By Tom Kleckner

HOUSTON — When Russell Gold, a senior energy reporter with The Wall Street Journal, decided to write a book on climate change, he naturally chose to focus on the long-haul transmission system.

Say again?

“When I think about climate change — and this is not specifically about climate change — there’s balance between hope and despair going on throughout our entire culture,” Gold said. “What’s happening in the Amazon needs to be balanced by hope. Everything that’s going wrong, all these animals disappearing … I wanted to do something on the hope side, on the people trying to arrest climate change and slow it down.”

Gold was speaking recently before a standing-room-only audience at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. It was another stop on his book tour for “Superpower: One Man’s Quest to Transform American Energy.”

“This is an energy story and an entrepreneurial story,” he said. “I wanted to find someone, a group of people out there, and tell their story, give people some hope that there are options out there. If you don’t have hope, despair wins.”

Gold’s book tells the story of Michael Skelly, the title’s “one man” who built the second-largest wind power company in the U.S. — Horizon Wind Energy — and then founded Clean Line Energy Partners. Skelly’s plan at Clean Line was to build HVDC lines hundreds of miles long to transport wind energy from the Great Plains to Eastern and Western population centers.

Unable to clear endless regulatory hurdles and landowner opposition, he eventually sold off Clean Line’s projects and is now a senior adviser with the Lazard investment management firm. (See Out of the Game, Skelly Still High on Wind Energy.)

Gold, who has covered energy for the Journal since 2002, said he was struck by seeing Skelly’s projects run into the same long environmental reviews and bureaucratic delays as natural gas pipelines.

“It would be helpful to get a yes or no [answer] in five years,” he said, to some snickers in the audience.

“I didn’t think that would be a laugh line,” Gold said, pausing. “You have your investors saying, ‘This is a fun ride, but we’d like to have something happen.’”

First Mouse … or Donkey

While Skelly may not have been ultimately successful, both he and Gold believe his efforts will help those developers who follow. As Gold writes in his book, “The second mouse gets the cheese … what is usually left unsaid is that the first mouse gets the trap.”

“There’s a really important message here,” Gold said. “If we can find a way to build out the grid to where we can move bulk power around to take advantage of this amazing wind and solar resource we have, Americans can have cleaner and affordable energy.

“I wouldn’t have thought that five or 10 years ago. I think that’s a really powerful message,” he said. “We don’t have one energy policy, one energy grid. We have 50 energy policies and 50 energy grids. It’s difficult to negotiate your way through that.”

Skelly, who has apparently never met a person he doesn’t enjoy talking with — he was a relentless door-to-door campaigner during a failed congressional bid in 2008 — easily emerges as the star of “Superpower.”

“I think there’s a different word for it, and it’s called a ‘donkey,’” Skelly said. “When you work in the transmission business, you feel like a donkey.”

“He’s a fun, entertaining storyteller,” Gold said. “When you’re writing about transmission, you need someone who can make the stories interesting.

“Skelly’s career starts when wind power is emerging from the bad California days. By tracing his career, I was able to write about the wind industry,” he said. “It’s gone from a niche market in the last 20 years, from people who wanted to change the world to a fully functioning industry. I wanted to tell the story, one that you can read and follow along with.”

Skelly gave Gold “unfettered access” to the company and its deliberations as it worked to build as many as five long-haul lines. “People in the company thought this was the stupidest idea they had ever heard,” Skelly said.

The Talking Industry

The Plains & Eastern Clean Line was central to Clean Line’s plans. The 700-mile line from the Oklahoma Panhandle’s wind farms to Memphis, Tenn., was to carry 4 GW of renewable energy for purchase by the Tennessee Valley Authority, proving the viability of Clean Line’s other projects.

Gold remembers sitting in meetings in Clean Line’s fishbowl conference rooms and watching the staff walk by.

“You could tell who didn’t like the project by their scowls,” he told Skelly during the Rice event. “Trying to build a big transmission line is incredibly difficult. It takes a lot of focus. One of my concerns was having this writer in and out of the office would distract you.”

Gold and Skelly operated under what came to be known as the principle of Heisenberg’s Cat, a conflation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Schrödinger’s cat.

“Heisenberg’s Cat came to be shorthand for the fact that mere measurement of an atom changes it,” he said. “Digging too deep into TVA and how TVA was handling the Plains & Eastern proposal would affect the outcome.”

As a result, Gold was allowed to sit in on Clean Line’s side of the discussions, as long as he held off requests for interview and making details public until negotiations ran their course.

Gold layers story upon story in the book, providing side trips into the long effort to develop renewable energy. He writes about the conception of electricity in Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street Station, Samuel Insull and his nephew’s attempts to build electric monopolies, and a group of students who took on Consolidated Edison in 1970s New York by building a wind turbine atop an East Village tenement.

Industry insiders are likely to come across personally familiar names in “Superpower,” a result of the more than 150 interviews Gold conducted during his intensive research.

Skelly helped Gold pitch the book during the Rice event, saying while he had “no economics in this, we need people to buy this book.”

“I started Clean Line because we realized one of the biggest challenges we faced was getting energy from where the resources are really good to where the power is needed,” he said.

Referencing California’s overabundance of afternoon solar energy, Skelly said, “I’m sure [solar] power is free right now in California. We’re using a lot of power in Texas, so we could use some of it.

“Everyone realizes an interconnected system is an optimal way to build a grid,” he said. “It’s not entirely clear which is bigger: The industry of building a national grid, or the industry of talking about building a national grid? We depend more on a state-by-state approach.”

Reflecting on his experience, Gold said that it will take more than an “entrepreneurial outsider” for the nation to realize the impacts of renewable energy. As he said, “It’s always windy or sunny somewhere” in the U.S.

“If there’s a way to get the different RTOs to cooperate with each other, that would be very helpful,” he said. “The history of the United States grid has gotten bigger and bigger, with more and more networking. Think of an integrated, continent-wide network. There’s a lot of benefits to that.”

And a huge bite of cheese, for the mice that come later.