For Star subscribers: Construction could begin next year on a renewable energy transmission line across Southern Arizona, but local activists in the Lower San Pedro Valley continue to oppose the project.
Henry Brean CASCABEL — After 16 years of reviews, changes and challenges, the first high-voltage towers could go up next year in the Lower San Pedro River Valley, as work finally begins on a 550-mile power line from central New Mexico to Southern Arizona.
Opponents along the powerline route on the eastern slope of the Rincon and Catalina mountains call it something else. Though several national environmental groups have since lined up behind the transmission line and the green energy it will deliver, Else and other opponents still cling to the hope that they can stop construction or get the line moved somewhere else.
Pattern acquired the SunZia transmission project earlier this year. Company officials hope to get it built and activated by late 2025, when its SunZia Wind development is also slated to go online. SunZia would enter Arizona in southern Greenlee County and march west through rural areas north of Bowie and Willcox, where it is slated to pass within about a mile of the popular Apple Annie’s Produce & Pumpkin Patch before angling southwest toward the San Pedro.
Pattern is still finalizing the implementation of its overall mitigation agreement with the Arizona Game and Fish Department, but the company has already committed to a wide range of measures, from strict speed limits for construction vehicles on rural dirt roads to seasonal building schedules designed around the nesting and migration patterns of birds.
Advocates dividedMajor environmental groups such as Western Resource Advocates and Defenders of Wildlife are publicly supporting SunZia as a way to fight climate change. “The river itself is already very endangered, and the threats keep coming,” he said. “If it were up to us, wouldn’t be built there.”
The company has also agreed to make landscape improvements along the route by reclaiming unnecessary roads and avoiding, relocating or replacing saguaros, agaves and other important native plants at a “more than 1-to-1 ratio,” Hayes said. “If this project goes forward, our hope is it can be a model rather than a bitter pill to swallow,” Robinson said. “We won’t know that until we see it in writing in great detail.”
Their house looks out over Mica Mountain, the Rincon Mountain Wilderness and the highest, easternmost reaches of Saguaro National Park. This valley of fewer than 200 residents is home to a host of environmental advocacy groups, including the Cascabel Conservation Association, the Cascabel Working Group, the Lower San Pedro Watershed Alliance and the Saguaro-Juniper Corporation.
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