Can conservationists and dam builders really be friends?
Dan Reicher thinks so. He's out to chart hydropower’s role in confronting the climate crisis while also advancing healthy rivers.
Welcome to EarthWatch, an environmental news and opinion newsletter for people who think you should never turn your back on Mother Earth—written by me, Jerry Bowles, an ancient scribbler who has been around the Sun a few times and doesn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Ideas, tips, and feedback: jerry.bowles@gmail.com
George Szlemko, my late wife’s father was a young civil engineer when he came to Huntington, WV in 1938 to help design and build a flood wall along the Ohio River waterfront. Much of the city had been inundated and hundreds of citizens forced to higher ground the year before by the Great Flood of 1937, as it is still known in local lore. Once the flood wall was built, he stayed, married a local gal, had kids, and except for a timeout for World War II and a few years in the 1950s when he focused on fallout shelters, spent nearly 40 years at the Corps of Engineers designing hydroelectric plants that never got built. Not one. I saw his blueprints. They were beautiful.
The reason his plans never got built is a guy named David Brower, who, over a 60-year career as the godfather of the Sierra Club and later Friends of the Earth and the Earth Island Institute, waged the most successful environmental persuasion campaign of all time—convincing millions of Americans that dams, all dams, are inherently evil.
In “Encounters With the Archdruid,” the incomparable John McPhee describes Brower’s version of “hell on earth” as a series of concentric circles, ending at “the absolute epicenter ... where stands a dam.” Why? “Because rivers are the ultimate metaphors of existence, and dams destroy rivers.”
It’s as simple as that. No dams, no hydropower. For many well-meaning conservationists, hydropower joined nuclear—which Brower also hated—at the end of the bench in the battle against climate change. It’s kind of a mythical religious thing if you dig what I’m saying, man.
That is not to say that there is no hydroelectricity in the American grid. The world’s first hydroelectric power plant began operating in the US along the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin in 1882. Grand Coulee Dam is one of the nine largest energy generating facilities (of any kind) in the world. Hydropower generates about 24 percent of the world's electricity but only about 12 percent of the United States' power. There just doesn’t seem to be much of an appetite to build more.
We certainly owe Brower a debt for stopping the building of dams in national monuments like the Grand Canyon and Dinosaur National Park and for building the modern environmental movement. But, we can blame him for the current split between energy pragmatists who believe that hydropower and nuclear are good clean renewable sources of energy that have to be part of the mix if we have any hope of reaching the 2050 Paris targets and those who still believe that dams stand at the epicenter of hell on earth.
Over the past two and half years, former US assistant secretary of energy Dan Reicher, who is both an avid kayaker and an energy pragmatist, has been trying to bridge the gap by bringing US environmental groups and the hydropower industry together to tackle the climate crisis and find areas of agreement through Stanford’s Uncommon Dialogue process, in collaboration with Stanford’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, and the Energy Futures Initiative
Reicher, now a senior research scholar at the Stanford Woods Institute for Environment and board member of the conservation group American Rivers, acknowledged that there have been unsuccessful attempts at bringing the warring factions together over the past 100 years:
The big difference between then and now is the climate crisis. Our rivers are extremely vulnerable to the compounding factors of a changing climate, habitat loss and alteration of river processes. I often ask, what have we really accomplished in river conservation if climate change either fries or floods the rivers we love? So the opportunity was to chart hydropower’s role in confronting the climate crisis while also advancing healthy rivers.
The result is the “Joint Statement of Collaboration on US Hydropower: Climate Solution and Conservation Challenge(“ (link below), which identifies areas of common ground to advance the renewable energy and electricity storage benefits of hydropower and the environmental and economic benefits of healthy rivers. Here’s the nut:
To rapidly and substantially decarbonize the nation’s electricity system, the parties recognize the role that U.S. hydropower plays as an important renewable energy resource and for integrating variable solar and wind power into the U.S. electric grid. At the same time, our nation’s waterways, and the biodiversity and ecosystem services they sustain, are vulnerable to the compounding factors of a changing climate, habitat loss, and alteration of river processes. Our shared task is to chart hydropower’s role in a clean energy future in a way that also supports healthy rivers.
The report notes that there are more than 90,000 existing dams throughout the country, of which about 2,500 have hydropower facilities for electricity generation. In the next decade, close to 30 percent of U.S. hydropower projects will come up for relicensing. As such, the parties focused on three potential opportunities:
• Rehabilitating both powered and non-powered dams to improve safety, increase climate resilience, and mitigate environmental impacts;
• Retrofitting powered dams and adding generation at non-powered dams to increase renewable generation; developing pumped storage capacity at existing dams; and enhancing dam and reservoir operations for water supply, fish passage, flood mitigation, and grid integration of solar and wind; and
• Removing dams that no longer provide benefits to society, have safety issues that cannot be cost-effectively mitigated, or have adverse environmental impacts that cannot be effectively addressed.
Said Reicher:
Rehabilitation means you make dams safer and improve their environmental performance. Retrofit means you replace old inefficient turbines in a hydropower dam with new ones or you power a non-powered dam. Of the 90,000 U.S. dams recognised by the US government, 87,500 do not generate electricity, but instead were built for flood control, water supply, recreation etc., so there is a real opportunity there. Or you add pumped storage at an existing dam or build a new off-river pumped storage facility. Removal is the third option. A key reason we reached an agreement was that, for the first time, the US hydropower industry was willing to talk about dam removal. This was critical because some dams no longer serve any useful purpose, have safety issues that cannot be cost-effectively mitigated, or have adverse environmental impacts that cannot be effectively addressed. Removal is often the top option.
Phase two of the initiative will bring states, tribal nations, NGOs, the business community, academic experts, and federal agencies such as the US Department of Energy and the Army Corps of Engineers together to develop concrete actions in each of these areas.
All in all, it sounds like a doable new beginning to a long dysfunctional relationship. Would David Brower approve if he were still with us? Who knows? I still haven’t forgiven him for the millions of trees that gave their lives for those monster Sierra Club coffee table wilderness porn books that all the cool people—me included—bought in the 1970s and 80s so we could enjoy nature without actually going outside.
Dig Deeper
Joint Statement of Collaboration on U.S. Hydropower: Climate Solution and Conservation Stanford University Uncommon Dialogue
To Dam or Not to Dam (Milken Institute)
Hydropower, explained (National Geographic)
Types of Hydropower Plants (Energy.gov)
Who Was David Brower (Brower Center)
The results are in. Degrowth is a terrible environmental strategy. (EarthWatch)
Encounters with the Archdruid (John McPhee)
You are reading a free version of EarthWatch. If you want to be sure to receive all updates and special alerts, as well as read, comment, and take part in the ongoing dialogue, you should subscribe. I’m an old guy living on a fixed income.