EDITORIAL: Hydropower: Clean, reliable and cheap

Published 12:45 pm Monday, December 5, 2022

If you rely on kilowatts to heat your home and water, be grateful for the dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers.

Thanks to those dams, and the plentiful power they produce as water spins turbines, you won’t spend more money this winter to stay toasty even if temperatures, as they typically do around here, plummet below zero.

Oregon Trail Electric Cooperative announced last week that for the third straight year, it won’t raise its rates.

And the main reason is that the Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency that sells the electricity those dams generate, is also holding its wholesale rates steady.

Residents and businesses with furnaces and water heaters that burn natural gas have less reason to be jolly as Christmas approaches.

Cascade Natural Gas, which serves Baker City, boosted its residential rates by 25.1% starting Nov. 1.

Several factors contributed to this year’s unusually large rise in natural gas prices, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a June fire at a major natural gas exporting facility in Texas.

But the cost of natural gas and other fossil fuels can also be affected by political factors, notably the campaign to wean America (and, indeed, the world) from these carbon-spewing sources of energy.

That’s a laudable goal.

But we certainly can’t replace those dirtier fuels, any time soon, with solar and wind power. Hydropower — especially in the Northwest, where we are immensely fortunate to have great rivers — is and will remain a vital source.

Dams aren’t perfectly clean, either, though the electricity they produce isn’t tainted by carbon emissions.

The harmful effect of dams on salmon and steelhead is undeniable.

But hatchery programs have partially ameliorated the losses.

Doing away with dams — the four lower Snake River dams in southeast Washington are the biggest targets now — would require replacing a lot of megawatts.

And until Americans embrace nuclear power — an energy source that is effectively carbon-free like hydropower, but even more reliable — we’ll need that water-generated electricity as a major weapon in the battle against climate change.

That this power happens to be relatively cheap sweetens the deal.