This is a photo of my electric hot plate stove. Years ago, when I moved to this house, my friends were working to stop fracking in the nearby county. In solidarity, I turned off our natural gas stove and bought a hot plate, paying a little extra each month for the wind power option available during from our local electric cooperative.
Time rolled onward. Fracking is still a problem. The climate crisis is intensifying. In North Dakota, the Energy Transfer Partnership is using tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons at freezing temperatures to try to build their billion dollar pipeline under the Missouri River. They are violating the rights of indigenous people, the Standing Rock Sioux, and the human and civil rights of all of the peaceful Water Protectors.
Interestingly, our wind power comes from North Dakota. Our electric coop’s website says:
The association has secured several different sources of “green power.” As a Class A member of Basin Electric Power Cooperative, another consumer-owned generation and transmission cooperative based in Bismarck, N.D., a portion of the energy Tri-State purchases from Basin is derived from that cooperative’s 80 megawatts of wind generation capacity. Tri-State also receives wind energy from Fort Collins, Colo.-based Platte River Power Authority’s wind farm in Medicine Bow, Wyo.
By 2022, local renewable energy groups have a goal of 100% locally produced renewable energy for our coop. In the meantime, my support of wind power is hopefully part of the broad Just Transitions movement that seeks to employ energy workers in increasing numbers in the renewable energy industry instead of in the fossil fuel industry. My hope and my prayer, each time I turn on my stove, is that this choice of mine has a positive impact on the energy workers who are concerned for their jobs and their families.
We can make a Just Transition together. We do not need to see the violence we are witnessing from the Morton County Sheriff’s Department against peaceful Water Protectors. We do not need to escalate the climate crisis any further. If you are in Taos, NM, and on Kit Carson Electric Coop, please consider supporting the wind option and sending a clear message to North Dakotans that we support their transition along with ours. Please contact the Coop to learn more.