Dam this Thing!
A green hydroelectric project pitched for Lake Elsinore has some eco-activists seeing red
By: Alex Distefano
With all the talk of “green” energy and finding renewable, yet affordable sources of fuel and electricity, you would think that people would wholeheartedly support plans to construct a hydroelectric power plant and pumping station near Lake Elsinore.
The idea behind the project is pretty straightforward: pump water from Lake Elsinore into the mountains at night, then during the daytime flush it back down through turbines to generate electricity. The project was, at first, a partnership between the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District and a hydroelectric company called Nevada Hydro Co.
Entitled the Lake Elsinore Advanced Pump Storage (LEAPS), the proposed facility would include a water storage facility, as well as a dam and transmission line in the mountains above the Cleveland National Forest.
But a growing number of nearby residents who own land in the area vehemently oppose the project for a number of reasons. For one, some opponents are against the deforestation that the project would require and, second, the transmission line is a fire danger to nearby residents, according to Gene Frick, member of the Santa Ana Mountains Task Force and Friends of the Forest.
“We know that these things have the potential to cause fires,” says Frick, who says he has been battling this project at the grassroots level for just over a decade. “We have seen it happen in San Diego County. Here in this area if a fire starts where there [are] transmission lines, the firefighters can’t fight it unless the transmission line is turned off, which of course is never the case.”
Frick tells the Weekly that this project would destroy the natural landscape of the Santa Ana Mountains.
“If constructed, this entire thing is going to mess with the National Forest, and not in a good way,” Frick says. “Particularly, there is a part of the Cleveland National Forest that could be affected; if people use this [project] for infrastructure there will be no forest left, and many properties and the homeowners don’t want this thing along their homes.”
The hydroelectric project is not a new idea, Frick says. He tells the Weekly it was first conceived in the 1990s.
“The pump storage project was proposed in 1992,” Frick says. “Lake Elsinore is natural and makes sense since it has mountains right behind [it]; it’s basically gravity storage, meaning little costs.”
At first, the project was under the control of the Elsinore Valley Water District, but over the years that changed.
“They had a lot of problems getting started, then in ’97 [the district] decided [it] wanted to go in with a partner,” Frick says. “Then, in 2000, Enron came in to try to help and build the transmission line, but that never happened since in 2001 the whole company went under because of [then-Enron CEO and chairman] Ken Lay.”
But Frick is not the only one out there against this project.
The project’s initial permit was rejected by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in July. One of the reasons it was rejected was because Nevada Hydro and the Elsinore Valley Water District could not “agree on certain aspects,” according to The Press-Enterprise.
In yet another twist to this case, the water district recently announced that it would no longer work on the project partnered up with Nevada Hydro.
Frick says he is certain that Nevada Hydro has plans to start over on the project on its own.
“They know how much money is behind that power and electricity,” Frick says. “The whole thing goes beyond the environment. If people look into it, they will see that there is a bigger story behind them trying to get this pumping station and transmission line built. I am just thankful that local papers have been covering this for the past 15 years.”
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Comments
Just because it is a "green" source of energy is no reason to bulldoze pristine areas that we have tried so hard to maintain for the past 20 or so years. This same idiotic mentality has us putting solar panels on every square inch of the desert despite that fragile ecosystem. If you want to generate power, put solar panels on all of the 5 quadrillion ugly, cookie-cutter houses that have been built in the area in the past 40 or so years, not to mention the hundreds of square miles of warehouses that have gone up at the same time. Those areas are already ruined - let's not ruin more for the sake of "green" energy.
One can't include all the drawbacks to this project in a concise article. According to FERC's environmental impact report, the project will lose money, 120-124 MILLION dollars per year. That loss will be passed as an expense to the rate payer. I don't want a power plant that deep in the red responsible for maintaining a reservoir over my community. LEAPS will lose energy too. It is supposed return 80% of the energy it stores, and this is an untested number. There are better solutions for banking power: my employer, a local manufacturer, supplied components to a hydrogen storage plant, where excess energy from windmills splits water, stores the energy as hydrogen, and then burns the hydrogen to respond the peak loads. This technique can be tightly coupled to wind generation in the Coachella Pass and does not rely on difference between day and night energy prices.