Power Replay

It’s been nearly a decade since Tucson Electric Power rolled out the
bright idea of stringing a huge, 345-kilovolt transmission line down
through the Coronado National Forest into Nogales, and then on to
Mexico.

To the good folks of Santa Cruz Valley, it seems like only
yesterday. They haven’t forgotten the multitude of hours and dollars
spent countering TEP’s army of engineers, lawyers and PR hacks, all
handsomely paid to argue that anything less than a full-blown
international connection was hugely impractical. Company officials
scoffed at the idea of simply adding a 138-kilovolt line to the current
115-kilovolt line, thereby giving Nogales all the juice it
needs—and is mandated by the Arizona Corporation Commission to
receive.

That’s why more than a few folks were scratching their heads
recently, after TEP announced plans to upgrade that 115-kilovolt line
to Nogales to 138 kilovolts. As you might expect, many Santa Cruz
Valley residents are a touch disgusted that the company fought them
tooth and claw, only to completely reverse itself.

“They wasted a lot of our time and energy, and money as well,” says
Rich Bohman, president of the Santa Cruz Valley Citizens Council. The
volunteer group became an official participant—known as an
“intervener”—when TEP applied for the 345-kilovolt route with the
Corporation Commission (a project which is now in limbo). Bohman’s
group also hired a Phoenix attorney to fight one proposed route, which
would have directed the massive line along Interstate 19 through Tubac.
“We easily spent $40,000 on that,” Bohman says.

If Marshall Magruder had been paid for time spent fighting TEP, he
could have retired all over again. The Tubac resident became a
perpetual thorn in the company’s side, arguing against the 345-kilovolt
line at Corporation Commission hearings and to anyone else who would
listen. (See TQ&A, Feb. 3, 2005.) As it turns out, the former
systems engineer knew exactly what he was talking about. Today,
Magruder is still keeping close tabs on TEP shenanigans.

While he has no major beef with the latest proposal, he does note a
few niggling problems. For instance, power for Santa Cruz County
currently comes from the “Nogales Tap” on lines owned by the Western
Area Power Administration. Though WAPA charges a fee for this northern
connection, the proposed link will run on TEP lines—at a higher
cost. “They’ll have to put a couple of miles of new transmission lines
in to do that,” he says, “and it means we’ll pay a different rate. It
will be about $2.50 more per month, per customer. And that’s
forever.”

Nor would the latest TEP proposal have more than one line serving
Nogales. That could leave the city vulnerable to blackouts—a key
reason behind the Corporation Commission-ordered upgrade in the first
place. (See Dave Devine’s article on Page 13.) The new TEP proposal
“doesn’t do any improvement in reliability,” Magruder says, “except
that they’re going to replace some of the existing wood poles with
steel poles.”

He also takes issue with the number of steel replacements needed.
Magruder says there’s a formula for when such poles need to be
replaced, and that TEP might be racking up unneeded expenses. “Is it
cost-effective? That’s how I’m looking at it. They say they’ll have
less (power) failures with the steel poles. So then I asked them for
their failure rate, and they said it’s not relevant.”

TEP estimated the cost for upgrade at between $24 million and $47
million, Magruder says. “But I’d like it a little closer. That’s a big
spread.”

Although the new proposal lacks TEP’s earlier intention of rifling
through the Coronado National Forest, that doesn’t mean nature gets off
scot-free, either. Marty Jakle can tell you about that. The former U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service biologist lives in Rio Rico, where the
company wants to reroute its existing line. That would move it from one
part of Jakle’s property, where it is today, to another that’s rich
with wildlife.

“They told me they would want to remove all the vegetation there
within a 100-foot easement,” he says. “It’s an old-growth mesquite
bosque with hackberry, elderberry, cat’s claw and shrubs.” It’s also
home to the yellow-billed cuckoo, which is currently a candidate for
the endangered species list.

If Jakle doesn’t sign on to the shift, the company could muscle away
the habitat through condemnation. That would make a mockery of the
power-line-location process, which he says is supposed to make
sensitive species a top consideration. “I worked on environmental plans
all of my professional career. If had a case like this, it would be
such a no-brainer, because they have that lower-quality habitat on my
property already cleared.”

Still, the political habitat seems to favor TEP this time around.
Unlike before, when it voted to oppose the 345-kilovolt line, the Santa
Cruz County Board of Supervisors seems to be onboard with this latest
proposal—although those sentiments aren’t yet official. “TEP
needs to do what it needs to do to make sure that we have the power
available for our community,” says District 1 Supervisor Manny Ruiz.
“It will be interesting to see what happens. But as far as a board, we
haven’t taken a position.”

Others have shifted their position from low-key opposition to
borderline apathy. Among them is Hugh Holub, a longtime Santa Cruz
County player who served as a city attorney for Nogales in the
late-1990s. During the wrangling over the 345-kilovolt line, he was
among a group calling itself Maestros, which proposed building a power
plant in Nogales as an alternative.

When it comes to Santa Cruz County, says Holub, the utility company
seems to lose its bearings. “They’ve taken the long way to get back to
where they should have been in the first place. They went off on a
tangent there for a long time that wasn’t really doing us any good down
in this end of the world.”

Holub calls it a colossal waste of time—particularly since
TEP’s goal of tapping into Mexico’s power grid was a pipe dream. He
learned that fact while working with the Maestros.

“We proposed putting our power plant right on the border,” he says.
“Well, one of the things we found out was that the Mexican government
made it really, really clear that they weren’t buying power on any
long-term contract from any source in the United States. And that came
from really high up in the Mexican government. In fact the
then-secretary of energy who made that ruling is now the president of
the country.”

This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2009.