Page 10 RAIN May 1981 Last month I was out touring projects that were funded by the Oregon Department of Energy's Small Grants Program. The trip took me across the state to the Idaho border and back again. Everywhere I traveled I was impressed by the people and their'work. Meeting Roger Mackaness ahd Clif Graf, recipients of a grant for their micro-hydro installation, was an especially eye-opening experience for me. They led me in turn to Scott Sylva of Northwest Water Power Systems who supplied me with more information and in his turn directed me to Jim McPhee' s lengthy article on mini-hydro in the New Yorker(Feb. 23, 1981). Additional resources for this article were Chris Wood's article "Dam Gold Rush" in the March issue of Canadian Renewable Energy News, and the books accessed below. protestors in rural Minnesota. I have some heartfelt criticisms of any prerogative granted to anyone to condemn a person's land for the dubious "common good" private inte'rests determine. Standing by Trapper Creek with Clif, whose family had homesteaded that stretch of beauty generations ago, I was riled to think of someone else staking a claim to it. But if an acceptable feasibility study of the generating potential of the creek were submitted, the courts could rule in favor of condemnation. Trapper Creek would hardly be worth the effort, primarily because the cost to capitalize on the water flow, compared with the kilowatts yielded, make such an enterprise for investment purposes less than cost effective. Now Clif and Roger are not looking to make a killing off Trapper MINING THE WATERS: fl'i cashing in ·on by Carlotta Collette ,The scene was classic Cascade woods (all hydro articles begin with water-side reminiscences). I was bruising my new no-nonsense Oregon rubber boots slopping my way down a cat road with Roger and Clif. We were en route to the low-head micro-hydro installation they are developing in c;lif's mile run of Trapper Creek on Larch Mountain. They were describing their project, pointing out the impoundment, the new track of pipe that would conduct the water to the turbine, and the old ram that had pumped irrigation water up to Clif's farm for years. Their enthusiasm was catching but the trials and tribulations of permit procedures and other bureaucratic balderdash kept slipping into the conversation: "And ya know, pretty near anyone can come in here and get the water rights to develop the hydro-electric potential of this creek or any other, private or public owned. If ya don't want to sell it to them they can take ya to court and condemn the creek. They can claim eminent domain and just take it." Roger had just triggered a knee-jerk reaction in me. I'd spent a little time, previous to moving to Oregon, among the powerline • , ' Hydro-power Creek. They're just gathering a little homemade electricity. So the scale of project they're engaged in (micro-hydro), and their heavy reliance on scrounging and hard work, becomes feasible even with very low head and flow rate. Larger hydro installations (called mini-hydro), particularly those operated pre-World War II and dormant since then, are the real little gold mines of this energy rush. • Two federal programs make it so. The Energy Act of 1978 compels utilities to purchase electricity generated by smaller producers. Moreover they are required to pay these producers the "avoided rate"-the cost the utilities would otherwise have had to pay to expand their own electrical generating capacity. For added encour- . agement, 1978 also gave us the Windfall Profits Tax offering an energy tax credit (11 %) on top of the standard investment tax credit (10%) which combine to significantly offset the costs of recycling deteriorated dams. Numerous businesses were started just after the Act took effect. I call them the "just add water" industries. With undeveloped hydro-power's calculated potential figured at 470 billion kilowatt hours (not including the potential of micro-hydro) and the "avoided rate" paid by utilities set at anywhere from 2 cents to 8 cents per kilowatt hour, it is not difficult to recognize the source of the glint in speculators' eyes. Jim McPhee in his article for the New Yorker puts it this way: "One did not have to be a theoretica~ physicist to figure out that if water was falling, say, twenty-five feet, where the annual average flow was four hundred cubic feet per second, it could turn modest turbines, that could turn small generators, that would earn, at six cents a kilowatt hour,·about two hundred thousand dollars a year." Given an initial retrofit cost of anywhere from several thousand to several hundred thousand dollars (depending on the scale of installation, the condition of the existing equipment, and the inventiveness of the entrepreneur) these operations could turn a fairly quick profit. Since venture capital for putting mini-hydro generated power on line is not readily available to •any but the moneyed interests, the unwashed public could be left out once again. Moreover, in all likelihood the small business hy- , dro-broker will in turn be bought out by the next size up until we see the sort of economic concentration already evidenced in the solar industry. But this prognosis is only one side of the story. Certainly there
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