Tehipite Chapter of the Sierra Club

May 7, 2008

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
— John Muir

Sierra Club members need to know about a huge PG&E transmission project that will likely soon impact the Sierra Nevada foothills from Kern County to Fresno County, where a large substation will be built either near Humphreys Station or in Watts Valley. If this project is built, it will change the Sierra forever, in my opinion not for the better.

The name of this project is the Central California Clean Energy Transmission Project, or C3ETP. The purpose of this billion-dollar project is to satisfy government mandates for renewables, to supply the Helms Project at Wishon Reservoir with necessary energy, and to meet needs of a growing population in and around Fresno and the northern San Joaquin Valley.

So far C3ETP has gotten little scrutiny from the media. Brief articles in the Fresno Bee and the Bakersfield Californian published in September and October of 2007 were little more than PG&E advertisements, presenting the project as almost all pro and little con. An ABC Channel 30 segment aired on January 31 was more balanced but not detailed enough to present the project in its totality.

C3ETP is still in the planning and study phase. According the company officials, PG&E will submit an application to the California Public Utilities Commission about a year from now. If the application is approved, PG&E will begin by acquiring property and easements.

If land owners do not agree to the company’s terms, the company will sue them using the eminent domain law to condemn the property. For example, my family property includes the forty acre parcel in Watts Valley that PG&E has chosen as one of two possible sites for its E2 substation. Since we intend to protect our property as open space and therefore will not agree to PG&E’s terms under any circumstances, PG&E will have to take possession of the property through eminent domain. Company officials have said they will do exactly this.

According to documents and maps presented at a meeting in Fresno on February 6 and published on the web site of the California Independent Service Operator (Cal ISO), the non-profit coordinator of California utilities, planners are studying ten possible alternate routes, through the foothills and the San Joaquin Valley. Seven of these terminate at a substation called the E2 substation at Humphreys Station or Watts Valley, in the foothills.

Our neighbors and we strongly believe that placing this substation and all its concomitant incoming and outgoing utility lines in Watts Valley will not only greatly diminish our quality of life but also devastate the natural environment, which is habitat for countless species of flora and fauna, including the bald eagle, the golden eagle, and the black-tailed deer.

How should the Sierra Club get involved? PG&E has the resources to provide necessary scrutiny. C3ETP has thus far received little expert scrutiny outside PG&E and the energy industry. As a land owner in Watts Valley, I speak from an admittedly biased perspective, but my neighbors and I feel that PG&E has purposefully kept this the negative aspects of this project, such as eminent domain and environmental destruction, from the public eye.

The environmental impact reports required by the government will be done by subcontractors paid by PG&E. The Sierra Club has the resources and expertise to properly scrutinize these reports well before C3ETP moves to the land-acquisition and construction phase.

Neither PG&E nor Cal ISO has invited public comment on the plan. The notification we received from PG&E about October 1 contained an 800 number to call for information on the project. However, the company officials we spoke with have no decision-making power. Indeed, it became immediately clear that they do not consider it their job to bring land owners’ criticisms and complaints before company officials with decision-making power. Though superficially polite and sympathetic, these low-level representatives have done a great deal more dictating to us than listening. Indeed, they seem more a buffer against the public for their higher-ups than a conduit of information from the public to them.

I can hardly claim objectivity in this onerous matter. The onus my family bears at the prospect of part of our ranch, part of beautiful Watts Valley, being subjected to this kind of degradation causes us great sadness. Perhaps Watts Valley should be sacrificed for “the greater good” of the larger community that needs the additional energy the project will provide. On the other hand, it is all too easy for us as partisans to conclude that this beautiful place that we and several other families have kept as open space for many generations is being sacrificed to wastefulness and greed. The Sierra Club can help to bring a diversity of opinion to bear on C3ETP so that it can properly be determined in the free and open public marketplace of ideas whether this project should finally go forward.

In the current political environment, where the government often acts as a willing partner in billion-dollar undertakings like the Central California Clean Energy Transmission Project, the small voices speaking for nature are too often drowned out in the cacophony of powerful voices celebrating growth and profit. As a society we need to acknowledge from time to time that growth eats up resources as it now threatens to take one more big bite out of the foothills and literally gobble up tiny Watts Valley. Ultimately, however, this story is about more than the Sierra foothills and Watts Valley. I hope it is a story about how—starting now with the Sierra foothills and Watts Valley—nature’s voice crying in the wilderness can receive, with the help of The Sierra Club, a full and just hearing and be preserved to live free.

To learn more about C3ETP go to www.caiso.com and search “Central California Clean Energy Transmission Project” or C3ETP.

Contact the author at wattsvalleypreservation@gmail.com

Visit the website at http://www.savethefoothills.org for more information.