Renewables

From today's Washington Post: As the push for renewable-energy development intensifies across the United States, scientists and activists have begun to voice concern that policymakers have underestimated the environmental impact of projects that are otherwise 'green.'... One of the biggest challenges renewable-energy projects pose is that they often take up much more land than conventional sources, such as coal-fired power plants." Lines to transmit power from huge solar facilities in New Mexico to communities in Arizona cross through some environmentally sensitive areas, and while the company building the lines promises to zig and zag to avoid sensitive areas as much as possible, every additional mile of line costs $1 million dollars, so expenses will add up. Always, always there are tradeoffs!