Heading for the Border
By Lily Auliff

With all these new strict pollution regulations, where will we build new power plants? In Mexico, of course.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has issued permits to two U.S. companies to build electrical transmission lines from their two new power plants in Baja, Mexico – just three miles from the border – into southern California. And other energy companies have plans to construct at least 12 new power plants along the California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas borders, with about half on the U.S. side and half on the Mexican side, according to Bill Powers of the Border Power Plant Working Group (BPWG), a coalition primarily composed of nonprofit groups from both nations.

Although Mexico does have some pollution regulations, they are not as stringent as those in the United States – and not nearly as stringent as those in southern California – where several areas are struggling to meet federal air quality standards, explains Powers. Doing the dirty work of producing power in Mexico allows U.S. companies, in this case InterGen and Sempra Energy, to sidestep both pollution regulations and the public processes required in this country.

Opponents to the projects blame some of the heightened interest in importing power on deregulation and the National Energy Policy, which includes a provision “to expand and accelerate cross-border energy investment, oil and gas pipelines, and electricity grid connections by streamlining and expediting permitting procedures with Mexico and Canada.”

“Now we see that what the administration meant by expediting power plant construction was actually a strategy to avoid U.S. laws that mandate environmental review and public participation,” says Martin Wagner, an attorney for Earthjustice who is representing BPWG.

BPWG has filed a lawsuit against the DOE, charging that the agency failed to prepare an environmental impact statement that considered the cumulative effects of the transmission lines, the pipelines being built to supply fuel to the power plants, and plant operations. The DOE’s EIS analyzed only the impact of the transmission lines.

BPWD also charges that the EIS did not consider alternatives to granting the permits outright, such as granting conditional permits that require the new plants to meet U.S. pollution regulations.

“Approving transmission lines for power plants under construction in Mexico without ensuring that these plants are built to minimize air and water quality impacts will cause unnecessary harm to local U.S. and Mexican communities,” concludes Powers. He is also concerned that allowing these facilities to operate unregulated will set a dangerous precedent for all border states.