Who's hitting the gas in sunny Arizona?

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Who's hitting the gas in sunny Arizona?

If ever there were a state made for solar energy projects, it's Arizona. Wide-open desert, flat stretches of land for power lines and (checks notes) oh, yes. Sun. Like, a lot of sun.

Which is one reason why a plan to build a natural gas plant in Mohave County caught the attention of The Republic's climate reporter, Joan Meiners . Beyond the objections of the people who lived near the plant's intended site, Joan wanted to dig into the whole idea that the power cooperative behind the project needed a so-called "peaker" plant fueled by natural gas.

We'll let her pick up the threads here:

IT'S HARD TO FIND A sunnier spot in America than Arizona's Mohave County. That’s the first seemingly odd point of contradiction in a recently renewed push by rural utility cooperatives to build a gas-fired “peaker” power plant in this haven for solar energy generation. But it’s far from the last.

Right after New Year’s, I got wind of a neighborhood of retirees in the northwest corner of the state protesting a proposed fossil-fueled facility sited less than half a mile from their homes in Fort Mohave. I knew about the October vote by Mohave County supervisors to temporarily ban new renewable energy projects on privately owned land, and was curious how this new gas project factored into the sociopolitical landscape of this region, which was taking such a different stance than Gov. Katie Hobbs on Arizona’s support for the clean energy transition.

So I traveled up to Mohave County to meet with residents and utility executives, see the site and attend a Feb. 12 community meeting about the project, where tensions were so high that photographer Mark Henle and I thought a fight might break out. (It didn’t, which thankfully meant that no one got hurt and also that we had just enough time to grab a late dinner at a local Chinese food restaurant, fueling our continued reporting the next day.)

The resulting story on the simultaneous opposition within Mohave County to both gas and renewable energy projects published April 7. In it, I chronicle what residents view as “deceitful” attempts by the Mohave Electric Cooperative, or MEC, to force their peaker project through, while fact-checking the utility’s claims that this particular type of generation is necessary to ensure regional energy reliability and affordability. (The Arizona Attorney General’s office even got involved to look into questions about illegal zoning practices.)

You can read that full story here or a shorter version of it here .

Five days later, MEC held an invite-only meeting to announce they had decided to move plans for the peaker plant facility to Mohave Valley, four miles to the south. This sudden chess move contradicted months of the utility stating, including just a few weeks prior to our coverage, that there was no other suitable location for the project.

Thus began my in-depth investigation that would become the second chapter in this story.

Mohave Valley is lower-income and more heavily agricultural than Fort Mohave. The site where MEC and its partner utility, the Arizona Electric Power Cooperative or AEPCO, now want to build their gas-fired turbines is within three miles of several schools and just 800 feet from tribal land the Fort Mojave Indian community had slated for future homes for their members. It’s also a landscape marked by fallowed farm fields, caused by drought and aquifer depletion that led to restricted irrigation and groundwater pumping in a place that has historically supported itself by growing alfalfa and other crops.

As you might therefore expect — and as was evidenced by the turnout for a Mohave Valley community meeting about the project May 3 that I traveled up there once again to attend — very few residents near the former or current proposed site for this peaker plant support its construction or believe the cooperatives’ claims that the planned facility is in their best interests.

Yet, the resident opposition has seemed to only galvanize MEC and AEPCO’s commitment to this specific project and resistance to considering cleaner alternatives. Throughout the spring, they’ve ramped up advertising efforts (funded by local utility ratepayers) that many view as misleading scare tactics.

To uncover what was really behind this insistence on natural gas, I spoke with more than 40 people, spent months researching the political dynamics and history of Mohave County, searched property records and water rights transfer agreements, pored over the tax documents of these not-for-profit utility cooperatives and reviewed more than 700 pages of emails obtained through a public records request.

After all of this, the only logical conclusion, according to my sources and other reporting, was that the project is being propelled forward not based on its advantages to a growing community with increasing energy demands, but based on opportunities for political and profitable gains for a select few individuals in power, who may have never suspected us to take such a close look at what they are doing in this rural region.

The resulting narrative investigation is long at nearly 6,000 words. But that’s because it’s important to us to truly tell the whole, messy story of conflicting interests in the less-scrutinized regions beyond Arizona’s urban core that could compromise the state’s transition to the reliable, affordable and renewable energy sources scientists say will be essential to keeping our climate livable.

Read the full new investigation published Friday here , or start with a shorter overview here . — Joan Meiners

June is roasting out all over

In Phoenix, June is like the weather month no one wants. It's hot, it's dry, it lacks the drama of the monsoon, the fluctuations of spring and fall. It rarely rains and, oh yeah, it's hot.

The month now in the rear-view mirror managed to usher in the leading edge of the monsoon, but it still ended as the hottest June on record for Phoenix, hitting the trifecta with records for high, low and average temperatures.

The 24-hour average temperature was 97 degrees, 1.7 degrees hotter than the old record from 2021 and 5.6 degrees above the 30-year average, according to the National Weather Service . The average high was 109.4 degrees, 5.2 degrees above normal, and the average low was 84.6 degrees, 6 degrees above normal.

That's a lot of heat for 30 days. Officially, we got 0.01 of an inch of rain, which is about normal for the month. The burst of monsoon activity near month's end posted higher numbers in some rain gauges in the area.

There were two record-high temperatures:

• 113 degrees on June 6
• 117 degrees on June 21.

What was notable were the record-high minimum temps, six in all:

• 87 degrees on June 7
• 92 degrees on June 21
• 92 degrees on June 22
• 91 degrees on June 23
• 95 degrees on June 27
• 92 degrees on June 28

That means we're not cooling off at night, which used to be a hallmark of the desert. Urban heat islands contribute to hotter nights, holding onto the heat absorbed all day, but the days were also pretty toasty all month.

We'd say "bring on July," but that seems unwise at this point.

Steady Freddy: A 2023 tropical storm is the longest on record, ASU weather expert says

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Now here's what else we've been doing:

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Who's hitting the gas in sunny Arizona?