Major Pivots: Audubon ends up on West’s broadcast

Audubon is hiring. The conservation organization wants to apply the science for which it is known among conservation organizations to electric transmission selection in Colorado and other intermountain states of the West.

“We don’t want to be an organization that holds anything back, because climate change is literally the existential threat to birds. And the renewable energy and storage needed will require more transmission lines. So how can we work together to make this happen?” says Alice Madden, a former state lawmaker from Louisville who joined the National Audubon Society in March as senior director of climate strategy.

Audubon already has a person working with developers on five proposed transmission lines in the Midwest. There is an organized market there called a Regional Transmission Organization (RTO).

Western states remain fragmented in terms of integrating electricity into an organized market. Colorado looks like an island. The person Madden hires will be responsible for working with developers to build new lines along highways, railroads and other areas of disturbed habitat. If that is impossible, the goal will be to route the transfer in a way that has the least impact on birds.

“Routing is important, and Audubon has great mapping tools… so we can provide a wealth of information,” she says.

However, the organization has already had success in the West. Madden cites the organization’s work with developers of SunZia, a 500-mile high-voltage direct current transmission line between central New Mexico and south-central Arizona.

Like most transmission lines, this one had a long history. It was proposed in 2006 and had a 17-year trajectory before final approval. Audubon credits Pattern Energywhich joined the project in 2018 and worked with Audubon to initiate early and active engagement with project developers.

“We literally walked them through best practices for routing, best practices for tower design and ways to avoid interruption of flight patterns,” Madden says.

In addition, the company committed to using an ultraviolet light-based system developed at Audubon’s Rowe Sanctuary. At the preserve, located along Nebraska’s Platte River, the technology has dramatically reduced sandhill crane mortality due to collisions. The technology makes the transmission lines that birds most often collide with more visible to them.

A 2023 Audubon Report, “Birds and Transmission: Building the Need for Grid Birds” cites the work in New Mexico and Arizona as an approach that is “essential to optimize mitigation for birds, ensure the best data and science are used, and make projects long-term successes worthy of Audubon’s support. ”

In the foreword to the report, Marshall Johnson, Audubon’s Chief Conservation Officer, speaks about the urgency of replacing fossil fuel generation with renewable energy sources. “The window to slow the rate of global temperature increase is shrinking, but the window still exists. If we want to make the most of this diminishing opportunity, we must act quickly.”

Johnson goes on to outline the need to develop renewable generation and then send it to population centers. Experts say the United States will need to effectively double or triple transmission capacity. “How and where new transmission is engineered will have a huge impact on birds and our communities,” he wrote.

Audubon also released the 2019 report, “Survival by Degrees: 389 Species on the Brink,” which warned that two-thirds of North America’s bird species are vulnerable to extinction unless emissions are reduced.

The same report examined Colorado in more detail: 125 of 241 species are climate vulnerable in summer when temperatures rise by 3 degrees Celsius. If the temperature increase can be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius – which seems unlikely – the number of vulnerable species will drop to 84.

Colorado has passed two laws in recent years. One requires the state’s electric utilities to join a regional transmission organization so they can better share low-cost renewable energy sources over a large swath of real estate and in more than one time zone. Another law created the Colorado Electric Transmission Authority, or CETA, which heard the latest report from Audubon representatives in January. The organization has broad powers to build transmission that will help Colorado deeply decarbonize its electricity sources, even as electricity expands into sectors now dominated by the burning of fossil fuels.

State Sen. Chris Hansen, a Denver Democrat who authored this and many other important pieces of energy transition legislation, says he believes Colorado and other states need to accelerate transmission development.

Some have argued that the National Environmental Policy Act needs to be amended. Hal Harvey and Justin Gillis argue for revisions in their 2022 book, “The Big Fix.”

“In the book we call for carefully considered reforms, not just in NEPA,” Gillis, a former New York Times reporter, said in an interview with Big Pivots. “There’s a whole range of land use policies that, if we just leave it as it is, it will take 30 to 40 years before we can do what really needs to be done in the next 10 years.”

Former Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, during an April 9 meeting with Pitkin County commissioners, cited the difficulty of transfer when crossing federal lands and the perceived need for streamlining regulations. Idaho is 66% federal lands, Nevada is 85% federal lands, and Colorado is 35%. NEPA, he said, is part of a broader conversation about whether regulatory review can be streamlined without losing necessary environmental research.

That conversation, Ritter added, is not just a conversation in Colorado, but a national conversation.

“I just had a conversation with U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, and I think there is ambition within the U.S. Senate to try to streamline reform and not lose anything in the process. It is a federal statute that needs to be passed in order to amend NEPA and they are currently trying to understand how to do that with bipartisan support.”

Madden is wary about NEPA reform. The things that motivated the creation of NEPA in 1969 remain. “But there are many ways in which it can be done faster,” she says. “This government in particular has tried to do that by hiring more people to assess these projects.

“There are many questions about why this is taking so long. I don’t think the biggest problem is the permits. It is the interconnection queue.”

She says 12,000 renewable energy projects in the United States are waiting to be connected to the grid. She cites utilities as the challenge.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently reported that nearly 2,600 gigawatts of generation and storage capacity is actively seeking network connections. That is an eightfold increase since 2014.

The U.S. Department of Energy recently released the Transmission Interconnection Roadmap, which provides potential solutions for accelerating clean energy interconnection.

In her new role at Audubon, Madden is responsible for implementing the organization’s climate strategy at the state and local level. She was previously policy and political director of Greenpeace USA. She had also directed the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy & the Environmental at the University of Colorado School of Law.

Meanwhile, she had also worked at the Department of Energy, served as Ritter’s climate change advisor for the last two years of his term, and before that she had served in the Colorado House of Representatives.

Allen Best is a Colorado-based journalist who publishes an e-magazine called Big Pivots. Reach him at [email protected].