Credits
Stephen Robert Miller is an award-winning science journalist and author.
MAMMOTH, Arizona — Peter Else lives nearly off-grid in an adobe house on the east bank of the San Pedro River in southeast Arizona. On a late-summer morning, his kitchen counters were strewn with yellow squash harvested from the organic garden outside. His water came from a massive drum of collected rain. His heat, when needed, radiated off a south-facing wall that harnesses the sun’s rays. By all accounts, Else is a bleeding-heart environmentalist walking the talk. So why is he vehemently fighting the largest renewable energy project in American history?
That project at issue is the SunZia transmission line, a 550-mile-long high-voltage power line that will carry some 3,000 megawatts of wind energy from central New Mexico to just south of Phoenix. The more than $8-billion joint wind farm and direct current…
