Briana LeClaire of Boise, a consultant on school choice, read my story this morning on solar power and asked why we don’t just expand the use of our hydropower to meet our electric needs.
“More than once as we’ve taken the Connector into Boise and had the city spread out in front of us, I’ve talked to our three kids about how lucky we are to have cheap, clean power here. I’m a Boise native, but I’ve lived and worked in parts of the country that are mostly nuclear and coal-fired. I prefer hydro with its jobs, a clean environment, and fish,” she wrote.
Here is my response:
“Cheap” hydro is only cheap because the water is free and because we built the dams decades ago and they have paid off their capital. Just like when you buy a car, pay off the loan and no longer have payments. But in the case of Idaho
Power, its dams are involved in a relicensing process because the water is a public resource, not private. This is expected to cost about $500 million and also limits how the power can be generated to aid fish. Also, new equipment like turbines also adds to the cost.
That said, this legacy power will remain cheaper than new power sources in part because it does not emit greenhouse gases and won’t face future costs from efforts to reduce them to address climate change. There also are not fuel costs.
But here is the complicated issue: Cheap power is good for us but we can’t sell it to get new jobs because the companies that would be attracted to the cheap power would use a lot of power and that would require new power sources, which all cost more money.
Other readers have wondered why Idaho Power doesn’t build a nuclear plant but even if it partners with other utilities a nuclear plant would produce more power than the region needs in the near term. Once the nation figures out how it will address climate change and the future is more certain nuclear power may get another look.
That’s why energy efficiency is so attractive economically. It protects our cheap power for those existing companies that need it to compete and also reduces the costs for companies and people that use it even when the cost of power goes up.
If you are using power wisely and the price goes up you can still pay about the same if you use less.
Recall that Briana LeClaire was also one of the directors of the Idaho Freedom Foundation, though apparently she’s cut ties with the organization, and so is coming from that mindset.
One of the points I’ve been trying to make for a while is that markets have the potential to make the transition to new energy sources more efficient if we use them. So I welcome questions and comments from people from all mindsets.
You still have to ditch the ‘relicensing will kill us’ mantra though. It will not, it’s like the tomcat squalor that always precedes kittens.
The kittens come anyway.
The real reason that existing hydropower is cheap is that we historically ignored the very real environmental costs associated with it. Wildlife habitat was compromised, fish runs were destroyed, towns and farms were flooded, river running opportunities were removed. Sometimes this was done consciously, but mostly these issues were just ignored. And there was no EPA or Fish & Wildlife Service to force their consideration. The good dam sites are all gone, and new hydropower would not be allowed to ignore such costs again. Cheap hydro is a historical anomaly that will not be repeated. Environmentally conscious hydro might still be found, but it won’t be very big and it won’t be as cheap as the old stuff.