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Curious of the politics that has folks in Idaho talking so warmly about renewable energy. If you believe the national news, all red states want to keep burning

Curious of the politics that has folks in Idaho talking so warmly about renewable energy. If you believe the national news, all red states want to keep burning coal. Curious about the background here.

chaosbutters 8y ago
second this question.
kevin42 8y ago
Idahoan here. Just a guess here, but most people don't realize how pristine and beautiful it really is here. The reason I mention that is, outdoor activities like hunting fishing, camping, boating, etc. are a huge part of people's lives here. We have massive areas of protected wilderness. My point is, as conservative as it is here, I think even our conservatives care more for the environment than average, because they spend a lot of time enjoying it. It's a similar thing with wildlife. The avid hunters are often the biggest protectors of habitats. Same with fisherman and rivers and streams.
- linuxlizard 8y ago
  Another Idahoan here. Agreed. The outdoors here is very valued. Idaho also has a lot of hydroelectric generation which I think also counts are renewable?
  - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
    Yes, take hydro away and the entire conversation changes. Now... how many people actually understand the effect hydro has on the environment? There is a reason that the big sandy beaches seen around highway 12 around McCall and Riggins are fairly rare in Idaho now.
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      Washingtonian here: they drill in the negative effects of hydro into our heads in high school civics class (but it’s primarily centered around fish). We still do it, but have began removing many of the older less productive dams in the state (eg on Elwa a few years back).
      - snowwindwaves 8y ago
        British Columbia has built about 125 new hydro plants in the last 30 years. The environmental studies take about 5 years and cost millions and employ many biologists and environmental specialists. Negative effects can be mitigated if the plant is designed to take them in to account. Be it not changing flows and levels except very slowly to avoid stranding fish, keeping some water flowing past the intake structure to keep sediment moving, creating fish ladders, fish spawning channels, etc. Hydro is really one of the least bad energy sources if you have to pick one.
        seanmcdirmid 8y ago
        Sure, for new dams. The ones built a hundred or more years ago are the ones with huge problems. Well, there is always a cost, the Columbia will never run free, for example.
        snowwindwaves 8y ago
        There must be some solution to the huge problems. The entities operating and maintaining these old hydro electric facilities probably don't have the budgets to resolve the huge problems, but it is hard to believe the situation is so bad and so hopeless that we'd be better off removing all of the dams and installing natural gas turbines in their place.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >how pristine and beautiful it really is here. The Keep talking like that on the internet and it will rapidly take a turn for the worse. Colorado used to be a lot like Idaho then it achieved a "brand image" as a vacation spot, after about a generation of people retiring to their vacation spot and people moving there because they can and the state is in a tailspin (being an early adopter on weed probably didn't help but that's beside the point). Now the cost of living is skyrocketing and Denver/Boulder seem to be hell bent on recreating all the bad (bad for people who aren't wealthy, that is) decisions of a certain west coast state. Economy, people, natural environment, no place can be highly favorable to all three. You can make big bucks and enjoy nature all you want in CA but the rest of your life will be a rat race. You can live a nice life and make good money in some places on the east coast but god help you if you want to get outdoors once in awhile. There are still many highly rural states where you can enjoy nature and have a nice life but you won't be making big bucks there.
  - linuxftw 8y ago
    > Now the cost of living is skyrocketing and Denver/Boulder seem to be hell bent on recreating all the bad (bad for people who aren't wealthy, that is) decisions of a certain west coast state. This is the net result of asset inflation. The North East and California got rich via big-bank (Federal Reserve and Wall St) driven asset inflation. People are logically cashing out and moving to lower cost of living areas.
  - rpedela 8y ago
    What are the bad decisions?
- bigredhdl 8y ago
  Drove through Idaho on the way to Spokane from Omaha and was so struck by Coeur d'alene I made sure to go back for a vacation years later.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  The panhandle is cool like that (we used to go to priest lake a lot), southern Idaho reminds me more of Utah (a lot of scrub and irrigated farming going on).
- mbostleman 8y ago
  Also Idahoan here - but not sure that matters. No doubt it is pristine and beautiful here. But this implies that "conservatives" don't care about the environment where it's not pristine and beautiful. I don't think that's the case. I think that financial realities will always win out and what is happening in Idaho is a sufficient government distortion of the market to make these other technologies financially workable.
  - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
    The folks who don't care about the environment are not conservatives in general, but the big money that owns the corporations that do resource extraction and their employees, who happen to be mostly in conservative areas. Which gives a lot of people the wrong idea about conservatives. Plus a few ideologues who idolize the free market and don't care about externalities. Which also gives people the wrong idea about conservatives.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
consentfactory 8y ago
Another Idahoan here. I don't completely buy into the notion that conservatives here are conservationists. I think there definitely are some that are, but I think larger contributing factors are that we have an abundance of renewable energy (hydro, wind, and sun), low population, and a ton of federally-owned land. We have so much hydro power that some of our dams aren't even owned by Idaho Power. For example, Lucky Peak Dam, which provides flood control for the Boise River and Boise, has a power plant there that is actually owned by Seattle City Light that provides 4% of Seattle's power (1). Also, Idaho doesn't have a lot of fossil fuels to harvest (2), so this likely plays into lack of desire for coal. Mining in the north and agriculture in the south are our primary economic drivers. In terms of the politics, our legislature this year just barely formed a committee to discuss climate change, but our governor did say it exists and is a problem, so who knows? I suppose I tend to think that our population's demand for electricity is no where near greater than our supply, which is why demand for coal isn't really there. However, if someone from the outside wanted to install a coal power plant, I think conservatives here would easily support it. That may be my cynicism coming through, but I could easily see Trump advocating for it and then the freedom trucks with their freedom flags and freedom coal rolling exhausts would rally to support this. Yeah, I'm a tad cynical. 1. http://www.seattle.gov/light/history/brief.asp http://www.seattle.gov/light/history/brief.asp 2. https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=ID https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=ID
- kevin42 8y ago
  The thing about coal here in Idaho is that there are very few reasons for conservatives to like it. There are no coal jobs here. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying conservatives here are actually conservationists, I just mean that many of them tend to be more interested in the outdoors. I'm just basing that on people I know and encounter, so the sample size isn't huge. Also, the weird thing about Idaho is that there are at least two, maybe three Idaho's. There is Eastern Idaho, who are largely extremely conservative farmers, then there is the Boise area, which relative to Eastern Idaho is less conservative. Then there is Northern Idaho, which I don't really know how to describe, but they don't fit either category.
  - 8y ago
lettergram 8y ago
Other people from Idaho are talking about the environment and I’m sure that’s a large part. I’d also like to add from a government perspective a Idaho is a huge state with a small disperse population. It’s cheaper to have local energy generated from solar, than transporting power tens or hundreds of miles to a single house.
swebs 8y ago
Idaho does not have coal reserves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Stat... As an aside, I believe there's a term nowadays for when the media purposefully misleads in order to promote an agenda.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Well that highlights that they lack an economic interest in it. Except nearly everywhere that applies - mid-tier restuarants like Arbies are bigger than the coal issue yet so many declare coal their hill to die on as some sort of symbol.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  Isn’t that a straw man though? The media hasn’t even hinted at Idaho being into coal, heck, reading the paper or watching CNN one would think that no one used coal west of the Mississippi (when in reality Wyoming is a big coal user). If you didn’t...study it in school you wouldn’t even know how much hydro California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho had. Or maybe you simply didn’t care, because how is that information even useful to you? There is also a term when purposely describing the media as misleading in a misleading way.
- thinkcontext 8y ago
  The article explicitly states it is to replace generation from a coal plant in Nevada.
Not_a_pizza 8y ago
You might as well state that no republican is pro-renewables, and that would be dishonest as well. This binary labeling of people and states in order to franchise hate really has to come to a close. The moment any movement convinces you that someone is a single choice and not a human, you have failed.
- grande 8y ago
  completely agreed, and you are getting downvoted as well for no reason, the amount of brainwashing is astounding... I am completely for solar and glad that solar is getting cheaper, it's a more environmentally friendly way of generating power and now it's also getting even cheaper, what's not to like, good for enviornment and the finances as well.. no real reason then for anyone not to support it
- tzs 8y ago
  > You might as well state that no republican is pro-renewables, and that would be dishonest as well How about if "no republican" is replaced with "no Republican who needs the support of the President or national party organization to win election"?
nthompson 8y ago
The Idaho legislature is totally dominated by farmers (I mean this literally: The Idaho congressmen are primarily farmers.). These farmers are allowed way better deals on hooking up solar and providing it to the grid than city consumers. In addition, a large number of farmers already have solar panels since grid hookups are very expensive. The "California arbitrage" has been very profitable for Idaho for many years: This involves selling California renewable hydro, for which they pay a premium, and buying coal from Utah to replace it. (Ever driven north of SLC to Idaho on I-15? Those high voltage transmission lines are there for a reason.) If I had to bet, I would suspect the lines from the Nevada coal plant also supply California, and Idaho Power will sell the solar production there.
- AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
  Can you use Utah coal energy to pump water back into reservoir for clean hydro plants?
  - kortilla 8y ago
    Sure, but now you’re just powered by coal with a massive inefficiency in the middle.
    - nthompson 8y ago
      He's making a joke that the arbitrage could generate infinite amounts of money by generating clean power with coal power.
  - nthompson 8y ago
    haha they ought to try that.
  - floatrock 8y ago
    "energy laundering"
    - usrusr 8y ago
DamnYuppie 8y ago
"If you believe the national news"... there in lies the crux of the issue. Have we not all learned by now that large media is merely playing for click-bait and sensationalism at this point and can not be trusted? Aside from 3 years I have lived in various conservative states. The push for coal is not by the populace but by the $$$ being donated by various groups. Please note I have not lived in a coal producing state. I am sure in those states the desire is for coal as it equals jobs. Yet they are a minority.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  > Have we not all learned by now that large media is merely playing for click-bait and sensationalism at this point and can not be trusted? When are you going to learn that laypeople are not capable of critical thought?
cwperkins 8y ago
Thinking all conservatives are against green energy is a smear against conservatives. The debate is much more nuanced and to trivialize a complex issue conservatives generally think that the solution to the problem is through innovation and business investment rather than taxes and government action. As with most issues, I believe the solution is somewhere in the middle and after reading the news the other day where Florida is building the worlds biggest battery, it’s really great to see red states leading!
- ams6110 8y ago
  Agree. I lean conservative and generally feel that the market will find the best solutions. If solar is economically superior to coal then it will replace coal. We don't need government policies and tax incentives to make that happen.
  - tzs 8y ago
    How is the market going to account for externalities, such as climate change in the case of coal, without nudging from government policies or tax incentives (or anti-incentives)?
    - mbostleman 8y ago
      Because consumers want it. Consumers used to pay 50 cents for a cup of coffee. Now they pay $5. That didn't happen because of government nudging. It happened because a different demand was created.
      - tzs 8y ago
        A fancy $5 coffee drink looks, tastes, and smells different from a 50 cent cup of coffee. A kilowatt hour of electricity that came from the dirtiest coal plant in the universe and a kilowatt hour of electricity that came from whatever the cleanest source is are completely indistinguishable when they come out of my sockets and go into my appliances.
microcolonel 8y ago
> If you believe the national news, all red states want to keep burning coal. If you believed the national news for the last two years, you were presented with an unfounded conspiracy theory. The U.S. is not the caricature. Republicans are human too. Nobody wants to rely on coal, but if you have a lot of it, you have a huge incentive to try to make it work.
gniv 8y ago
The news are driven by political interests. The actual investments are driven by potential for profit. Wind is big business in Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, for example. Texas alone generates more than a quarter of its electricity from wind, but you don't often hear local politicians bragging about it.
shereadsthenews 8y ago
I searched a variety of archives and found exactly zero articles about the energy policy of Idaho in the last five years. Are you sure you didn't just ... make this up?
philwelch 8y ago
To invoke a cliche, "red states" are not a monolith. West Virginia is not Texas, Alabama is not Idaho, and Alaska is not Kentucky.

chaosbutters 8y ago

second this question.

kevin42 8y ago

Idahoan here. Just a guess here, but most people don't realize how pristine and beautiful it really is here. The reason I mention that is, outdoor activities like hunting fishing, camping, boating, etc. are a huge part of people's lives here. We have massive areas of protected wilderness. My point is, as conservative as it is here, I think even our conservatives care more for the environment than average, because they spend a lot of time enjoying it. It's a similar thing with wildlife. The avid hunters are often the biggest protectors of habitats. Same with fisherman and rivers and streams.

linuxlizard 8y ago
Another Idahoan here. Agreed. The outdoors here is very valued. Idaho also has a lot of hydroelectric generation which I think also counts are renewable?
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  Yes, take hydro away and the entire conversation changes. Now... how many people actually understand the effect hydro has on the environment? There is a reason that the big sandy beaches seen around highway 12 around McCall and Riggins are fairly rare in Idaho now.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Washingtonian here: they drill in the negative effects of hydro into our heads in high school civics class (but it’s primarily centered around fish). We still do it, but have began removing many of the older less productive dams in the state (eg on Elwa a few years back).
    - snowwindwaves 8y ago
      British Columbia has built about 125 new hydro plants in the last 30 years. The environmental studies take about 5 years and cost millions and employ many biologists and environmental specialists. Negative effects can be mitigated if the plant is designed to take them in to account. Be it not changing flows and levels except very slowly to avoid stranding fish, keeping some water flowing past the intake structure to keep sediment moving, creating fish ladders, fish spawning channels, etc. Hydro is really one of the least bad energy sources if you have to pick one.
      - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
        Sure, for new dams. The ones built a hundred or more years ago are the ones with huge problems. Well, there is always a cost, the Columbia will never run free, for example.
        snowwindwaves 8y ago
        There must be some solution to the huge problems. The entities operating and maintaining these old hydro electric facilities probably don't have the budgets to resolve the huge problems, but it is hard to believe the situation is so bad and so hopeless that we'd be better off removing all of the dams and installing natural gas turbines in their place.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>how pristine and beautiful it really is here. The Keep talking like that on the internet and it will rapidly take a turn for the worse. Colorado used to be a lot like Idaho then it achieved a "brand image" as a vacation spot, after about a generation of people retiring to their vacation spot and people moving there because they can and the state is in a tailspin (being an early adopter on weed probably didn't help but that's beside the point). Now the cost of living is skyrocketing and Denver/Boulder seem to be hell bent on recreating all the bad (bad for people who aren't wealthy, that is) decisions of a certain west coast state. Economy, people, natural environment, no place can be highly favorable to all three. You can make big bucks and enjoy nature all you want in CA but the rest of your life will be a rat race. You can live a nice life and make good money in some places on the east coast but god help you if you want to get outdoors once in awhile. There are still many highly rural states where you can enjoy nature and have a nice life but you won't be making big bucks there.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  > Now the cost of living is skyrocketing and Denver/Boulder seem to be hell bent on recreating all the bad (bad for people who aren't wealthy, that is) decisions of a certain west coast state. This is the net result of asset inflation. The North East and California got rich via big-bank (Federal Reserve and Wall St) driven asset inflation. People are logically cashing out and moving to lower cost of living areas.
- rpedela 8y ago
  What are the bad decisions?
bigredhdl 8y ago
Drove through Idaho on the way to Spokane from Omaha and was so struck by Coeur d'alene I made sure to go back for a vacation years later.
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
The panhandle is cool like that (we used to go to priest lake a lot), southern Idaho reminds me more of Utah (a lot of scrub and irrigated farming going on).
mbostleman 8y ago
Also Idahoan here - but not sure that matters. No doubt it is pristine and beautiful here. But this implies that "conservatives" don't care about the environment where it's not pristine and beautiful. I don't think that's the case. I think that financial realities will always win out and what is happening in Idaho is a sufficient government distortion of the market to make these other technologies financially workable.
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  The folks who don't care about the environment are not conservatives in general, but the big money that owns the corporations that do resource extraction and their employees, who happen to be mostly in conservative areas. Which gives a lot of people the wrong idea about conservatives. Plus a few ideologues who idolize the free market and don't care about externalities. Which also gives people the wrong idea about conservatives.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

consentfactory 8y ago

Another Idahoan here. I don't completely buy into the notion that conservatives here are conservationists. I think there definitely are some that are, but I think larger contributing factors are that we have an abundance of renewable energy (hydro, wind, and sun), low population, and a ton of federally-owned land. We have so much hydro power that some of our dams aren't even owned by Idaho Power. For example, Lucky Peak Dam, which provides flood control for the Boise River and Boise, has a power plant there that is actually owned by Seattle City Light that provides 4% of Seattle's power (1). Also, Idaho doesn't have a lot of fossil fuels to harvest (2), so this likely plays into lack of desire for coal. Mining in the north and agriculture in the south are our primary economic drivers. In terms of the politics, our legislature this year just barely formed a committee to discuss climate change, but our governor did say it exists and is a problem, so who knows? I suppose I tend to think that our population's demand for electricity is no where near greater than our supply, which is why demand for coal isn't really there. However, if someone from the outside wanted to install a coal power plant, I think conservatives here would easily support it. That may be my cynicism coming through, but I could easily see Trump advocating for it and then the freedom trucks with their freedom flags and freedom coal rolling exhausts would rally to support this. Yeah, I'm a tad cynical. 1. http://www.seattle.gov/light/history/brief.asp http://www.seattle.gov/light/history/brief.asp 2. https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=ID https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=ID

kevin42 8y ago
The thing about coal here in Idaho is that there are very few reasons for conservatives to like it. There are no coal jobs here. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying conservatives here are actually conservationists, I just mean that many of them tend to be more interested in the outdoors. I'm just basing that on people I know and encounter, so the sample size isn't huge. Also, the weird thing about Idaho is that there are at least two, maybe three Idaho's. There is Eastern Idaho, who are largely extremely conservative farmers, then there is the Boise area, which relative to Eastern Idaho is less conservative. Then there is Northern Idaho, which I don't really know how to describe, but they don't fit either category.
- 8y ago

lettergram 8y ago

Other people from Idaho are talking about the environment and I’m sure that’s a large part. I’d also like to add from a government perspective a Idaho is a huge state with a small disperse population. It’s cheaper to have local energy generated from solar, than transporting power tens or hundreds of miles to a single house.

swebs 8y ago

Idaho does not have coal reserves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Stat... As an aside, I believe there's a term nowadays for when the media purposefully misleads in order to promote an agenda.

Nasrudith 8y ago
Well that highlights that they lack an economic interest in it. Except nearly everywhere that applies - mid-tier restuarants like Arbies are bigger than the coal issue yet so many declare coal their hill to die on as some sort of symbol.
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
Isn’t that a straw man though? The media hasn’t even hinted at Idaho being into coal, heck, reading the paper or watching CNN one would think that no one used coal west of the Mississippi (when in reality Wyoming is a big coal user). If you didn’t...study it in school you wouldn’t even know how much hydro California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho had. Or maybe you simply didn’t care, because how is that information even useful to you? There is also a term when purposely describing the media as misleading in a misleading way.
thinkcontext 8y ago
The article explicitly states it is to replace generation from a coal plant in Nevada.

Not_a_pizza 8y ago

You might as well state that no republican is pro-renewables, and that would be dishonest as well. This binary labeling of people and states in order to franchise hate really has to come to a close. The moment any movement convinces you that someone is a single choice and not a human, you have failed.

grande 8y ago
completely agreed, and you are getting downvoted as well for no reason, the amount of brainwashing is astounding... I am completely for solar and glad that solar is getting cheaper, it's a more environmentally friendly way of generating power and now it's also getting even cheaper, what's not to like, good for enviornment and the finances as well.. no real reason then for anyone not to support it
tzs 8y ago
> You might as well state that no republican is pro-renewables, and that would be dishonest as well How about if "no republican" is replaced with "no Republican who needs the support of the President or national party organization to win election"?

nthompson 8y ago

The Idaho legislature is totally dominated by farmers (I mean this literally: The Idaho congressmen are primarily farmers.). These farmers are allowed way better deals on hooking up solar and providing it to the grid than city consumers. In addition, a large number of farmers already have solar panels since grid hookups are very expensive. The "California arbitrage" has been very profitable for Idaho for many years: This involves selling California renewable hydro, for which they pay a premium, and buying coal from Utah to replace it. (Ever driven north of SLC to Idaho on I-15? Those high voltage transmission lines are there for a reason.) If I had to bet, I would suspect the lines from the Nevada coal plant also supply California, and Idaho Power will sell the solar production there.

AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
Can you use Utah coal energy to pump water back into reservoir for clean hydro plants?
- kortilla 8y ago
  Sure, but now you’re just powered by coal with a massive inefficiency in the middle.
  - nthompson 8y ago
    He's making a joke that the arbitrage could generate infinite amounts of money by generating clean power with coal power.
- nthompson 8y ago
  haha they ought to try that.
- floatrock 8y ago
  "energy laundering"
  - usrusr 8y ago

DamnYuppie 8y ago

"If you believe the national news"... there in lies the crux of the issue. Have we not all learned by now that large media is merely playing for click-bait and sensationalism at this point and can not be trusted? Aside from 3 years I have lived in various conservative states. The push for coal is not by the populace but by the $$$ being donated by various groups. Please note I have not lived in a coal producing state. I am sure in those states the desire is for coal as it equals jobs. Yet they are a minority.

linuxftw 8y ago
> Have we not all learned by now that large media is merely playing for click-bait and sensationalism at this point and can not be trusted? When are you going to learn that laypeople are not capable of critical thought?

cwperkins 8y ago

Thinking all conservatives are against green energy is a smear against conservatives. The debate is much more nuanced and to trivialize a complex issue conservatives generally think that the solution to the problem is through innovation and business investment rather than taxes and government action. As with most issues, I believe the solution is somewhere in the middle and after reading the news the other day where Florida is building the worlds biggest battery, it’s really great to see red states leading!

ams6110 8y ago
Agree. I lean conservative and generally feel that the market will find the best solutions. If solar is economically superior to coal then it will replace coal. We don't need government policies and tax incentives to make that happen.
- tzs 8y ago
  How is the market going to account for externalities, such as climate change in the case of coal, without nudging from government policies or tax incentives (or anti-incentives)?
  - mbostleman 8y ago
    Because consumers want it. Consumers used to pay 50 cents for a cup of coffee. Now they pay $5. That didn't happen because of government nudging. It happened because a different demand was created.
    - tzs 8y ago
      A fancy $5 coffee drink looks, tastes, and smells different from a 50 cent cup of coffee. A kilowatt hour of electricity that came from the dirtiest coal plant in the universe and a kilowatt hour of electricity that came from whatever the cleanest source is are completely indistinguishable when they come out of my sockets and go into my appliances.

microcolonel 8y ago

> If you believe the national news, all red states want to keep burning coal. If you believed the national news for the last two years, you were presented with an unfounded conspiracy theory. The U.S. is not the caricature. Republicans are human too. Nobody wants to rely on coal, but if you have a lot of it, you have a huge incentive to try to make it work.

gniv 8y ago

The news are driven by political interests. The actual investments are driven by potential for profit. Wind is big business in Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, for example. Texas alone generates more than a quarter of its electricity from wind, but you don't often hear local politicians bragging about it.

shereadsthenews 8y ago

I searched a variety of archives and found exactly zero articles about the energy policy of Idaho in the last five years. Are you sure you didn't just ... make this up?

philwelch 8y ago

To invoke a cliche, "red states" are not a monolith. West Virginia is not Texas, Alabama is not Idaho, and Alaska is not Kentucky.