By Doug LaMalfa
Affecting my old Assembly district, Siskiyou and Modoc counties, comes news (last week) that the PacifiCorp group, which owns a series of dams on the Klamath River that run basically parallel to and near the Oregon-California border, has agreed to surrender its ability to produce clean, renewable hydro power. That does not bode well for new projects of any kind in California.
This settlement agreement has been a long time in process, about nine years, with farmers, fishermen, local tribes and a plethora of environmental groups all wrestling, along with many government agencies of two states and the federal level, and the actual owners of the dams. Four dams now are slated to be removed if the provisions of the agreement come to fruition.
Indeed, there are 29 signers to this settlement agreement draft. The net loss to Californians and Oregonians will be in low-cost, renewable, green hydroelectric power that serves about 75,000 customers, power that will have to be replaced. With the ever tightening noose of regulations for how and where electricity is sourced for Californians, the costs for ratepayers for this replacement power can only be dramatically higher.
PacifiCorp’s original problem was the need to relicense expiring operating permits for running these plants, which any power provider in this state can tell you opens up the utility to a wish list of demands from all walks of “stakeholders” wanting a new or larger piece of the pie. PacifiCorp made the decision, with much coercion, that removing dams would be cheaper for them and their ratepayers than to try to engineer a fish passage project around the dams that would perhaps never satisfy enviro group demands.
During my time on the Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee, it was soon obvious to me that these permits are a tool just short of extortion for enviro groups and their partners that join the ranks of state and federal regulatory agencies to demand just about anything before agreeing to allow permits to be reissued. If demands are not met, certain lawsuits would ensue, turning up some “problem” to sue over, environmentally or otherwise.
And still, the enviro groups are not satisfied with the draft agreement, as farmers in the basin are still to receive allocations for their farmland. Tearing out four dams to promote fish habitat isn’t enough — gotta run the farmers out of the basin to preserve “critical habitat” with their water, too.
While a handful from D.C. to the Pacific are giddy about this plan, it also establishes a precedent that is very dangerous to most any infrastructure in existence, to private property rights and the availability of affordable power to many. Will the last one out of California turn out the lights, er, never mind, it’s already happening.