Thom Mason, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, said Tuesday that the lab cannot rely on wind and solar power for its capabilities or to power its supercomputers.
“That was part of a pretty extensive analysis on how to get more power on site,” Mason said in response to a question about the Electric Power Capacity Upgrade Project at a virtual town hall. He said that while “New Mexico is very well situated” for solar and wind power, “Los Alamos, not so much.”
The project Mason mentioned refers to a high-voltage powerline that would run 14 miles through the Caja del Rio Plateau.
This placement is a controversial subject among the Pueblo and other tribal communities in New Mexico, and has led to protests as well as intervention from lawmakers.
Most recently, a delegation from New Mexico, including Reps. Melanie Stansbury (D), Gabe Vasquez (D), and Teresa Leger Fernandez (D), and Sens. Martin Heinrich (D) and Ben Ray Lujan (D), even penned an eleventh-hour letter Jan. 10 to then-President Joe Biden asking him to designate Caja del Rio, where the powerline would be built, as a national historical monument under the Antiquities Act.
The lawmakers asked in the letter “that existing and proposed uses, such as grazing and power transmission,” be restricted when designating the 107,000-acre expanse.
Biden did not designate the Plateau as a national monument.
“You’ll have to ask the Trump administration what’s going to happen,” Lujan told the Exchange Monitor at the Capitol when asked what would happen with the power line on the Plateau. “It’s a federal decision associated with what’s going to be happening in those particular areas with the use of tools that exist in the Department of Interior.”
Lujan told the Monitor that the delegation was “advocating for a designation understanding that oftentimes these designations take years to prepare for as well.”
Mason said that by 2027, “our demand would be greater than supply” since a new computer will arrive that year to replace the Crossroads supercomputer at the lab. “That’s what’s driving the push to do that,” he said, emphasizing that a lot of electricity is needed for high-performance computing.
Mason added that “with solar, it would take a large amount of land,” and it would be difficult to navigate between hilly geography and “culturally sensitive regions.”
“So we don’t have the kind of large acreage that you need for those big developments,” Mason said, while adding that since “the supercomputers run 24/7,” and solar and wind power depends on weather patterns and sunlight, “we’d need to build this storage capability that goes with it.”
