State’s Energy Users Pay Price to Save Salmon

Californians are paying for environmentalism--and smoked salmon--in ways they might never have suspected: through higher energy bills.

Environmentalists who oppose the Northwest hydroelectric system of dams, reservoirs and powerhouses because it impedes migratory salmon have succeeded in forcing dam operators to scale back operations. That has worked to reduce the supply--and increase the cost--of hydroelectricity in the Northwest and by extension in California, where much of it is sold.

California relies on hydroelectricity for 22% of its power, of which one-third is imported from the Pacific Northwest via huge transmission lines that run the length of the state from the Oregon border. Until now these hydro shipments have been taken for granted in the summer when the seasonal decline in the Northwest’s power consumption coupled with rising river flows created big surpluses of electric generation.

But salmon preservation measures that divert river waters away from dam turbines, combined with a disappointingly meager winter snowpack in the Pacific Northwest, cost California a crucial 3% of its power supply this summer and were a primary factor in causing the state’s ongoing electricity crisis.

The long-term trend toward diminishing hydroelectricity generation in the nation augurs an important shift in the arcane dynamics of the regional electricity market, and for California, which must import about a fifth of the energy it consumes. The drop in available hydro power has made the state’s energy generation “deficit” all the more glaring, as well as its dependence on the volatile prices of petroleum-based generation.

The drop in California’s hydro imports to less than half the typical shipments in July and August forced the California Power Exchange to buy costlier power generated from other sources, particularly natural gas--the price of which reached record levels this summer and remains at record highs.

The fish preservation measures may well be restoring salmon to the Columbia River--the main artery of the largest federally owned hydro system in the country. Year-to-date fish counts at the Bonneville Dam 40 miles east of here reached 881,000 as of Tuesday, up nearly two-thirds from last year, said Deborah Chenoweth, the dam’s U.S. Army Corps of Engineers operations manager.

But the measures are having a significant economic impact that drives home the cost of environmentalism. According to the Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency based here that markets the electricity produced by the 28 dams on the Columbia River system, salmon protection will soon cut another 400 megawatts from generation capacity, enough to supply about 400,000 typical homes, and possibly trimming exports to California and elsewhere.

The cost is an acceptable one for many Oregonians who regard salmon as an iconic part of the regional culture and ecosystem, said Steve Weiss, a senior policy associate at the Northwest Energy Coalition, a grass-roots environmental alliance. He warns that noncompliance with federal law mandating salmon preservation could result in massive financial penalties.

The new measures mandated by the federal Endangered Species Act involve increased “spills” of reservoir and dam waters to facilitate salmon migration to and from up-river spawning grounds. They follow previous operational changes that have eliminated 1,000 megawatts from the Bonneville system, or nearly 10% of average capacity, over the last five years.

The diminution of hydropower here reflects the disfavor into which it has sunk in recent years across the country, as environmental opposition has grown stronger to dams and reservoirs, overshadowing the economic trade-offs of dependable and relatively inexpensive energy.

Dams coming up for relicensing before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission can wait eight years for permission and result in millions of dollars in paperwork and attorney fees, and typically suffer 8% drops in allowable generation capacity in the process, said Linda Church Ciocci, executive director of the National Hydropower Assn., a Washington, D.C., trade group.

“It is ironic that the atmosphere is so unfriendly toward hydro when the nation needs low-cost energy and when we have technology to mitigate the environmental impacts, which we admit are there,” she said. “But the country hasn’t gotten the message.”

Public opposition to dams will cause California’s overall hydroelectric capacity to decline for the first time in half a century by 2003. The U.S. Department of Energy is predicting hydro megawattage capacity nationwide to show its first decline by 2010.

And California isn’t the only state left vulnerable. Dick Watson of the Northwest Power Planning Council, a Portland-based agency that studies the Northwest’s energy needs, fears there is a 1 in 4 chance that his region won’t be able to meet peak winter season electricity demand by 2003.

Demand in the Northwest peaks in the winter because of electric-driven heating; that’s just the opposite of California, where summer air-conditioning load is what stresses the power grid. In the same fashion, the Northwest typically has excess electricity to export in the summer but looks to California in the winter for imports.

“The risk is in the overloaded transmission system and California’s ability to ship us any surpluses it may have,” Watson said.

It could get worse for hydro proponents. There is even serious talk of breaching, or knocking down, four dams on the Snake River by 2008 to try to re-create primal salmon spawning grounds, an idea supported by Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber. The proposal has drawn stern opposition from the region’s business interests.

Mike Zenker, a director at Cambridge Energy Research Associates in Oakland, said that although the Bonneville Power Administration’s capacity has been declining by drips and drabs for several years, the drop this summer has been more acutely felt in California. That’s because salmon preservation has increasingly reduced the system’s operational flexibility to respond to sudden peaks in demand.

“This has been the crunch year,” he said.

Bonneville Chief Executive Judith Johansen believes this year has been an unusually bad one for hydro production because of climatic conditions that interrupted normal runoff patterns. But she warned that the general trend in hydropower in coming years is “for there to be less of it,” as “fish operations will continue to erode our power generation capabilities.”

“Don’t get me wrong. Salmon are an important part of the life of the region. But with the [power] reliability problem we have, we need to make sure the fish measures are effective. And the data and underlying science of the measures that have been undertaken are not that compelling,” Johansen said, referring to dam spills ordered to facilitate salmon movements.

So have the economics of environmentalism become too costly in the clash of salmon and hydropower on the Columbia River?

No way, said Weiss of the Northwest Energy Coalition, adding that federal progress in salmon preservation is essential not only to ensure compliance with the Endangered Species Act but also to uphold the government’s end of its bargain with several Native American tribes whose fishing rights were guaranteed under treaties signed a century ago.

“The courts have ruled that tribes have a right to fish. But if there is no fish, there is no right, which would seem to create a legal problem for the government, maybe billions of dollars in possible reparations,” Weiss said. “In the Northwest, extinction of salmon is not an option. The question is more how do we preserve them, which the federal government is under mandate to achieve.”

Weiss predicts that breaching of the four Snake River dams will be approved because the 140 miles of wild-river spawning grounds that would result are the surest way of complying with the salmon preservation mandate.

Bruce Lovelin, executive director of the Columbia River Alliance, a regional business group, said breaching would lead to higher energy costs and the needless destruction of “a resource that is providing value to the people of the Northwest, enough to light the city of Seattle.”

He said that several aluminum factories have suspended operations because of higher energy costs at a time the federal government is “wasting energy by letting water flow through the system.”

“I don’t believe that people are looking at this from a broader perspective,” Lovelin said.