Craig Miller

Tricky waters: a kayaker navigates the surge at the outlet of the Oxbow Powerhouse on the upper American River.

It’s a fair question and one that a reader posed during our recent series on “Water and Power” in California. Hydro has its virtues. It’s clean, once it’s built; producing hydropower creates no significant greenhouse gas or other emissions. And it’s certainly “renewable” as long as the water flows. But it’s not without its environmental impacts, especially where large “terminal” dams are involved (the kind that fish can’t get past).

In fact, state regulators divide the resource into “large” and “small” hydro, the latter being defined as anything producing 30 megawatts of power or less. Utilities can count small hydro toward their mandated Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) but not the bigger operations. But why?

Partly it’s because there is already so much hydro out there. In a wet year, Californians get about 17% of their electricity from hydro, not counting imports. The RPS is designed to encourage development of new sources, such as wind and solar.

In opposing a recent bill to count larger hydro facilities, The Utility Reform Network (TURN), a watchdog non-profit, wrote that such a reversal:

…would effectively reduce the RPS targets for utilities with existing large hydroelectric  generation in their portfolios and significantly undermine the impact of the RPS program on the development of new renewable energy projects in California and the West.

TURN estimated that changing the rules would effectively reduce California’s target of 33% renewables by 2020, to 30% — even less if utilities increased imports of hydropower from neighboring states.

TURN’s analysts also argued that an over-reliance on hydro could end up raising the retail cost of electricity. That’s not entirely theoretical. At least one report calculated added costs of over a billion dollars when utilities had to shift to more expensive natural gas during a recent dry spell.

The plot twist here is that hydro is an important helper to new “intermittent” renewables like wind and solar. Hydro output can be quickly and easily throttled up or down, to keep the electrical grid in balance as the sun and wind come and go.

This post is part of Climate Watch’s series, “Water and Power.”

Just so we all start on the same page: there are a lot of dams in California. People have been building dams here since the Gold Rush, and though the dam building boom of the first half of the 20th century is long-over, the dams are still here.

This animation shows all the dams in California. To see a breakdown of which ones are connected to hydropower projects (and which rivers in California remain undammed), explore the Water and Power map. Graphics produced by Don Clyde. Research by Lisa Pickoff-White.

When people began building dams in California, they probably were probably mostly thinking about gold. Later, they had more lofty ideals: controlling floods, supplying water to cities and farms, generating electricity.

One thing they probably weren’t thinking much about: pond turtles. Until recently.

On a bright, late spring day Geoff Rabone, the Projects Manager for the Yuba County Water Agency drove me through a padlocked gate and down a dirt road to the Log Cabin Diversion Dam on Oregon Creek. It’s part of the YCWA’s Yuba River Development Project, a complex of dams, tunnels, powerhouses and a reservoir in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. He was showing me the pond turtle study that’s underway there, one of 44 studies the YCWA is conducting as part of its hydropower relicensing process.

We found biologist Lisa Danielski looking through a spotting scope at a Western pond turtle, basking in the sun on the other side of the creek. She works for HDR Engineering, a company the YCWA has hired to conduct this and other studies. At this point, Danielski’s just establishing that the turtles are indeed here. The next step will be to figure out if they are going into a mile-long tunnel that diverts water from this creek to New Bullards Bar Reservoir.

“We’ll set out turtle traps and use epoxy and glue tiny little transponders to their carapace and see where they go,” she said. “Right now we don’t know. This is all new data, so it’s just kind of seeing what’s going on.”

It’s new, because even though the Yuba River Development Project was built in the late-1960s no one’s looked at the big picture: how the project affects the world around it. Not only the turtles, but also the frogs, the fish, the plants, the recreational facilities and the archaeological resources. That’s the case with most big hydropower projects.

Molly Samuel/KQED

Powerlines crisscross the Yuba River, just below the New Colgate Powerhouse.

“When many of these dams were built, there was no Endangered Species Act, there was no Clean Water Act,” Steve Rothert, California Director at American Rivers, told me. “And many of these dams were built before we understood much about how they affected rivers.”

And they do affect rivers. Beyond just blocking a river, dams generally also alter the flow of the water — how much of it comes down the river, and when — and they raise the temperature.

The Yuba project is better than most: after years of fighting, then debates, then discussions, the YCWA and a host of agencies and advocacy groups adopted the Yuba River Accord, which brought changes to how the water is parceled out before relicensing even began.

But for most hydropower projects, at least those that fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Agency, or FERC, relicensing is when everything comes up for review. And with licenses lasting 30-50 years, it happens infrequently enough that when a hydropower project does begin the relicensing process (and not all of them have even done it once yet), the stakes are high. It takes time, money and a lot of people.

Relicensing is a balancing act: everything gets reviewed. Water supply competes with energy generation, recreation, the environment. Though the process has gotten more collaborative, relations between agencies, advocacy groups and hydropower operators have not always been rosy. One infamous relicensing took 27 years.

For the environmental groups, the main focus is flow. “These dams, for the last 50 years for the summer months have let only a trickle of water out of the dams,” Rothert said. “We’re not asking for much, but the licensees have been reluctant to provide what we believe is necessary for just a minimal amount of habitat downstream for trout, for foothill yellow-legged frogs and for all the other creatures that healthy rivers support.”

But letting more water out into the river does have tradeoffs. Rabone said that at the end of YCWA’s relicensing application, it will have cost the agency $20 million. And that’s not the only cost. “The losses in hydropower from relicensing are typically somewhere between 2% and 12% of your hydro generation,” he told me.

So, in the end, it’s a balancing act. Not every party gets everything they want during relicensing, but the goal, at least, is to get enough water to people, plants and animals downstream; to keep the rivers from flooding or trickling away into nothing; to generate electricity; to provide recreation. And as demand for water and energy go up, and as climate change shrinks California’s snowpack, it will only get more complicated.

Hear Molly’s companion radio report Monday on KQED’s The California Report. Explore the rest of the “Water and Power” series, including a map of all of California’s dams — and its undammed rivers.

We’ve mapped all of California’s hydropower dams as part of our series on “Water and Power.”

Craig Miller

PCWA's Ralston Powerhouse on the Rubicon River in Placer County. California typically gets about 15% of its electricity from hydro facilities inside the state..

While much is uncertain about California’s warming climate, there is little doubt that it’s already changing the fundamentals of how most of us get our water. In fact, the Bureau of Reclamation has estimated that the Sierra snowpack could be reduced by half as soon as a decade from now.

And that has some far-reaching implications that could even show up on your electric bill.

“When you hear people talk about a depleted snowpack, it’s because of warmer temperatures and the snow just cannot stay in the hills,” says Robert Shibatani, a hydrologist and consultant to numerous government agencies. He says the “hydrograph” for California — the “usual” pattern of precipitation and runoff — is already changing. “There’s no question about it,” he told me in a recent interview. “That’s not an if. It’s not even a when, because I can tell you the when. It’s happening now.”

Shibatani says it’s not that we’ll get less precipitation, necessarily, but warming temperatures will mean more of it falling as rain at higher elevations. And the relatively steady runoff we’ve come to count on to fill the reservoirs and spin the turbines throughout the summer and fall will be compressed into the late winter and early spring.

“What it’s gonna mean is that we’re gonna spill more often,” says Einar Maisch, strategic planning director for the Placer County Water Agency. “And that means we’re gonna lose generation.”

Maisch says his agency is already enlarging spillways to accommodate bigger springtime rushes of water — and he’s prepared to see power generation taper off by 5-to 6 percent at his facilities, which generates more than 200 megawatts of power, purchased by PG&E.

“Water that goes over the top [during those high-pulse periods] does not go through a turbine,” he says.

At other times, there may not be enough runoff to spin the turbines reliably. We had a sneak preview of that during those three dry years in a row that we had recently. Overall, during that time hydro generation was roughly cut in half, says water analyst Juliet Christian-Smith at Oakland’s Pacific Institute. “That has a price tag and an environmental impact as well.”

Craig Miller

PG&E's Belden Powerhouse on the upper Feather River. This stretch of the Feather has so many hydro plants on it that it's become known as the "Stairway of Power."

She ran the numbers and found that as utilities were forced to switch some of the load to natural gas-fired plants to make up the difference, “The cost to electricity consumers was about $1.7 billion dollars.” That’s billion, with a “B.” And here are some more billions from the same time frame: 13 billion additional tons of carbon dioxide emissions because, well, burning natural gas emits CO2 and hydropower does not. Christian-Smith says that, “Given the impact of this drought on our energy production possibilities and the costs that we had to pay for energy, it’s important to think about what a longer and more severe drought might do.”

And there’s another rub, says PCWA’s Maisch. “Hydro is unique.” Not only is it the cheapest form of power imaginable, but it’s the most “dispatchable,” as they say, when utilities need to make quick adjustments to meet fluctuations in electrical demand.

On a tour of one of his agency’s powerhouses, near where the Rubicon River meets the MIddle Fork of the American, “Throttling the needle valves on the Ralston generator over there can change the amount of flow by 50% within 10 minutes. It gives us a tremendous ability to ramp in counter-flow to the changes in the grid.”

That’s not a trivial matter as utilities try to balance a power grid with an increasing percentage of on-again, off-again renewables, like wind and solar. PG&E’s David Moller, who heads the National Hydropower Association, said in a recent company publication that, “The operating flexibility of hydropower is essential to grid reliability and integrating intermittent renewables.” He’s calling for an expansion of hydro, pointing out that of the 80,000 dams across the country, just three percent currently have hydro installed.

But any expansion in California will be a tricky proposition given the environmental sensitivities of the state’s mountain regions. Most projects have recently gone through — or are going through — tortuous renewals of their federal licenses, which usually result in a net reduction of power generated to accommodate environmental concerns. And in California, utilities can’t count hydropower toward their renewable energy targets.

Hear Craig’s companion radio report Monday on KQED’s The California Report. We’ve mapped all of California’s hydropower dams as part of our series on “Water and Power.”

Patrick McCully/Flickr

Demonstrators rally in 2006 for the removal of dams on the Klamath RIver.

Today at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar weighed in on three major water projects in the state and called on Californians to “stand firm” and defend the “hard-gained agreements and settlements” built in past decades.

“Never before have water agreements that provide safety and certainty for Westerners been so at risk,” said Salazar, referring to debates over the future of the San Joaquin River, the California Bay Delta, and the Klamath River.

Salazar argued that the state, and the country, should not back away from the 2006 San Joaquin River Restoration Program settlement, which, he said enabled the river to run from its headwaters to the ocean this year for the first time in half a century. He lobbied for the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, calling it a “comprehensive approach that includes new habitat for endangered fish species, coordinated measures to attack toxics that are fouling delta waters, and improvements to the state’s water infrastructure.”

Salazar said he will be ruling on the proposal to remove four dams along the Klamath River in March of next year.  In recent years both fish populations and agricultural interests have suffered from drought along the oversubscribed river.  In 2009, negotiators representing a wide array of interests agreed on a settlement that would remove four hydroelectric dams by 2020 as part of an agreement to restore historic salmon runs while keeping irrigation for the region’s farmers.

Salazar said Monday that the cost of removing the dams would be $290 million, far less than the $450 million originally estimated. He offered a preview of the impacts of the dam removals and river restoration, according to the DOI’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement, which is due to be released Thursday. The report includes the following findings, he said:

• Loss of hydroelectric power
• Loss of 50 power generation management jobs
• Loss of some recreational opportunities
• Decrease in some nearby property values
• Addition of 4,600 jobs to the regional economy over 15 years, including 1,500 during dam removal
• Increased water reliability to boost farm income and add between 70 and 695 agriculture jobs annually
• Improved conditions for salmon fishermen, creating 400 jobs

Salazar said that California and the West are facing a critical time for decisions about the region’s water supply.  Both population growth and climate change will add stress to an already stressed system, he said.

“Climate change is happening,” he said. “We can’t ignore this reality. It does no good to blame the scientists or to bury our heads in the sand.”