Investments set to pay off in NM

New Mexico is building itself up with some new, cutting-edge infrastructure.

First, there’s Facebook and its $1 billion data center at Los Lunas. It’s creating a need for some expensive improvements to New Mexico’s energy infrastructure. The data center needs a lot of electricity and plans are in the works to build a transmission line on top of an existing line with less transmission capacity, at a cost of $85 million.

As it stands, the state’s Public Regulation Commission has ruled that Facebook must pay $39 million of that cost since it’s the primary beneficiary for the project, though the PRC’s ruling may be appealed to the state Supreme Court. Either way, the “BB2” project is moving forward and will greatly increase the state’s capacity for transmitting the juice needed out of eastern New Mexico’s wind farms, where turbines are sprouting up like weeds across the Great Plains.

That’s infrastructure the state needs to move toward a renewable energy foundation that Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and the state Legislature set in motion with a “green new deal” of its own earlier this year. With a goal of moving the state to 50% renewable by 2030, high-power transmission lines will be critical to the Rio Grande Corridor, where Facebook and other high-tech companies are settling in.

Then there’s Spaceport America, which has been criticized as a colossal waste of money under Gov. Bill Richardson’s administration. This $200 million-plus facility is about to launch Virgin Galactic into the space tourism business.

You may recall the spaceport’s construction got off the ground in 2006, after Richardson and Virgin’s founder Richard Branson announced that Virgin would headquarter itself in New Mexico and the state Legislature allocated taxpayer funds for the spaceport’s construction.

As the spaceport — billed as the first and only publicly funded facility designed exclusively for commercial space launches — was being built, Virgin worked on its spacecraft (there are two so far) so they can safely launch private citizens to the edge of space.

For a while, 2014 was supposed to be the year for Virgin’s virgin voyage into space tourism, but engineering problems and a test-flight crash in the Mojave Desert put the flights years behind.

Then came the announcement on May 10, in which Virgin declared that it’s moving its spacecraft and its carrier aircraft (which piggybacks the craft to the edge of space), along with its operations staff, from California to New Mexico this summer, in anticipation of its first flights sooner rather than later (Virgin has not specified a date yet).

And get this: One of the expressed reasons Virgin is making the move now, on the edge of the summer months, is to allow its employees with children time to relocate to New Mexico and get their kids enrolled in their new schools for the fall.

Maybe Virgin will be a good company to work for — although the move will actually generate more jobs indirectly, through the vendors, contractors and other businesses that will serve Virgin’s and Spaceport America’s needs.

The “multiplier effect” will really be at work in places like Truth or Consequences (the closest city to the spaceport) and Las Cruces (the closest big city).

It appears our infrastructure investments are about to pay off, 21st century style.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

[email protected]