Klamath dams should remain

Albany Democrat Herald Opinion

Jan. 17, 2008

This week’s big agreement on water issues along the Klamath River leaves out the biggest piece — the four hydoelectric dams that some people want torn down. The agreement calls for the dams to be removed, but it does not offer a way that could be done without costing Pacific and its customers hundreds of millions of dollars.

Pacific and its predecessor companies have operated the dams for a long time. The oldest, Copco No. 1, was completed in 1918. Copco 2 was finished in 1925. JC Boyle started operating in 1958, and Iron Gate in 1962.

Advocates of demolishing the dams say doing so would open up more than 300 miles of salmon-rearing habitat. They point out that in recent times, fish production in the Klamath has declined sharply, and they imply that opening all that habitat would reverse the decline.

The dams started shutting off the upstream habitat decades before the fish production fell. So it’s hard to believe that tearing out the dams would do much to restore the runs.

Proponents of removal point out that the dams’ hydro capacity is only a small proportion of the generating capacity in Pacific’s system. That may be so, but their virtue, even more than supplying up to 70,000 homes with electricity, is that water can be released through the turbines quickly, shoring up the power supply when other sources falter or the demand suddenly goes up.

It is amazing that the fervor for dam removal has been affected not even in the slightest by the concern over greenhouse gases and climate change.

As long as the Klamath River flows, those dams are reliable producers of vital electricity without producing any greenhouse exhaust at all, and without marring the countryside or endangering birds with hundreds of windmills.

The dams just sit there, affecting fish runs no more than they’ve affected them for most of the past century.

The continued drive to abolish those dams — and the support of this alternative by the environmental movement — raises doubts about the belief that gas from burning carbon threatens the world via global warming. If that were really so, the environmental movement would demand that the dams remain regardless of their effect on fish.

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Source:  http://www.dhonline.com/articles/2008/01/18/news/opinion/4edi01_klamath.txt