Increase the required renewable energy in Nevada

[Michael Higdon]

I was reading this article by the Reno News & Review and it occurred to me that maybe you can't stop the coal power plants, there's far too many people involved with all the in state and out of state interests. There's just too many cogs already saying yes. But what you can do - correct me if I'm wrong - is petition the state government to increase the required percentage of renewable energy sources in the state. They've done it twice before.

Does that sounds like something that would work, I'm especially asking Mr. Bobzien and his friends?

[Tom Clark]

We don't actually mandate the required percentage of renewable energy resources in the state, however we do require that utilities in Nevada (mainly Sierra Pacific in the North and Nevada Power in the South) purchase a percentage of their energy portfolio from renewable sources. The Renewable Portfolio standard (RPS) in Nevada is one of the most stringent in the country - for good reason. There has been talk of increasing the standard and/or increasing the amount of the standard that has to come from a specific type of renewable energy, like solar. For the utility to meet the standard the resources have to be available or the RPs means nothing. For the resources to be available we need transmission line access to the remote areas in the state where the wind blows, the water is hot and the land is available for a large solar footprint.

Therein lies the biggest problem. Transmission is too expensive to build for an intermittent energy source like solar or wind. Baseload is needed. Baseload comes from a steady stream of energy like that produced by natural gas or coal. It can come from geothermal but rarely will you find a geothermal deposit large enough to make the project pencil.

The bottom line in my mind is we have to build large baseload facilites that generate electricity from coal or natural gas if we are ever going to harness the renewable resources we have in this state. Simply increasing the RPS won't cut it.

[David Bobzien]

Tom's correct about the transmission issue being a major hurdle for the development of clean energy in our state, and that currently the development of transmission is typically reliant on baseload development. My focus for the next session will be on solutions to facilitate the meeting of the existing RPS requirements, and the lack of a transmission infrastructure (particularly in eastern Nevada) to fully tap our state's clean energy potential will undoubtedly be one of the issues dealt with. There are some interesting examples of how other states (Texas and New Mexico come to mind) have addressed transmission short comings, but ultimately we need to find a solution that works for Nevada to be able to bring more wind/geothermal/solar to market.

That's not to say the RPS won't be discussed again- every session the legislature does something to tweak it and keep it aggressive, but what concerns me the most is making sure we're doing everything we can to address specific obstacles to tying the sources to the grid. I want to make sure our progress developing clean sources/technologies/jobs remains strong.