“Mr. Trump talks about infrastructure, he talks about jobs,” said Michael Skelly, founder and president of Clean Line Energy Partners, a company based in Houston that builds transmission lines for renewable energy.
“What we’re creating are welding jobs, steel manufacturing jobs, in Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa,” he said. “These are projects that create income for landowners, create jobs in the middle of the country.”
Smells like fear to me. Clean Line Energy Partners talks a big game, but the very fabric upon which their arrogance and contempt for Midwestern landowners has been built over the past 7 years has been ripped asunder. A new regime is taking shape, and no matter how Skelly tries to remake himself at this late stage, he no longer has any leverage.
There's a whole bunch of chatter from these arrogant blowhards about how Republicans support clean energy, or about how Republicans support things like jobs, infrastructure and economic prosperity. But Clean Line's projects don't measure up.
Jobs? Skelly thinks his overly expensive and invasive "infrastructure" projects should be built because they would "create" welding and manufacturing jobs? Building Clean Line would be temporary, while its detrimental effects would last a life time. For every temporary "job" created by Clean Line, many more small businesses and family farms would either be destroyed or have their productivity impacted.
And for what? Not for the personal wealth of landowners. Landowners have resoundingly rejected Clean Line's compensation offers in all impacted states. Compensation... that's right, it's not "creating income" for landowners, Clean Line's offers are lame attempts at compensating landowners for their loss of property.
Energy imported via a Clean Line could impact long-time energy generation jobs in "beneficiary" states. If you believe Sierra Club's rhetoric that Clean Line would "shut down coal plants" then along with that comes a whole bunch of displaced workers. Are they supposed to pick up and move to the Midwest to get a new job manufacturing steel? Or welding things for a couple of years before they're back in the unemployment line?
It's all about sustainability. Energy should be local, and it can also be "clean." Sustainability means that no one is harmed by an energy project. Clean energy may be good, clean energy may be cheap. But not when it depends on taking something from one part of the country to give it to another. Not when it depends on building billions of dollars of monstrosities to get it to market.
So, while Republicans may support clean energy, and they may support infrastructure, it doesn't mean they automatically support gigantic and expensive for-profit boondoggles like Clean Line. In fact, all the Trumpesque blather about "infrastructure" specifically talks about transportation infrastructure. When it comes to energy, a Trump administration promises to
There's a whole bunch of chatter from these arrogant blowhards about how Republicans support clean energy, or about how Republicans support things like jobs, infrastructure and economic prosperity. But Clean Line's projects don't measure up.
Jobs? Skelly thinks his overly expensive and invasive "infrastructure" projects should be built because they would "create" welding and manufacturing jobs? Building Clean Line would be temporary, while its detrimental effects would last a life time. For every temporary "job" created by Clean Line, many more small businesses and family farms would either be destroyed or have their productivity impacted.
And for what? Not for the personal wealth of landowners. Landowners have resoundingly rejected Clean Line's compensation offers in all impacted states. Compensation... that's right, it's not "creating income" for landowners, Clean Line's offers are lame attempts at compensating landowners for their loss of property.
Energy imported via a Clean Line could impact long-time energy generation jobs in "beneficiary" states. If you believe Sierra Club's rhetoric that Clean Line would "shut down coal plants" then along with that comes a whole bunch of displaced workers. Are they supposed to pick up and move to the Midwest to get a new job manufacturing steel? Or welding things for a couple of years before they're back in the unemployment line?
It's all about sustainability. Energy should be local, and it can also be "clean." Sustainability means that no one is harmed by an energy project. Clean energy may be good, clean energy may be cheap. But not when it depends on taking something from one part of the country to give it to another. Not when it depends on building billions of dollars of monstrosities to get it to market.
So, while Republicans may support clean energy, and they may support infrastructure, it doesn't mean they automatically support gigantic and expensive for-profit boondoggles like Clean Line. In fact, all the Trumpesque blather about "infrastructure" specifically talks about transportation infrastructure. When it comes to energy, a Trump administration promises to
...scrap the $5 trillion dollar Obama-Clinton Climate Action Plan and the Clean Power Plan and prevent these unilateral plans from increasing monthly electric bills by double-digits without any measurable effect on Earth’s climate.
And furthermore, it states
He will defend Americans' fundamental rights to free speech, religious liberty, keeping and bearing arms, and all other rights guaranteed to them in the Bill of Rights and other constitutional provisions. This includes the Tenth Amendment guarantee that many areas of governance are left to the people and the States, and are not the role of the federal government to fulfill.
Such as state transmission permitting and siting laws, which have been circumvented using the federal Department of Energy's trumped up federal eminent domain authority under Section 1222 of the Energy Policy Act? Good riddance to bad rubbish!
It looks to me like Clean Line is on the verge of hysteria over their sudden reversal of fortune under a changing regime in Washington.
It looks to me like Clean Line is on the verge of hysteria over their sudden reversal of fortune under a changing regime in Washington.
"Election Day was a big sea change in America," Jimmy Glotfelty, executive vice president for Clean Line Energy Partners, told the TVA board last week. "But we believe that just because we've gone from Democrats to Republicans (in the White House) that does not change the need for jobs and low-cost energy in America and we believe we will provide that. We've been before this board for the past seven years and our project dynamics have not changed."
But it does change, Jimmy, and you looked pretty overwrought as you were trying to convince the TVA board that nothing has changed. You've been trying to sell your project to the TVA for 7 years, but they've resolutely ignored you. That certainly won't change.
Remember, whatever the shade of lipstick you slap on your pig, it's still a pig.
Clean Line is in big trouble.
Remember, whatever the shade of lipstick you slap on your pig, it's still a pig.
Clean Line is in big trouble.
RSS Feed