Editor’s note: This commentary is by Hilton Dier, who is the co-owner and operator of a small hydro plant and a board member of the Vermont Independent Power Producers (VIPPA).
I’m prompted to write this by an article celebrating the tearing out of a dam on the White River. I’m not contesting that particular effort; I don’t know enough about that situation. However, I am disturbed by the lack of attention paid to hydroelectric power in discussions about our energy future.
Three points: Someday Vermont (and the world) will run on renewable energy. In a renewably powered world we will need a constant source of energy. We need to preserve and develop hydroelectric energy now if we want a less painful transition to this new situation.
Randy Udall once said, “Eventually, the politics of energy has to surrender to the physics of energy.” This means that someday Vermont, the United States, and the world will run on renewable energy. No matter what we do in the way of policy, the fact remains that the earth isn’t making new fossil fuels. There’s less non-renewable energy every day, and we already extracted the easy to get resources. As the years go by it is taking more and more energy to get less energy out of the ground. At some point it will become useless to extract oil, gas, coal, or uranium. Either we will plan an orderly transfer to renewable energy or else suffer a disorderly emergency that will drag on for decades.
Part of that planning is the transformation of our electrical grid, and the part missing from that planning right now is stability. By stability I mean both the quality of the electricity that we get from wall sockets and the price that we pay for it throughout the year. Given the inevitable transition to renewable energy, we have unrealistic expectations.
We expect electricity to be 60 cycles per second, not 59 or 61, at something very close to 120 volts, in any quantity we want, available 100% of the time, for a minimal, constant price. Many people in Vermont also seem to expect the sources of that electricity to be invisible and silent, with no consequences. We have mostly outsourced the consequences of large scale energy production to other states.
Utilities have been remarkably successful at the 60 Hz, 120 Volt, 24/7/365 part. What maintains that is rotating equipment, that is, extremely large rotating coils of copper (alternators) powered by consistent sources of energy. Those sources can be coal, nuclear, or natural gas fired steam turbines, direct gas turbines, or hydroelectric turbines. This power is consistently available, even on cloudy days and windless nights. Only hydroelectric power will be there to fulfill this function in our renewable future.
What about battery storage? Twelve hours of storage for Vermont would be about 7,500 megawatt-hours, which at present lithium battery prices would cost $1.2 billion, and would be 10% of global annual lithium battery production. That price is just batteries in shipping containers. Add buildings, inverters, controls, cabling, and interconnection and it could be twice that. Add operations cost plus about $200 million per year for replacement cost. Utility scale battery storage would add 16 to 32 cents to the cost of a kilowatt-hour. It still wouldn’t solve the seasonal problem.
We get three times as much sun in mid-summer as in December. We get about two and a half times as much wind energy in the winter as in summer. Hydroelectric power has a peak in the spring and another in late fall. Add up the right amounts of all three and we can reduce the seasonal variation in supply. Rely on any one alone and we’ll get seasonal blackouts and price spikes.
This brings me back to local hydroelectric power and dam removal. Most of the energy investment and CO2 debt in a hydro project is contained in the concrete of the dam. Tear out a dam now and I guarantee that someday energy starved Vermonters will build it again, with no regard for the environment. The energy spent building it will be wasted and the opportunity to ease our energy transition will be lost. When considering the removal of a dam, regulators should be required to quantify and consider the loss of its potential contribution to our environment and economy. Sure, preserving one section of one river is important, but if we are polluting our way to a yearly Irene-scale storm, what have we accomplished?
All methods of extracting energy from the earth have consequences. We have to decide which consequences we are willing to have and how big an area we are considering. We can only look at one small section of a river in Vermont, or we can include the health of people and ecosystems in New England, or the world climate. It is a flawed moral choice to say, “Your children will get lung disease so our children get to live in a flawless natural wonderland.” It is myopic to plan a solar buildout reliant on natural gas power plants elsewhere in New England, or to imagine that affordable non-renewable energy will be around forever. It is foolish to assume that we will win a future bidding war for out of state hydro power.
Local hydroelectric power will be a keystone for Vermont’s energy future. We need to preserve what we have and promote the development of new hydro in coordination with our other resources.