Editorial

Save the dam!

ALMOST 90 YEARS after legendary conservationist John Muir lost his battle to save Hetch Hetchy Valley, near Yosemite National Park, several environmental groups with dubious credentials have proposed that the city look into tearing down the O'Shaughnessy Dam, which holds the city's water supply and provides 240 megawatts of electric power.

It's one of those ideas that sounds just great, as long as you don't stop to think about it.

In practice, tearing down the dam would force the city to rely on new, pollution-belching fossil-fuel power plants – and possibly prevent the closure of Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s Hunters Point plant and force the city to accept the expansion of Mirant Corp.'s plant at Potrero Hill. It would be a major blow to efforts to replace PG&E with a public power system in San Francisco – and thus would undermine the best chance for the city to pursue renewable energy alternatives and to close the Hunters Point plant, which many in that neighborhood link to high rates of asthma and other respiratory problems.

It might take 50 years for Hetch Hetchy Valley even to begin to return to its natural condition – but the negative environmental impacts on San Francisco would be felt immediately, and would last for the duration.

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The fate of Hetch Hetchy Valley was a huge national issue in 1911. The fast-growing city of San Francisco was desperate for fresh water, and one of the few available sites where a large enough dam could be built was on the Tuolumne River, inside Yosemite National Park. The dam would flood – and thus destroy – Hetch Hetchy Valley, considered by some to be as spectacular as Yosemite Valley.

Muir rallied the emerging conservationist movement against the dam. But there was another political cause in the country that also had tremendous appeal to liberals and progressives – public power – and John Edward Raker, the congressperson who represented the district that included Yosemite, tapped into that sentiment with the Raker Act of 1913. The bill allowed the dam to be built – but only on the condition that it generate electric power as well as provide water, and that the electricity be used to establish a public power beachhead in San Francisco.

Of course, as we've reported countless times since, the dam was built, the water system developed, the generators constructed, and power lines installed as far as Newark. Then the city mysteriously ran out of copper wire – just a few yards from a new PG&E substation. The power went into PG&E's grid, and PG&E spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defeating bond acts that would have brought the electricity the rest of the way into the city. Thus, although San Francisco is the only city in the nation with a Congressional mandate for public power (confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1940), San Franciscans now pay PG&E for their power.

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Today the dam and Hetch Hetchy reservoir provide water to three million customers – and provide the electricity that runs Muni buses, powers street lights and city offices, and serves energy-hungry clients at San Francisco International Airport. A significant amount is also sold off to the Turlock and Modesto Irrigation Districts under long-term contracts.

If the dam were torn down, environmentalists say, the city could expand the capacity of the Calveras Dam, and that could provide plenty of water for all of the customers in the Hetch Hetchy system. The groups, including the Planning and Conservation League and Restore Hetch Hetchy, want the city to include in its planning for rebuilding the water system an environmental review of dam removal. And they're threatening to oppose the bond act to rebuild the system if the city doesn't comply.

It may well be that the city could find other ways to store its water. But the immediate loss of all that electric power would be catastrophic. The city would still be obliged to provide electricity at fixed, low prices to Turlock and Modesto, and thus would have to purchase power – presumably from PG&E or other private energy suppliers – at high rates, losing millions on the deal. The 130 megawatts currently used for municipal functions would also have to come from an outside supplier, putting a massive strain on the already bloody city budget.

And where would that power come from? A loss of such a large hydroelectric facility would almost certainly put pressure on local and state officials to replace the power with new fossil fuel-burning plants. Community activists are desperately trying to shut down the ancient, filthy Hunters Point plant, which generates 215 megawatts, and state regulators are arguing that the plant must remain until that capacity is replaced. The city's best efforts at creating new solar and wind generation might possibly generate 150 megawatts of power over the next 10 to 20 years – but any realistic picture of a clean, green energy future for San Francisco includes a significant amount of hydropower from Hetch Hetchy.

Hydropower isn't a perfect environmental solution: dams disrupt the flow of rivers and have devastating impacts on fish populations and on the general riparian ecosystem. We've joined with environmentalists in opposing almost every new dam in California, and we'll continue to do so.

However – as most realistic environmentalists and green-energy experts acknowledge – existing hydropower is far better for the environment than increased fossil-fuel generation. There will come a time – quite possibly in the next 20 years – when solar and wind technology (along with new technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells) will allow San Francisco to replace all of Hetch Hetchy's power simply and cheaply with renewable energy, generated locally and controlled by a public power agency. And when that happens, we'll be happy to talk about tearing down the dam and letting the Tuolumne run free. But right now, that's just not possible.

On a political level, destroying the dam would be a severe blow to the successful development of a San Francisco public power agency – and thus to the future of renewable energy policy in the city.

Why is the Planning and Conservation League – a Sacramento-based group that supported PG&E's energy deregulation bill and was part of the utility's environmental "cover" – trying to push this stupid proposal? It wouldn't surprise us at all to see the hand of the private utility at play here.

And although it sounds a bit wacky, this suggestion is no joke: as long as the city refuses to comply with the Raker Act, the threat that Congress could take back the dam (and demolish or sell it) looms over the head of San Francisco like an electrified sword of Damocles.

No local environmental organization should join the PCL in this dangerous game. Instead, they should be putting their efforts into backing Proposition D – the best hope for clean, renewable energy in San Francisco, for now and the foreseeable future.