Power line offers bigger benefits than pipeline
A couple of lines being drawn across the map of Iowa could have a big impact on our economic and environmental future.
One is a proposed 343-mile pipeline to funnel an ocean of crude oil from North Dakota to a redistribution point in southern Illinois. The other is the Iowa segment of a 500-mile transmission line carrying wind-generated electricity from northwest Iowa turbines to a redistribution point in northern Illinois.
The pipeline is sought by Energy Transfer Partners; the power line proposal comes from Rock Island Clean Line. Both are based in Texas.
Each has filed for approval by the Iowa Utilities Board. It is not an “either-or” issue. Each could be accepted or rejected. But there are enlightening contrasts between the two proposals.
According to backers of the two projects:
• The pipeline construction will bring $1.1 billion to Iowa. The power line construction will bring $2 billion.
• Pipeline construction would employ 7,600 people for a year; the power line, 5,000.
• The pipeline would create 25 permanent jobs; the power line, 500.
• The pipeline would pay local taxes of $27 million per year; the power line, $2.5 million. (The latter would affect far less land.)
The power line would spur another $7 billion in wind-farm development in northwest Iowa, increasing the harnessing of a natural resource. The pipeline would have no comparable impact.
Local opposition has been voiced regarding both projects. Gov. Terry Branstad was asked to deep-six the pipeline due to its environmental impact, but he refused. A group of 100-plus northern Iowa landowners, calling themselves the Preservation of Rural Iowa Alliance is doing its best to cripple the power line.
Among its arguments: The line would export energy out of Iowa. By that logic, Iowans should protest exporting corn, beans, hogs, cattle and eggs. And in fact, the Rock Island Clean Line says that while much of its power will be distributed in Illinois, enough will be diverted to eastern Iowa to cut millions off of the electric bills of Iowans living there.
In theory, the buried pipeline would leave no permanent impact on the land, whereas tall poles would carry the power line. Rock Island Clean Line will pay a bundle to use the land supporting those poles.
The company’s Iowa manager, Beth Conley, offered this example: For a 145-foot-wide, half-mile-long easement in Grundy County containing two poles, the firm would pay the landowner around $115,000, plus damages. More than 99 percent of the strip could be cropped. For the land actually taken out of production, that figures out to well over $1 million per acre.
In short, the electric transmission line offers an economic boost healthy in all respects. It helps promote the needed switch from fossil-fuel energy, as opposed to the crude-oil pipeline, which besides endangering our soils would pour more capital into the least environmentally compatible form of energy.
Wind energy and solar energy create none of the pollutants that contribute to climate change, do not drain our reserves of resources, do not poisons our soils or our drinking water. Precisely because they are the logical answer to the need for clean energy, wind and solar are a threat to Big Oil and Big Coal, which endlessly campaign against them at every turn.
Windpower has put Iowa on the leading edge of a technological wave of the future. Our forests of turbines now generate 27 percent of Iowa’s electricity, tops in the nation. It is a distinction of which we can be proud — and whose promotion is an unquestionable economic and environmental plus.
As noted, both proposals require a green light from the Iowa Utilities Board to proceed. Both will pursue voluntary agreements with landowners and seek authority to use eminent domain, the power to take private property for public use with compensation to the owners.
The issue in each case is the public benefit. The answers are clear.
THE AUTHOR:
BILL LEONARD of Des Moines is a retired Des Moines Register editorial writer. Contact: LBleona@aol.com.