Local opinion: The wrong sort of solar for Arizona

There's no mention in recent reports of a massive solar project near Three Points as to who, exactly, owns it. Nor do we really know what it's going to be used for. Ask county officials, and they don't have an answer. So, presumably, one of the two major investor-owned electrical utilities here in Arizona, TEP or APS, would fess up eventually. Both of these monopolies, after all, treat solar exactly like they treat their gas, coal or even nuclear infrastructure.

They buy a gargantuan plot of land, clear-cut everything, put up a chain-link fence, and plumb the wires and poles to wherever the electricity will be used, typically far away. But they've also been remarkably quiet about Three Points. The ACC? The Governor's office? I haven't heard a word from either of them. Have you? It doesn't take much else to determine that the Three Points photovoltaic colossus is probably going to be used for data center projects near Tucson and Marana: tech oligarchy infrastructure that nobody asked for or wants.

If it was actually legal to do so in Arizona, local and regional governments could insist on owning and maintaining far smaller versions of these solar/battery fields that would primarily serve just their own nearby towns and villages. And Three Points is a farming community, right? Put a little science and creativity behind a human-scaled solar installation, and you'd have things like controlled shading for crops and resulting lower water use in the form of Agrivoltaics.

Divide a 5000-acre project like this one into hundreds, or potentially thousands, of football-field-sized parcels. These could be placed all over the state next to small towns, without fear of having to co-opt a data center along with it. Take a sizable chunk of those PV panels and integrate them into the urban landscape architecture of cities like Tucson and Phoenix. Have them creatively disappear as shade awnings over big box parking lots, for instance, addressing the urban heat island effect and generating electricity near where it's actually going to be used. Scale the solar and distribute it. You'd also need far fewer wires and poles.

Furthermore, we already have a comprehensive canal system for bringing increasingly scarce Colorado River water into the state. California is adopting a plan to cover their canals with solar panels. This, again, is a dual-use strategy of mitigating evaporation and combining it with something that also produces electricity. And you're doing so on top of infrastructure that's already been built. However, attempts to cover our human-made canals with photovoltaic panels are always derided as a "Woke" or "Green New Scam" by the usual fossil-fueled pundits. This, sadly, has been going on in Arizona for decades.

So, who dreamed up this newest overwrought sea of aluminum, glass and silicon, deciding to put it squarely in the backyards of the very people who have been hypnotized for years that climate change is a hoax or that those weird blue rectangles with the white stripes are a Chinese plot to spy on us? Or maybe this was the plan of a project like this all along: present solar in the most unattractive "my way or the highway" fashion possible, so the developers can do a bait-and-switch with a methane plant a few years later? Currently, though, those marketing fine points mean little to a collection of folks in the middle of the desert who simply don't want their view of nature co-opted into a photovoltaic version of the Three Gorges Dam.

The real solution is to finally break up Arizona's two investor-owned monopoly utilities, who have dictated a corporate-captured energy policy since the early years of the 20th century. That, of course, won't happen anytime soon. However, our governor could actually lead here and impose a moratorium on data center construction, as is now happening in both politically red and blue states around the country. Nix the gas pipeline plan you just signed off on, Governor Hobbs, while you're at it. Solar with batteries is the tool that we — individuals and municipalities — can and should own ourselves and scale to our own requirements.