Arizona just ended its hottest summer since records began in 1896, while fast-growing metro Phoenix completed a record high last month. historical series of 113 days of temperatures at 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The coming decades have been predicted to keep it warm even longer.
To survive in that heat and grow the state’s economy, Democratic Senate candidate Ruben Gallego pitched a major solution Wednesday night during the final debate with Republican rival Kari Lake.
More nuclear energy.
Amid a combative television exchange in which the serving U.S. congressman attacked his Republican opponent for denying the election results and climate science, Gallego said new reactors are the “fastest thing we could do to make sure we get the growth we have in Arizona can continue with production and climate.” homes to make sure we can meet that.”
“We must first accept that climate change is happening. We are preparing for that by actually having a very resilient network,” he said. “We need to bring in more base load energy. That will have to be nuclear.”
The term base load refers to electricity sources that can generate power non-stop regardless of the weather, as opposed to renewable energy sources such as wind turbines and solar panels. While batteries have helped save renewable energy for later, the energy in lithium-ion units runs out over time, making long-term storage a challenge. As a result, the growth of wind and solar energy – which sun-drenched Arizona has in abundance and is increasingly being tapped – has been accompanied by an increase in the amount of natural gas that can serve as backup at night and when the air is quiet. .
In addition to fossil fuels and nuclear energy, hydroelectric dams and geothermal energy provide 24/7 production. But dams are ecologically destructive to vast areas, and water is becoming scarcer, especially in the American Southwest. Although promising new breakthroughs suggests that geothermal energy can be harnessed in more places, but is somewhat geographically limited to areas where the Earth’s crust is thin and there is a lot of volcanic activity, such as in Iceland or El Salvador.
Arizona already generates 27% of its electricity from its only nuclear power plant. The Palo Verde Generating Station, just west of Phoenix, is the nation’s second largest nuclear power plant. The three reactors generate so much energy that the plant accounts for 4% of the generation of the entire US fleet of 94 units, spread over 54 separate plants.
National public support for nuclear power is at the highest level in more than a decade, with a majority of American adults supporting new reactors in recent polls from Gallup and the Pew Research Center.
But 46% of Arizona’s energy comes from natural gas, which produces powerful emissions that warm the planet through drilling and transportation even before it is burned, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And the demand is growing.
The Grand Canyon State already uses more electricity than two-thirds of other states, with the majority of Arizona homes using power for both heating and cooling. The state’s largest energy companies record demand reached in August, when a heat wave sent temperatures in Phoenix soaring to 116 degrees Fahrenheit and made energy-hungry air conditioning essential. Cool even a medium-sized house, The Wall Street Journal reported this week drove up taxpayers’ bills to as much as $500 a month.
Arizonans needed more electricity to cool off as the price of natural gas, the state’s main fuel for energy production, rose to its second-highest price in 35 years in July, trailing only the peak of the summer of 2023. facts show.
Even those who used the exact same amount of electricity saw an increase. In February, the Arizona Corporation Commission voted 4-1 to approve an 8% rate increase so utilities can “recoup the costs spent maintaining and upgrading the electric system.”
That hike followed other rate hikes in 2019 and 2022, and could be a harbinger of another rate hike in 2025, said Commissioner Anna Tovar, the lone dissenting vote this year.
“This is the most significant rate increase customers have seen in a long time,” she said in a news release local PBS station job interview in August. “So they have that sticker shock when it comes to, ‘Wow, how come my bill is so high?'”
Tovar is the only Democrat on the five-member Commission.
That didn’t stop Lake from blaming Democrats for higher electricity prices.
“I recently read an article about a woman who is retired, she has to keep her house at 83. She keeps her windows and shades closed because she just can’t afford to cool her house,” Lake said, paraphrasing details from this week’s Journal story. “We have to bring the energy price down.”
Her solution was light on details, largely echoing her party’s national slogans and promoting fossil fuel projects outside Arizona.
“We need to bring back the Keystone XL pipeline and start building it, and continue, as President Trump says, ‘drill, baby, drill,’” she said.
The Keystone XL pipeline, which President Joe Biden canceled in 2017, connects oil fields in Canada to another pipeline in the Upper Midwest. Last year, the US eclipsed Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer, beating Russia and Qatar. take first place in the export of liquefied natural gas.
Without any known oil and gas reserves, Arizona is instead gearing up for a boom in mining copper and other minerals needed for the transition away from fossil fuels. In particular, Arizona has a long history of mining uranium, the metal used to fuel nuclear reactors. Demand has increased sharply as the US tries to phase out Russian imports.
Building new reactors, as Gallego wants, is not an easy task. The US has only started and completed two new reactors since the beginning of this century. Regulatory changes that occurred in the 1990s, after much of the country’s nuclear fleet had already been built, make financing large-scale projects that cost billions of dollars and could last a decade virtually impossible. Biden’s historic climate and infrastructure bills have spent billions of dollars boosting nuclear power, and rising demand from data centers is driving tech giants like Microsoft and Google huge offers for atomic energy.
Electricity wasn’t the only flashpoint Wednesday night.
“She didn’t bring up water,” Gallego said, raising his eyebrows. “This is Arizona. She should have brought water. We must ensure that we make water investments to tackle the drought caused by climate change.”
He pledged to push for more federal funding for water reclamation projects, including canal capping. But he warned that upcoming water negotiations between the federal government and Western states such as Arizona, which rely on the dwindling Colorado River for freshwater supplies, would likely lead to bigger water cuts.
That “will be very dangerous for some of our farmers,” Gallego said. “They’ll be cut off from that. These are the real things she should be doing. But she denies climate change, and that shouldn’t surprise us: she’s still denying the 2022 election.”
Lake, a former TV news anchor turned Republican Party hardliner who has refused to accept the outcome of the gubernatorial election she lost two years ago, has dismissed the issue outright.
“I have lived here for 30 years and have seen how politicians keep saying we have a water crisis,” she said. “We have to look at long-term solutions. I’m not talking about fighting over a drop of water. We can save money, but we cannot save how we get out of this crisis.”
Her message doesn’t seem to resonate. Despite Republican Donald Trump voting slightly ahead of Democratic rival Kamala Harris in Arizona presidential contest, surveys issued this past week Gallego showed with a 6 to 13 point lead over Lake.
