The hydropower industry and several U.S. environmental groups have joined forces to promote electricity produced by hydroelectric dams as a tool in the fight against global warming. The alliance is unusual in that the environmental movement in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s grew out of opposition to hydropower development.
Brokered by California-based Stanford University’s Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, today’s (Oct. 13) joint statement says that the parties “are motivated by two urgent challenges. 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.”
Among the dozen signatories:
* National Hydropower Association, the Washington lobbying group for hydro;
* Great River Hydro, a New England hydropower operator;
* American Rivers, a river conservation and restoration group;
* World Wildlife Fund, and international conservation group;
* Union of Concerned Scientists, a broad-based U.S. energy-oriented group.
Conspicuous among prominent U.S. green groups who have not joined the statement are the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club, and Friends of the Earth. The Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth came to prominence, under the leadership of the late David Brower, as opponents of hydropower development in the Western U.S.
A key player in the two-year process that led to the joint statement was Dan Reicher, executive director of the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at the Stanford institute. He was a Department of Energy official in the Clinton administration and, before that, an attorney at the NRDC. He a board member of American Rivers.
The New York Times commented this morning that the alliance “is a sign that the threat of climate change is spurring both sides to rethink their decades-long battle over a large but contentious source of renewable power.”
The agreement includes three major objectives:
* “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;
* “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.”
The parties also focused on closed-loop pumped storage, where the reservoirs are not connected to an outside body of water. Their summary of the discussion noted, “Closed 2 loop pumped storage systems do not involve construction of a new dam on a river, but they may have other impacts that need to be avoided, minimized or mitigated, including to surface and ground water.”
The parties to the agreement also said they will work over the next 60 days “to invite other key stakeholders, including tribal governments and state officials, to join the collaboration, and to address implementation priorities, decision-making, timetables, and resources.”
— Kennedy Maize