DILLSBORO–I find the Dillsboro Dam controversy a little boggling, and I’m not alone.
It isn’t the fundamentals of the argument between Duke Energy and supporters of keeping the dam that are hard to grasp — although Duke’s relicensing agreement is complex — but more particularly how the Dillsboro situation fits in to the much larger picture of “big” hydroelectric power versus “little” hydro, and how the two are influenced by our insatiable hunger for energy.
I admit a general mistrust of Duke. I also admit that from an environmental standpoint, I’ve long fallen into the less-dams-the-better camp, but without doing much homework on the subject. My friends who have done their homework are more-or-less split over the Dillsboro Dam issue. And therein lies the boggle.
Along comes the invaluable Orion Magazine, with an article in its May/June issue that is well-written well-researched and about time — at least for those of us who are trying to figure Dillsboro out.
A few excerpts from Ginger Strand’s piece The Poetry of Power:
Few things are as beautiful as falling water. That beauty has been making power for thousands of years—first mechanically, with waterwheels, and then electrically, with turbines and generators. Generator, from the Latin generare, to produce, is a misleading word. No device can produce energy; it must convert it from something else. The burning of coal converts millions of years’ worth of stored sunlight into heat. A hydroelectric plant converts the kinetic energy of falling water into electricity.
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There’s just something about a dam. Dave Brower fought to obstruct them. Edward Abbey dreamed of exploding them. Derrick Jensen dreams of exploding them still. John McPhee wrote that for environmentalists, the Devil’s world is ringed with moats of oil and DDT, but its absolute epicenter holds a dam. The treacherous wizard Saruman in The Lord of the Rings powers his evil orc factory with a dammed river. “Free the river!” cry the Ents: big explosion, triumph of good. Nothing says eco-warrior like killing a dam.
(snip)
John Seebach, director of American Rivers’s Hydropower Reform Initiative:
“The footprint of all these little dams adds up and chokes up a watershed,” he says. “A big plant provides a lot more power.” That extra capacity means big plants are more profitable. And more profit means they can afford to mitigate the harm they do to the river with measures like fish hatcheries and smelt barging.
He concedes that, done right, small hydro plants can preserve riparian habitat and provide for fish passage. But for John, “done right” is the hitch. Doing it right requires money, and John just isn’t sure the economics add up. As projects get smaller, their price per kilowatt-hour ramps up. Private producers and communities may like the idea of small hydro, but as costs increase, John worries they’ll be tempted to relax environmental standards. That temptation might only grow as more and more states institute renewable portfolio standards—minimum percentages of power that utilities must generate with renewables.
Cost is a highly rational way to make decisions. Big dams may not be ideal, but they’re efficient. Small dams do less harm, but their economic benefits may not outweigh the harm they do. One thing this assumes, of course, is that there’s no relationship between our centralized power grid and our profligate use of power. But it isn’t easy to connect the action of running your microwave to the burning of a hunk of coal two counties away.
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Lori Barg, principal of Community Hydro, a small hydro consulting firm:
Lori talks a lot about “distributed power”: generating power at thousands of small sites, in a variety of renewable ways, rather than at huge centralized plants. Such a system would not only favor low-impact, greener power, but it would be less “brittle,” meaning less subject to cascading failures when one big plant goes down. It would reduce transmission losses, too, because the shorter the distance power has to travel, the less is lost in the process.
“We’re losing one or two times as much power as we’re using in the end,” Lori says. “If you want to start looking at the economics, is a kilowatt-hour generated in Boston the same as a kilowatt-hour generated in Peterborough, when you have so many losses along the way? It’s like having a leaky bucket.”
Read the whole piece here.
