for the Southern Nevada Group of the Sierra Club and energy chairwoman for the Toiyabe Chapter of the Sierra Club.
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