Judging by their headline, EC thinks so too.
From Environmental Capital:
Clovis, New Mexico, might just be the cornerstone of a clean-energy revolution. It might also be the epicenter of a political battle over how America embraces green energy.
Clovis is the site chosen for the Tres Amigas electricity-transmission project, as our colleague Rebecca Smith reports today in The Wall Street Journal. The idea is to build a powerful substation in New Mexico using advanced supercondctors that could physically connect the three otherwise isolated power grids—the Eastern, the Western, and Texas grids.
The project, which could take five years to finish, seeks to remedy one of the problems with renewable energy: Places with lots of sun and wind are in the middle of the country, while electricity demand is strongest on the coasts....
...The problem is that not every region wants to see the Midwest (for wind) and the southwest (for solar power) turn into the clean-energy breadbasket. Eastern states, in particular, are leery about hitching their electricity future to other states.
This spring, governors of ten states—including New York, New Jersey, Massachussets, and Virginia—sent a letter to congressional leaders questioning the idea of a national transmission superhighway to bring juice from the midwest to the Atlantic coast....MORE
