Jun 09
5
Sierra Club Wants to Tear Down Dams in Northwest
The New York Times has an article stating that the Sierra Club wants Bonneville Power Administration to tear down the dams on the lower snake river to replace them with wind turbines.
Apparently Bonneville has already made significant investments in wind turbines but because of the unreliability of using the wind for power generation, it needs other, more stable, power sources to back it up. Bonneville currently uses power from dams as well as natural gas generators for this. With the dismantling of the lower snake river dams, it would put those power requirements on natural gas generators to a much greater degree.
Sierra Club claims that if more wind turbines are placed in more locations, that the wind would always be blowing somewhere but this would require a huge expansion of wind generators as well as the transmission lines to where the turbines would be built.
I’m all for increasing our power generation capabilities in whatever way is economically feasible in order to improve our energy independence. Environmentalists, though, need to get their acts together. It is counter-productive to be nothing but the nay-sayers without coming up with practical alternatives.
The city of Seattle gets 90% of their electricity from hydroelectric power plants. That’s power that generated locally and not from other countries. That’s power with no CO2. That’s power that creates no air pollution. And above all, it’s cheap. Hydroelectric is very nearly the perfect renewable way of generating electricity. But the problem is the salmon. It’s not as if efforts haven’t been made to mitigate the effects to the salmon. Fish ladders have been installed. Nevertheless, the salmon apparently are “traumatized” by the dams and the lakes which make them “weaker”.
There is not a “green” way of generating power without some downside they can oppose. Most people can agree on using renewable resources that are economically viable for a huge variety of reasons from energy independence and national security, to wanting clean air to breath and for the health benefits, to “global climate change”, but environmentalists hurt their causes by condemning things because they’re not “green” enough and not being on the same page.
We have choices to make and especially the environmentalists. Solely criticizing every renewable energy option out there will do nothing more than cause people to eventually throw up their hands and say “screw it”. We have to develop the best options we know how and minimize the risks and use those options until we can develop better ones. Environmentalists need to start coming up with real-world options that actually take into account people and not just wildlife and plant life. They need to support the better of imperfect options and support the improvement of these options and development of new ones or else they risk marginalising themselves and the causes they care the most about.
UPDATE