What will life be like for farmers in the Russian River Watershed after the Potter Valley Project is decommissioned and its dams removed?
“An absolute disaster,” said one attendee of a forum held in Ukiah Monday to update the public on the process of dismantling the Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s hydroelectric plant in Mendocino County, a longtime Potter Valley resident who predicted that eliminating the cheap and plentiful source of water provided for decades as a by-product of electricity will “wipe out every bit of farming from here to the Bay Area,” since what now costs about $20 an acre-foot will become at least ten times as expensive.
“What we’ve laid out today is the vision of … how we survive as a county with the reality of what PG&E has left us in,” said Third District Mendocino County Supervisor John Haschak, thanking the Inland Water and Power Commission for not only hosting the Nov. 24 workshop, but for its years of work attempting to mitigate the impacts of losing both Scott and Cape Horn dams by finding a way to possibly continue the diversions of water from the Eel River into the Russian
River that were initiated for a hydroelectric plant that PG&E not longer wants to operate.
“We respect the work of the IWPC, and we see that as the path forward,” said Haschak. “We know that there are issues with the plan (to build a New Eel-Russian Facility to seasonally divert water), and we’re also asking PG&E to really study the economic harm that’s going to be done to the communities.”
As for why there were no PG&E representatives at the workshop Monday, Scott Shapiro, legal counsel for the IWPC, said that “PG&E is quite willing to come be part of these meetings, and we elected not to ask them to come to this one, but we will include them in future meetings, perhaps the next one.”
As for the possibility of stopping the decommissioning of the project, Shapiro said the IWPC tried twice to take over operations of the PVP, but now “there are no forks in the road, just a straight road that leads to the end,” which almost certainly includes both dams being removed.
“So you might not like how we got here, but we did, and this is an attempt to make the best lemonade we could out of lemons, after not being able to buy the whole thing ourselves, and not being able to acquire the license (to operate it) ourselves,” Shapiro continued, pointing later to several options that the IWPC is currently exploring for increasing water storage capacity in Potter Valley and Lake Mendocino, which include: increasing the amount of water that can be stored in the lake, pumping more water from the lake, creating a new dam, and expanding the current network of storage ponds.
As for which storage options might be pursued, Shapiro said that was not something the IWPC was prepared to address at this point, as the first step was “making sure the water continues to flow, the second part is figuring out how to maximize water storage.”
“There is no silver bullet, all of these (storage) concepts have some strengths and some weaknesses,” said consultant Tom Johnson, explaining that several options were being looked at because “we’re trying to replace Lake Pillsbury storage; we need to have storage that was in Lake Pillsbury, somewhere in the Russian River. So when we have seasonal diversions (with the NERF), we can then store the water to be used in the summer.”
But no matter which storage options are ultimately realized, Johnson said, all will be “expensive and difficult, and some sort of water conservation will be needed because the water will get a lot more expensive,” and there will be less of it available.
At the end of the three-hour workshop, IWPC Chair Janet Pauli thanked the panel and promised, “we’re going to do this again.”
The presentation, including all informational slides regarding the storage options and their expected costs, can be watched on the Mendocino County YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UClLBmYYFOA
Who is going to be paying for these grandiose plans to build new dams, create storage ponds in Potter Valley, raising the dam at Lake Mendocino?
Who is going to pay for dismantling what is there now? Who is looking at which option is most economical?
This meeting sounds very one sided. Too much beaurocrocy and not enough input from the people who will be severely impacted
Does anyone have any real idea of the amount of the economic losses to the agricultural and general economy if the dams are removed?