Oregon is well endowed with hydropower resources, which provide about
half of the state’s electricity. Most of this energy comes from large
dams on the Columbia and Willamette rivers. Large-scale hydropower has a
long and controversial history in the Pacific Northwest. It provides
abundant inexpensive electricity, but major dams have damaged habitat
and blocked fish from migrating upstream.
Since 2007, Energy Trust of Oregon has promoted a different kind of
hydropower: small, environmentally friendly projects. These projects
install generating equipment in places where water is already dammed or
diverted, such as agricultural irrigation pipelines. Adding hydropower
where water is already in use for another purpose typically does not
cause additional environmental impacts. And it provides small-scale
local power sources that keep revenues in local communities.
Locations for new, run-of river hydropower projects in Oregon are limited by the state’s 1987 Instream Water Right Act,
which declared that instream uses of water (such as recreation and
maintenance of fish habitat) were beneficial uses and allowed natural
resource agencies to apply for those rights. The Northwest Power and
Conservation Council has identified other locations as Protected Areas
off limits to hydro development. The combination of the law and
regulation “essentially took natural streams off the table,” says Jed
Jorgensen, a renewable energy program manager at Energy Trust of Oregon.
“Hydropower work now is mostly limited to existing non-powered dams;
streams where there are no fish issues, which is a very small subset;
and places where water already is in use for another purpose, such as
municipal supply pipes and irrigation canals.”
After studying these options, Energy Trust focused on conduit
projects, which install generating equipment inside an existing conduit,
such as an irrigation ditch or municipal water line. Hydropower
projects, even small ones, must go through complex state and federal
permitting processes that can be daunting for new developers, so Energy
Trust published permitting guides. It also provided technical and
financial support to developers for project research and permitting, and
published a separate guide to the utility interconnection process.
Energy Trust has completed 13 small hydropower projects since 2007,
ranging in size from 4 kilowatts to 5 megawatts. These projects are
generating approximately 27 million kilowatt-hours of electricity
annually. Now the organization is scaling up its work with irrigation
districts, the majority of which still move water through leaky open
ditches. Irrigation modernization projects replace open canals with
pressurized pipe, often saving energy as well as water and allowing for
hydropower in many cases. In the arid West where water is very valuable,
the water savings from the piping process is an important piece of
financing the cost of the pipe. “Irrigation districts have hundreds of
miles of canals that move tremendous volumes of water. Piping is very
expensive, and most districts don’t have the operating budget to go out
and buy it all by themselves,” says Jorgensen. Energy Trust is
developing project assessment tools and hopes to have assessed up to a
dozen potential sites by the end of 2016.
Based on its experience, Energy Trust provided comments to the
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on simplifying and streamlining
permitting for conduit hydropower projects. Not long after that, the
Hydropower Regulatory Efficiency Act, enacted by Congress in 2013,
simplified the permitting process for conduit hydropower projects.
http://blog.renewableenergyworld.com/ugc/blogs/2015/08/oregon_expands_oppor.html
No comments:
Post a Comment