Discuss: The Poetry of Power

Here in Vermont - like most of New England - the state’s Agency of Natural Resource’s regulations have been both a blessing and a curse. As much as I believe in the value of natural waterways, functioning, community hydro also has its place. Unfortunately, developers willing to take the risk to revitalize old hydro sites have (understandably!) been reluctant to devote their life energy to making projects come to fruition. What are the regulatory impediments to their implementation? What policy options can help over them? These are the questions we ask at the University of Vermont’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics. We offer a suite of credit and noncredit courses for student and citizens interested in these issues. I encourage readers to learn more about our offerings at http://learn.uvm.edu/igs/ecological_economics

It’s almost humourous to read of squabbles about hydro projects that are so small. Here in British Columbia there’s a full-blown war going on about the current gold rush of run-of-river hydro (no impoundment dams) that are gigawatts in size, multi-billion dollar boondoggles funded by General Electric, with new transmission lines snaking hundreds of miles through the clearcut rainforest.

This is what’s happening in our world-famous landscape of awesome ocean fiords and big salmon rivers surrounded by 2 mile high mountain ranges with glaciers melting due to global warming. It’s a shame to see such wild beauty desecrated for private power, and there’s no firm connection made between building new hydro and demolishing old coal plants, or scrapping pipeline projects and cancelling new freeways. It all seems to add up to More and More Energy, feeding the endless growth machine that got us into this climate mess in the first place.

This run-of-river hydro is also seasonal, mostly summer melt when our own electrical demand is lowest, so it may just get exported to California.

So, in light of our mega-hydro battles in BC, it seems these small family-run hydro projects you describe in this article are the epitomy of green sustainable energy, so stop throwing rocks and support your local small time producers. I wish our hydro projects were that size.

I so appreciate Ginger Strand’s thorough research and well-developed writing! This is truly a great article.

Dear Ms. Strand:

As the “Elder Statesman of Hydro” I want to thank you for your insightful and compelling story about small scale hydro and dams. As a follower of American Friends Service, I believe in moderation, tolerance and compromise as a foundation for diplomacy. As such, I believe that some dams should be removed. I have been instrumental in promoting the removal of three dams on the Shasheen River, in Andover, MA. The folks at American Rivers have been very supportive of this effort. When completed, striped bass, shads and bluefish will be running through the Center of Andover, from the Atlantic Ocean, for the first time in 275 years. That is exciting to me as any hydro station I have ever built!!!

May I modestly suggest to correct an oversight? Celesty’s and Will’s wensite is: http://www.frenchriverland.com and the website for my larger sites is: http://www.swiftriverhydro.com

Once again, a hearty and warm thank you for your most wonderful and entertaining story about my favorite subject!!!

Sincerely,

William K. Fay P.E.
East Ware, MA

Many thanks to Ginger Strand for an exceptional article.  She must posess one of the most endangered qualities of all these days, class. It’s rare to find someone who will admit to liability in our modern moral hazards and seek practical solutions.

Ms. Strand’s article brought back fond memories of my time spent working at Holden Village, a remote retreat center in Washington state, back in the early 1990’s. No roads or other infrastructure reach the village, a former copper mining operation in the heart of the Glacier Peak wilderness, so it is entirely reliant on its small hydro power plant and diversion dam for power year-round.

In the winter we’d turn off the baseboard electric heaters, fire up the wood furnaces and boilers, and enjoy one another’s company in the brightly-lit community center rather than with the many bulbs in our individual spaces. We’d do away with curling irons and hair dryers. I’d occasionally find myself on “hydro duty,” trudging up the hill in the middle of the night to readjust the penstock flow and restart the hydro.

I learned a lot about making do with what I had in those years. These days, when I flick a switch or fire up my computer here in Portland OR, I think about the Bonneville dam on the Columbia river and the Boardman coal-fired power plant on the east side of the state. I still traipse around the house and turn off excess lights in the mornings and evenings. And, like many of those featured in the article, I ask/talk/think about what it would take to create a local energy source in our community where the values of sharing and sustainability would be the norm.

Thanks for this.

A great article. Very thoughtful.
Much of this debate strikes me as an effort to sacrifice the good for the perfect. Energy independence is one of the two linchpins to this country’s economic survival. Smass hydro has a clear role in that direction

This article is a good read, but it would have been stronger if it had avoided the false dichotomy of anti-dam “eco-warriors” versus pro-dam green-power-enthusiasts. The contrast is much less stark than portrayed here.

Yes, rivers are much healthier when they don’t have dams in them. Many of the folks I know within the hydro industry would agree. But Verne Tower is right: there is no free ride in this world. Dams screw up rivers, but they also provide us with useful things like power and water storage, so no one is seriously advocating removing them all. The key here is balance: we depend on dams, but those dams need to be operated in a way that protects the gifts that free-flowing rivers provide communities: fisheries, wildlife, water quality, and recreation. The desire to find this balance – rather than an “emotional” aversion to dams, as the article alleges – is why American Rivers opposes attempts to weaken clean water standards in order to make hydro projects more profitable. If a dam can’t achieve a healthy balance between function and environmental protection, then it’s time to start talking about removing it.

American Rivers does advocate for the removal of hydropower dams, but only rarely, when a dam has enormous environmental impacts that don’t justify the insignificant amount of power it generates. For example, removing Maine’s Edwards Dam renewed Augusta’s waterfront and restored commercial and recreational fisheries that had been wiped out by the dam. The article’s implication that the removal of Edwards somehow led to the development of five new natural gas plants to replace the lost power is simply not accurate: Edwards’ tiny 3.5 MW of capacity represents only 0.002% of the new gas capacity brought online in Maine since the decision to remove the dam in 1997. This new gas met rising demand, but it also offset Maine’s existing coal and oil-fired generation. Edwards’ power was insignificant compared to any of these sources.

Finally, Strand correctly calls me out for not keeping a promise (although I’m still waiting for a promised copy of the issue in which the article appeared, so I guess we’re even). I offered to try and find someone who could take her to see a harmful hydropower dam, but was unable to do so. My failure to find her a tour guide doesn’t mean that there aren’t some terribly-run dams out there. For example, a small dam operated by the City of Spearfish, South Dakota dewaters several miles of a trout stream that flows through a canyon that Frank Lloyd Wright called “the most miraculous canyon in the West.” Its owners have fought the request from fisheries experts at state and federal agencies to put less than 8% of the stream’s average flow back into the stream. Turning a fine river into a trickle for the amount of power that could be generated by a couple of wind turbines just doesn’t make sense.