America’s big shift to green energy has a woolly mammoth problem
In recent years, Joe Biden has been putting in effort to increase renewable energy in the United States. Unfortunately, his efforts to create a greener USA by tackling climate change have come across considerable setbacks. Electricity needs to be transmitted. Across the States, electrical grids supply energy to different communities; to complete their goal of eliminating planet-heating emissions, they need to triple the amount of capacity their grid currently has.
There are two main problems with this need for a larger grid. One problem is the inability to create electrical transmission effectively. Chief executive of Fervo Energy, a developer of geothermal projects stated, “I can’t tell you how many places we’ve seen and thought, ‘Wow, the geology is excellent for geothermal, but we just can’t get the transmission… It’s difficult to get private finance for something where you can’t get revenues for nine more years, so you just give up.” It is evident that there is potential for large amounts of energy that is obtainable, but without a return on investment in a short amount of time, investors choose not to invest.
The second problem with expanding the grid is the land area the new grid would cover. Some expansion layouts have the grid going through fossil conservation areas and green group areas. For example, the Greenlink West project aims to build 470 miles worth of transmission, it would cross over one of the country’s richest areas of fossils containing woolly mammoth tusks and giant sloths. Other projects look to pass through green conservation areas which seems ironic to disrupt the green areas for renewable energy.
Ultimately the main question is when does this end? If these projects are allowed to go through these historic and important pieces of land, how many lines will they be able to cross until it is too much? Here in Canada, we have our own designated conservation areas and aboriginal reserves we should not cross. Canada should be taking notes on how the Americans handle this problem. Although we are pushing for renewable energy, we must remain ethical with our practices. Our Anorra wind turbines are the perfect solution to resolving the need to expand the grid. Rural homeowners can reduce their dependency from the grid electricity with our Anorra and potentially sell back energy to the grid.