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Local politics, the county, and the world, as viewed by Tammy Maygra Tammy’s views are her own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Bill Eagle, his pastor, Tammy’s neighbors, Wayne Mayo, Betsy Johnson, Joe Corsiglia, President Trump, Henry Heimuller, VP Pence, Pat Robertson, Debi Corsiglia’s dog, or Claudia Eagle’s Cats. This Tammy’s Take (with the exception of this disclaimer) is not paid for or written by, or even reviewed by anyone but Tammy and she refuses to be bullied by anyone. See Standard Disclaimer.
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One of Several Dams on the Columbia River System
Dam Removal Pros & Cons
Some general information regarding the cons, and pros for removal of dams on the Snake River and maybe Bonneville and John Day dams too. It is a very controversial issue for all Oregonians.
CONS FOR DAM REMOVAL
A movement by environmentalist to restore the natural flow of the Snake and Columbia River.
2. Northwest's hydroelectric system keeps our carbon footprint at half that of the rest of the country, and is our largest source of affordable energy. 3. The lower Snake River dams alone produce 1,110 average megawatts of clean, renewable energy -- enough to power the city of Seattle -- and provide backup power to wind resources when the wind isn't blowing. Dam removal folks provide info that says differently (go to # 20 and 25-) 4. increased carbon emissions of 3 million tons per year, a 7.6 percent increase." This is because more gas-fired plants would have to be built to take their place. Following info not correct -- coal sources outside the Northwest is considered as well, the total increased emissions would be 6 million tons per year. Emission # false.. Oregons coal usage will be zero by the end of 2020 (Boardman Plant) 5. BUT barge traffic has been reduced dramatically over the last 20 years, Snake River barge shipping has been in decline from a peak two decades ago, when barges moved some 9 million short tons of cargo per year. In the past decade, river shipping on the Snake has dropped from about 5.5 million short tons annually in 2007 to less than 3 million in the years immediately after the Great Recession. It has since settled between 3.5 million and 4.4 million tons per year. A single “tow” of four barges moves 14,000 tons of wheat downstream. Each tow replaces 538 semi-trucks on highways, or 160 cars on congested Columbia Gorge rail lines. (An industry group says Snake River barges move the equivalent of 167,000 truckloads of goods annually; moving the Snake’s wheat alone would require 137,000 trucks or nearly 24,000 additional rail cars.) 6. Utility customer costs also would rise dramatically -- by more than half a billion dollars in 2020 and remain at that level or higher in future years 7. Bonneville public-utility customers would bear the cost increases. Based on Bonneville's rate of $28 per megawatt-hour, dam removal causes an increase of 24 percent to 29 percent. 8. billions of dollars it would cost to remove the dams, economic impacts on lost river trade and navigation, flood control, replacing barge transportation with thousands of carbon-emitting trucks and changes in irrigation sources. Nor does it include the costs or carbon emissions of providing power alternatives to back up the rapidly growing wind resources when the wind isn't blowing. 9. 2020 information dam removal would cost $2.3 billion over the next 30 years. 10. The study pulls from 14 interviews with regional farmers, shippers, port managers and agricultural trade groups, as well as data from state agencies in Washington and Idaho. According to the report, breaching the dams would require at least 201 additional unit trains and 23.8 million miles in additional trucking activity annually to maintain current shipping activities. To accommodate the increased rail and truck shipping, federal investments between $1.17 billion and $2 billion in road and rail improvements, 11. Shipping by rail and truck is more expensive than barging, so costs for regional farmers would also increase. The report estimates that more than 1,100 farms could go bankrupt if federal subsidies do not increase to offset those costs. It would take between $18.9 million and $38.8 million more in federal funding to keep farm profits level, 12. Without those subsidies, nearly 4,000 jobs and $472.7 million in sales supported by agricultural exports from the 10-county region nearest to the dams could vanish. Thousands more jobs in tourism, paper manufacturing, munition manufacturing, water transportation, lumber mill and wholesale trade would also be put at risk. (The report did not evaluate the potential loss of indirect jobs downriver in Cowlitz or Clark counties.) PRO FOR DAM REMOVAL 13. DAM Removal would create Seattle-based economics firm ECONorthwest concluded that dam removal would create 317 new jobs, $408 million in labor income and other wealth. There would be some job shifting. 14. Last year, 32 Pacific Northwest salmon biologists and six whale scientists signed letters to Washington Governor Jay Inslee, advocating removal of the four dams. Dam decommissioning, the whale scientists wrote, “will re-establish productive access” for chinook and other salmon to more than 5,000 miles of high-quality habitat in the Snake Basin. 15. A 2017 study by the Fish Passage Center, a nonpartisan, government-funded Columbia Basin research group, found that removal of the four Snake River dams would result in a two- to three-fold increase in salmon abundance in the Snake River Basin, even though the fish would still have to negotiate four more dams downstream, on the Columbia River. 16. According to four surveys conducted for the study, Pacific Northwest households were willing to pay an average of $40 each for the dams’ removal,
BONNEVILLE DAM IN FINICIAL TROUBLE 17. The 21st century has caught up with Bonneville, as the cost of renewable energy and natural gas has dropped below the price of Bonneville’s hydroelectricity. Bonneville historically maintained low prices for its contracted customers, chiefly 134 Pacific Northwest public utility districts, by selling its surplus power at much higher rates to California. But when the state began embracing solar energy in the last decade, the going price for Bonneville’s surplus power dropped sharply. 18. raise rates it charges its contracted customers by about 30 percent over the last eight years. Those customers now pay Bonneville more than $35 per megawatt-hour; were it not for their contractual obligations, they could buy electricity on the open market for prices that over the last year averaged less than $30 a megawatt-hour and occasionally dropped to below zero. 19. Bonneville might then be forced to raise its rates even more, driving away still more customers and intensifying the “death spiral” that utilities increasingly fear. 20. Bonneville’s prospects aren’t likely to improve. Its six dams on the main stem of the Columbia River provide all the electricity its contracted customers need; the electricity generated by its 25 other dams, including the four lower Snake River dams, is all surplus. 21. Bonneville has become the nation’s most highly leveraged utility. It spent down its financial reserves from nearly a billion dollars in 2008 to about $5 million in 2017, and it accumulated $15 billion in debt, 22. From 2008 to 2017, salmon recovery that effort cost Bonneville $727 million a year, about a fourth of its annual budget. Much of the mitigation money has been spent on the basin’s 178 salmon hatcheries, 23. salmon recovery effort has cost Bonneville ratepayers more than $16 billion since 1980, about a quarter of their electricity bills. That makes it the nation’s most expensive endangered species recovery failure. 24. YET__ SALMON DEMISE is a several issue problem climate change, over fishing, predator (sea Lion) over eating. 25. the last time the Snake River dams’ power helped meet Bonneville’s contracted customer demand was in 2009, other than that it is all surplus and the demand has plummeted. 26. From the time they leave the Idaho spawning grounds where they were born and arrive at the ocean, they run a gauntlet of eight dams on the Snake and the Columbia. Before dams blocked the river, juvenile salmon, known as smolts, rode the current to the Pacific Ocean. Now they must swim through 325 miles of inhospitably warm slack water, using energy that ought to be devoted to physical preparation for salt water and ocean predators. The result is that they arrive at the Columbia’s mouth undersized and unprepared for the ocean’s rigors. 27. In 1993, environmental groups sued Bonneville and other federal agencies for violating the Endangered Species Act in their treatment of Snake River salmon, beginning a cycle of litigation that continues to this day. On at least five occasions, federal judges ordered the agencies to consider removing the lower Snake River dams, and each time the agencies responded with delay and diversions, once going so far as to call the dams immutable parts of the landscape and therefore not subject to the Endangered Species Act. 28. Agencies have installed screens to prevent smolts from being pummeled by the dams’ turbines. They have placed water tanks inside barges and trucks and transported smolts in them to bypass the dams. They have built water-filled fish elevators to improve the survival of adult salmon swimming upstream. And they have installed at least seven hatcheries that release millions of smolts each year into the Snake. None of this has significantly helped native salmon recover. As Jones told me, dam removal is the one untried option, and the only one with high promise of benefiting both salmon and Bonneville’s finances.
Tammy
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