newsminer.com

FAIRBANKS — In a column published by the National Review Friday, former Gov. Sarah Palin said one of her accomplishments as governor was the creation of a “long-term plan” for Alaska to generate 50 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025, up from about 20 percent today.

Unfortunately, there is no long-term plan to get to 50 percent. A “long-term plan” means a series of clear steps that must be taken to reach a goal.

It would have been accurate for the former governor to say she made an announcement Jan. 16 that the state should be generating half of its power with renewable energy by 2025. She did not offer any details on how the goal would be achieved.

The 50 percent proclamation has been mentioned numerous times in the past 10 months, but there is still no plan.

Palin’s announcement was a bit like the federal government’s declaration in the No Child Left Behind Law that every student will be succeeding in school by 2014.

It sounds great.

The state did release an inventory of energy options as part of Palin’s announcement in January.

“Alaska Energy: A first step toward energy independence,” is the report that outlines a mind-boggling array of alternatives.

“This is huge. And I want this to be grasped. It’s an unprecedented effort to inventory and analyze energy options. This is huge,” Palin said at the press conference. “It should be greatly appreciated by all Alaskans who are really fed up with the cost that it takes to energize Alaska’s businesses and our homes. The money we spend for energy in Alaska doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when we own the resources. And the renewable energy sources are here at our fingertips. Once we plug those in we’re going to get a handle on the cost of energy. I hope that that is grasped here.”

She said the report made the options clear to communities across Alaska.

“Now Alaskans living remotely especially can engage in the construction of their energy future,” she said.

At that same press conference, she said the pipeline to the Lower 48 was the foundation for a long-term energy plan for Alaska, but an in-state gas pipeline would be the focus for 2009.

In her column in the National Review, Palin says the extensive catalog of energy options released this year “can help rural villages transition away from expensive diesel-generated electricity — allowing each community to choose the solution that best fits its needs. That’s important in any energy plan: Tempting as they may be to central planners, top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions are recipes for failure.”

I shudder at the thought of “top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions,” but the real recipe for failure is what Palin did. She announced an ambitious goal without doing the detail work necessary for success.

The difficult and controversial negotiating process of sorting through conflicting points of view about our energy future has yet to take place in Alaska.

We see that in the unfocused and disjointed approach to energy planning that applies to the competing proposals to develop natural gas for in-state use as well as to the many ideas about electrical generation.

The Railbelt utilities are continuing to go their separate ways to plan future generating capacity — the combined effect of which will kill any hope of building the Susitna hydro project or some other large-scale renewable effort.

Absent leadership from the state to build a consensus, Alaskans with different ideas will continue to pull in different directions at the same time.