Elizabeth S Eaton

The Republic | azcentral.com

The power line as propsed would cut through a wildlife refuge

An alternate route would disrupt the small town of Quartzsite

There's no guarantee the energy sent along the line will be renewable

When the engines roar, the wheels lift off, and the ground beneath you starts to shrink, everything seems much more simple.

The Arizona Republic went up with LightHawk, a non-profit that promotes conservation by showing a bird's-eye view of environmental issues.

The Cessna soared past mountains and over rivers and then flew near a patch of land along Interstate 10 that didn't look like much from just beneath the clouds.

But to California ISO, an organization that oversees much of the state's electricity, that area is the starting point for an important project.

CISO has its eye on a stretch of land from Tonopah to Blythe, California, as the home for a new transmission line. DCR Transmission has been contracted to build the line, called Ten West Link, to connect the states.

The potential benefits seem simple –— California requires 50 percent of its energy be renewable by 2030. A transmission line could send solar and other sources of renewable energy to California, generating revenue for Arizona while also leaving us with the warm feeling that comes with propagating a more sustainable form of energy.

But much as a plane landing brings the world's complexities back into focus, looking closer at Ten West Link reveals a more convoluted issue.

The original proposal sends the line through the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge.

An alternate route cuts through the town of Quartzsite.

And there’s no guarantee that the energy sent along to California will actually be solar, or even renewable.

Fears that line could damage wildlife

The Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, under the management of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services, was notified in 2015 that DCR Transmission wants to build a power line through the northern corner of the 1,000-square-mile refuge.

“As soon as we were informed and had our first meeting, we stated that this is not something that we see that we would be able to support,” said Christa Weise, the acting manager of Kofa.

Fish and Wildlife first assesses whether a project would have an adverse impact on the wildlife or the wilderness when a company requests to build on its land

According to Weise, Fish and Wildlife determined Ten West Link would disrupt land used by desert bighorn sheep. She added that Sonoran pronghorn, an endangered species that was reintroduced to Kofa in 2011, has also been documented in the area and would be affected.

A transmission line would increase habitat fragmentation, Weise said, preventing animals from moving freely across land the line would intersect.

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Weise instead supports an alternate path just north of Kofa along I-10, calling it the “obvious route” because the interstate is already an obstruction to wildlife.

“There’s a lot of wildlife that will not or cannot successfully cross Interstate 10 on a regular basis,” Weise said. “There’s already a very big corridor there, and so I don’t know how much an additional line would contribute to fragmentation."

This area of the highway, called West-Wide Energy Corridor 30-52, was designated as a path for new power lines under the National Energy Policy Act of 2005.

“It seems to us that running the line there would have a much lower ecological impact,” Weise said.

Many people who live along I-10, however, say they don’t want Ten West Link coming their way.

Disrupting a town's way of life

Interstate 10 runs through Quartzsite, a small retirement town in La Paz County.

“One hundred percent, we don’t want the line going through Quartzsite,” said Kelly Saber, an environmental consultant to the La Paz County Board of Supervisors. “That community should not be asked to bear the burden of the line.”

She and Holly Irwin, the Board of Supervisors chairman, both support the route as it is currently proposed. They said they would rather have the line go through Kofa than through Quartzsite, though both were hopeful an alternate route that satisfied both parties could be found.

The average age of Quartzsite residents is 70, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Saber said there is no local labor force to work on the line.

“When they say there’s going to be all these jobs created, I can guarantee you that probably not one job related to the construction on that line will be local,” she said.

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Irwin said there may also be negative economic impacts if Ten West Link is built too close to Quartzsite.

The desert surrounding the town is popular for off-roading and ATV riding, she said. One of the proposed alternate routes runs through Johnson Canyon, a trail often used for recreation.

A transmission line could deter people from outdoor activities, potentially driving away tourism revenue, she said.

“My whole goal is to make sure that whatever route they decide to take, that it doesn’t impact the economics of the county and or the town,” Irwin said.

Saber acknowledged that Ten West Link could be beneficial to Arizona as a whole, and to California.

“Overall, from a national standpoint, the goals are very good,” Saber said. “They want grid reliability, and that makes sense. They want to be able to bring in a lot more renewables, and that makes a lot of sense.”

The potential for renewable-energy development has the Sonoran Institute, an environmental non-profit, interested in the transmission project as well. But the organization can't support the line going through Kofa.

Taking advantage of the desert sun

Ian Dowdy, the director of the Sonoran Institute’s Sun Corridor program in Phoenix, came along for the flight with LightHawk.

He echoed Fish and Wildlife's concerns. A transmission line constructed in Kofa would create a barrier to wildlife.

Dowdy also supports the same alternate route along I-10 as Fish and Wildlife, though for more reasons than just protecting wildlife. Construction along this route would also have a lower environmental impact than traditional projects, Dowdy said, because the line would be integrated into already established infrastructure.

He also sees Ten West Link as an opportunity to expand solar-energy development in western Arizona.

Dowdy analyzed the transmission line's alternate route along I-10. He found that the line would pass within 10 miles of about 170,000 acres of land designated as Renewable Energy Development Areas and Solar Energy Zones.

In short, the line would go through hundreds of thousands of acres of Arizona desert optimal for solar plants on its way to California.

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If Ten West Link is built correctly, Dowdy said, Arizona would have the opportunity to create a renewable-energy economy by selling and sending solar power along the transmission line to California.

The situation is a bit of a Catch-22, however, he said.

There are no solar plants in the area yet because there isn't an easy way to move the power to California. And because there isn't any renewable-energy generation currently happening in that area, there isn't a demand for a transmission line.

For Dowdy, the transmission line needs to come first, ideally integrated along I-10.

"There is no way for us to develop our renewable-energy potential without being able to move the energy," he said. "If we can have transmission capacity, we probably would see much more development in western Arizona around renewable energy."

Miles to go before promises are kept

On its website, Ten West Link echoes Dowdy, advertising itself as expanding “regional access to low-cost, environmentally friendly energy-generation sources.”

However, Joe Incardine of the Bureau of Land Management, which is the lead agency for the Ten West Link project, said it’s “hard to say” exactly what types of power would move along the transmission line.

Dowdy acknowledged that California ISO won't be able to control what kind of energy is transmitted along the line. But he said construction of the line is still the first step to get solar projects in Arizona off the ground.

According to a transmission grid evaluation by California ISO, the line will be beneficial to the company because “Arizona peaking units can be built and operated at a lower cost than California peaking units.”

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A peaking unit is a natural-gas-burning plant.

“Natural gas is pretty cheap, and that’s what people are using to produce a lot of the power in the West,” Incardine said.

But there's no guarantee what amount of solar or natural-gas power that the line will transmit.

“Ten West Link is not connected to any electric-generation project, existing or planned,” Ian Calkins, a representative for the transmission project, said in an email. “Future electric-load growth and customer demand will dictate generation-resource needs for utilities.”

A perspective back on the ground

Nestled in the tiny Cessna, watching the world from up high, it's a little disappointing when the nose of the plane dips and descends.

Houses and roads that seemed so tiny up in the air come rushing forward, and empty swaths of desert that seemed to define the land are now out of sight.

Cities and wilderness aren't so disconnected though; that's one thing the contention surrounding the Ten West Link project shows.

Irwin expects to find out the final route of the transmission line in a couple of weeks. Then we'll know if Kofa or Quartzsite will host a section of the line or if the agencies involved were able to find a way to avoid both.

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Martin Pasqualetti, a professor within Arizona State University's School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, doesn't have a stake in the proposal.

He said he thought the corridor along I-10 was the best option because the landscape is already interrupted by the roadway.

Pasqualetti was unsure, however, whether California really needs any further renewable energy from Arizona.

He said California already has numerous solar plants, including one of the largest in the world.

The other option for California, he said, is to use the excess gas capacity Arizona has, citing underutilized power plants.

"The question is whether or not we need more transmission in Arizona to move solar energy to California, or whether we need to move gas-fired electricity to California," Pasqualetti said in an e-mail.

So, it's up in the air, really, as to what kind of energy will be sent along the Ten West Link.