Secretary Salazar Participates in National Clean Energy Project Forum
February 23, 2009
Music/Announcer: This is a podcast from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Ron Tull: Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar joined a historic group of leaders in Washington, DC, today to participate in the "National Clean Energy Project: Building the New Economy" forum, sponsored by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. The participants in this summit concluded that inadequate access to transmission was one of the most significant barriers to widespread development of renewable energy.
Here are Secretary Salazar's remarks on the Interior Department's role in both renewable energy development and transmission.
Ken Salazar: I believe that the Department of the Interior can play some significant roles, first with respect to citing and secondly with respect to transmission. We obviously own 20% of the landmass of the United States, 1.75 billion of the outer continental shelf in acreage. There are huge renewable energy potentials in wind out in the Atlantic, huge solar potential in the southwestern part of the state, and a whole host of other items that are on the portfolio of renewable energy. But ultimately, we get the 25x25 or 30x30 or, as Vice President Gore might say, maybe even beyond that.
I think so much of it is dependent on transmission. It doesn't do any good for us to take the 85% of the landmass in Nevada, where we have the sun shining almost every day in Nevada, and produce a tremendous amount of solar power. Some companies are talking about 200- and 300- and 350-megawatt solar power plants out in the desert, but there aren’t a lot of people out there to consume that energy that's produced from that solar power.
And so, our big question becomes how do we get the energy that is produced from those areas to the places where it's going to be consumed in Southern California and Los Angeles and North Albuquerque, wherever it is that we have to transmit that power. So I think, just based on my work with Senator Bingaman, with Senator Dorgan, President Clinton and others over the years, that we can do a lot more than we have been doing. The experts and scientists tell us that we can get to the point where we're producing 20% of our energy from wind alone by the year 2030.
They tell us that by the year 2020, we could put another 10% of our energy as we harness the power of the sun. And that's not even beginning to tap the potential that we have with respect to geothermal or other sources of renewable energy. But at the end of the day, unless we are able to solve this juggernaut that we are in and deal with the transmission issue, we simply are going to be standing in place 5 and 10 years from now. And so I think it is appropriate for this center and for the Congress and for President Obama to be absolutely focused like a laser beam on what we do to grapple with this issue of transmission.
Ron Tull: This has been a podcast from the United States Department of the Interior Radio News Service. I'm Ron Tull, Washington.
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