Tearing down Klamath dams: The largest dam demolition
calmatters.org
calmatters.org
I came away with an even greater feeling that this is a topic too complicated to just take a side, but rather the best possible outcomes happen when stakeholders work together. We need the fish, the energy, the irrigation, the flood control, and the ease of barge-based agricultural transportation. There is serious effort put into protecting wildlife (IE: fish) with very, very good outcomes. I think it's easy to assume that the pro-dam crowd is anti-environment, which couldn't be farther from the truth.
What really solidified for me this week is that these dams have a defined lifetime. Many are reaching the end of that lifetime, but the technology to replace them with something else isn't really there yet. Given the net benefit and the massive costs of replacement, it's very clear to me we are better letting them run their natural lives rather than removing prematurely. As each reaches a point where it is no longer viable, that is when and where we should consider other options.
Something I haven't seen discussed anywhere, but to me is almost obvious - these various wave generators we see in discussion for off-shore use. Is there a way that technology can be used in the Columbia, Snake, etc without the need for a dam? At the same time too often in these discussions there are other issues overlooked - like how much Washington / Oregon wheat goes down the river on barges that would otherwise be tractor trailers on the highways. Lots of problems to solve.
No one wants to be labeled as anti-environment, but when assigning labels, I think it helps to look at the big picture. I think the anti-nuclear crowd happens to be anti-environment in practice, even if many of them are tree hugging, organic eating, blah blah blah...
Malice requires intent. Apathy and ignorance do not.
I see no constructive outcome of following this logically flawed line of thinking.
It’s important to address someone’s actual concerns not simply whatever you feel is easiest to attack.
As for "serious effort protecting wildlife with good outcomes", it's worth keeping in mind that the dams are directly responsible for excessive growth of cyanobacteria. Leading to a Klamath that's seriously depleted. (No, the dams aren't the only reason, but they are a large one). The net "benefit" of the dams staying around would be a significantly damaged ecosystem. And let's be clear, they have reached the point where they are no longer viable, unless you externalize costs. PacifiCorp had the option to upgrade them to have less eco impact (salmon ladders etc), and they looked at the cost and said "nah, thanks, let's not".
As for stakeholders coming together - that's kind of what happened here. It's not like this was an overnight decision. It's been almost two decades of work by folks involved. As always, in a multi-stakeholder environment, not everybody is happy. And nobody is 100% happy.
That's not huge, but it's not nothing either. Feels like enough to not simply hand wave away, especially since that's carbon-free energy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Oreg...
Enough to give up on when it doesn't make commercial sense and destroys an ecosystem, the number doesn't stand in a vacuum.
Look up the North Atlantic Cod Fishery. We failed to tell fishermen to stop fishing, and as a result the entire ecosystem collapsed and has never returned. They had to stop fishing anyway, and their way of life collapsed too.
Its a tricky reality to balance, but the fishing industry have historically always gotten this wrong. At a certain point you have to be willing to tell people that their way of life is unsustainable.
Of course, then we have to recognize that most of us live an unsustainable way of life, fishermen just happen to be living unsustainably in a shorter term than the rest of us.
The trick isn't to avoid all suffering, that's just not possible. The trick is (IMHO) to first understand it, then minimize it. Homer Alaska guy will have to accept reduced income for at least a few years until the population rebounds. In the end, at least his business, home, and way of life aren't completely destroyed.
I don't know how we establish/create an independent and reasonable regulator to manage limits, but that's what we need to figure out. The existing entities are too corrupt and have proven that they can't be trusted. On the flip side, some environmental groups are too extreme and also not trustworthy regulators. It's a very hard and complex problem.
If you've ever tried telling an Evangelical that taking this whole Jesus thing so seriously is maybe not the best idea for humanity then you know what I mean.
There are some companies doing small scale hydro, by taking advantage of the natural flow of a river, without the use of any dam/head. Eg. see https://emrgy.com, and a volts podcast with the founder/CEO: https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-make-small-hydro-more-like#de...
And to be clear, these are small, old, dams. Modern dams and turbines produce far, far more.
[1]: https://emrgy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Emrgy-Specifica...
Saying that these are too small is like saying that solar panels are too small. The module size has nothing to do with the total generation - they're built to be manufactured and placed in bulk.
Source: I listened to the referenced podcast episode when I came out, and just looked at the spec sheet to refresh my memory.
Won't there be separate NIMBY lawsuits about every single one of these, claims that they're unstudied and cause ecological damage, ruin the natural enjoyment of the river, etc. etc.?
Solar is far more practical and far more dense then these things to replace a hydro dam.
When it comes to wave power, "in discussion" is the operative word. Modern pelton wheels are 95%+ effective in converting kinetic energy into mechanical energy and have been in operation for decades. They are super well understood and optimized and are deployed at scales of dozens of megawatts per unit. Total installed capacity is probably into the hundreds of gigawatts.
AFAIK, no wave power project is above 10 MW as of now and the total installed base is still tiny despite decades of research. Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wave_power_stations for example. It is a combination of the ocean being a super unfriendly environment for technology in combination with all of the wave energy extraction technologies being extremely inefficient.
Furthermore, you lose the ability to dispatch more or less electricity depending on demand, which is increasingly important in grids with a lot of wind and solar.
It may well be that the environmental costs of many dams aren’t worth it - and lots of dams produce very little or no hydroelectricity. But run of river hydro is not an easy substitute for those hydro plants that do produce significant energy.
Most of the removals seem to be on very small scale hydro projects on coastal river that produce very little power, aren’t used for irrigation and open up a lot of salmon habitat.
The Columbia Basin irrigation projects are a vast endeavor. The amount of food production that relies on the irrigation provided by these damns is HUGE (I work in Agtech and am regularly on many of these farms).
Multiple towns have grown over the years on the banks of these rivers. Ripping damns down would mean either some other form of flood remediation or just abandoning the towns.
And as an avid water skiier... the Columbia River is some of the best water skiing in the world (I've skiied many other spots). So there's a small deal about recreation as well. :D
That may sound like an "over my dam body" pitch. It's not meant to. It's meant to augment the parent post. You have to talk about the whole picture, not just the part you get excited about when you have big interconnected things like this.
I second going and visiting some of them. They're similar but different. Grand Coulee is a major testament to 40's large scale projects. I think Wanapum is cool because it shows that you can do a "public works" dam. And Dvorjak is pretty impressive as well, especially from a flood control/river management POV.
I say eventually because there is undoubtedly a good amount of sediment trapped behind the dams that will need to flush through the river system.[1]
[0] https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2007/oct/30/levees-face-bl...
[1] https://www.americanrivers.org/2023/08/sedimentation-and-dam....
Now that it's complete, there's an entirely new shoreline. It's been great to see.
There are also cool videos of the dams actually being demolished.
It's basically just a floating barge with an excavator chipping away at the dam a little bit every day, while water rushes past it through the damage.
It's also kind of amazing that the dam was essentially destroyed with a single guy and a single (large) jack hammer.
I was thinking the same thing. I know that being a heavy equipment operator is probably mind numbingly boring a lot of the time, but this particular job looks like it would have been incredibly satisfying.
You can still hike up to it and walk on top of the remaining dam structure, and since the washout the area has the feel of a ghost town.
So these dams produce a round error amount of energy[1]. But the effect on the watershed is not a rounding error. And a lot of them are old which brings costs due to maintenance and engineering analysis. And that applies to the 60 year old power lines to tie these to the grid.
[1] Compare with fish. Friends mom lived in Idaho which is popular with fishermen. Some state analysis showed fish tourism generates about $1000 per fish caught.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
A new dam is built alongside, then the old one dismantled.
For example, the Fengman Dam on the Songhua in N.E. China was originally built during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria:
The PNW has something like 80% of its power coming from clean hydro. It’d be a shame to lose that.
Somewhere up the thread, a 3% success rate was thrown out, so maybe some designs are better than others.
East of the divide is the Mississippi basin so that’s a whole different story.
Salmon snagging is a thing for us and the bears.
Nothing insurmountable (dredge the silt, build them bigger so the reservoir lasts until the fall, etc), but it just means the most cost effective way to help the salmon is tear down a lot of these dams.
This is a good question I'd like to hear more about. The fish ladder at Bonneville, for example, is fairly steep all considered. For the kind of money we have invested in the facility, would it be reasonable to invest some serious effort in making a more usable ladder?
I only know about this issue at all because someone linked me his talks on youtube years ago.
A place I used to work had the internal name of a release called Ulaanbaatar. AFAIK, nobody on the dev team was from Mongolia, but this sort of thing was the norm.
Recent OSX releases are all various places (High Sierra, Big Sur, Mojave, etc.)
Azure regional codenames are "Black Forest" and "Fairfax" for Germany and USGov sovereign clouds.
...and so on.