About 100 miles north of Reno, outside a desert town named Gerlach -- whose slogan is "where the pavement ends and the West begins" -- a quarrel is simmering that highlights the competing visions for the future of electricity production in the United States.
And in a curious political twist, Los Angeles may find itself playing a deciding role in the dispute, a showdown between "green power" and coal power.
Near the site of the annual Burning Man festival, a subsidiary of San Diego-based Sempra Energy is proposing to build a coal-fired power plant that could supply enough electricity to California and the Pacific Northwest to light up 1.5 million homes.
Nearby, green-power advocates are pushing an equally ambitious proposal to harness the force of the wind, as well as the heat of the sun and the Earth's core, to create enough electricity to power 1.2 million homes.
Both proposals would connect to the same high-voltage transmission line in order to move electricity to consumers. But there is only enough space left on the electrical freeway for one of the two -- at least at the current sizes. So government regulators and politicians must make a choice.
That choice is between coal-fired power -- a heavily polluting form of fossil fuel energy that could be counted on to help curtail the West's chronic electricity shortages -- and renewable power. The latter is a less-proven option that promises a future free of the emissions that cause smog and acid rain and that contribute to global warming.
Los Angeles, which recently had its own debate over investing in coal or renewable energy, may wind up resolving the dispute, because the city Department of Water and Power runs and partly owns the transmission line that passes through northern Nevada.
The Los Angeles City Council would have to agree to allow one of the projects to connect to the line, which moves megawatts between Sylmar and Oregon. So would the other owners: Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank and Southern California Edison. Decisions are not expected for months.
Sempra representatives said their proposal, Granite Fox Power, would bring badly needed electricity to Western states, including California, where the managers of its power grid recently warned of "critically thin operating margins" that could lead to shortages this summer. The plant, which Sempra expects to be operational by 2010, would provide jobs and tax revenue to a corner of Nevada whose main economic benefactor is gambling and, they contend, would produce 80% less pollution than most coal plants.
