It's Been Rejected Before: The Sunrise Powerlink

In 2008, SDG&E sought to build its Sunrise Powerlink — a 500 kV line, like the one proposed today — through Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. The California Public Utilities Commission refused. Its decision is blunt: “We find all of the routes that go through Anza-Borrego to be environmentally unacceptable and infeasible.” ^[1]

The environmental review behind that ruling found that the park route carried 52 significant, unmitigable impacts and would have required removing the protection from roughly 50 acres of state wilderness to proceed. The Commission approved the line only on an alternative “Environmentally Superior” southern route that avoided the park entirely. ^{[1] [2]}

This is not a story about a project that was stopped. The Sunrise Powerlink was built; it began carrying power in 2012. What was stopped was the route through the park. SDG&E had insisted for nearly three years that there was “no other way” — until the state's own review concluded that less-damaging alternatives existed, and the company accepted a different path. ^{[3] [4]}

That is the real lesson, and it is a hopeful one: a thorough environmental record, paired with a credible alternative, can move a 500 kV line off the ground a community is trying to protect. ^[3]

The Anza-Borrego Foundation, which helped win the 2008 fight, says the new Golden Pacific Powerlink's crossing of the park “appears to be substantially the same route the CPUC rejected in 2008.” The same Commission, applying the same standard, has already found an SDG&E 500 kV line through this park infeasible once. ^[5]

The way to hold that line is the way it was held before: insist the environmental review fully document the project's impacts and seriously study the alternatives — the existing corridors and lower-impact options that can meet the need without carving a new path through Temecula Creek and protected land.

Watch the framing, too. SDG&E argues the new route is reasonable because it would “co-locate” with the only nearby infrastructure — a 1930s 69 kV line on roughly 50-foot wooden poles. But that is not a like-for-like addition: the U.S. Department of Energy notes a transmission structure's size scales with its power rating, and its own diagram shows a 500 kV lattice tower dwarfing a 69 kV pole. A 200-foot steel tower beside the old wooden poles changes the corridor — it does not simply continue it. ^[6]