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Toss a pebble right into a pond, and also you get a ripple. Dam up a river and also you get a lake. Take away the dam, and also you get a gush of downriver impacts to neighborhood, surroundings and our energy-making capability.
Customers Vitality’s latest announcement that it’s taking a look at 13 dams throughout Michigan reveals how ripples flip into floods — and the way when people tinker with nature we don’t all the time know the way our “nice concepts” maintain up over time.
A century in the past, when the dams had been constructed, they had been a lot ballyhooed advantages — low cost electrical energy, stunning lakes … what’s to not love?
A century later, we all know higher. Severing a river system in two — or three or 4, as was the case with our Boardman River — wreaks havoc on those that name the river, and its related watershed, residence.
The injury is so important, we’ve spent the final a number of a long time attempting to undo it, together with on our Boardman the place three out of 4 impoundments had been eliminated.
Customers Vitality now weighs whether or not to take away, exchange, relicense or promote, as 11 of 13 dams are up for federal relicensing in 2034.
Customers says hydroelectric energy isn’t environment friendly, has downsized its holdings in an period of waning hydroelectric cost-competitiveness and presently pays $12.6 million to take care of getting old infrastructure that fuels 1.2 % of Michigan’s vitality.
The Division of Pure Sources desires to take away dams, the place possible, and plenty of environmental teams again this up, as dams fragment rivers, warming water, harming fish. Filling and emptying reservoirs disrupt river species’ copy and progress cycles. Dams additionally create silt and sediment points, creating cycles of dredging and fish stocking to attempt to counteract the consequences of the dam — to not point out the destruction triggered to all walks of life when dams fail.
But when the dams go, quite a lot of communities are left holding the bag. The 86,000 individuals who come to recreate on the Alcona Dam’s reservoir every year, filling up the township’s 450-site shoreline campground, and frequenting close by canoe liveries and nook shops, eating places and motels. The 110,270 annual guests to Hodenpyl Dam Pond, who benefit from the wooded shoreline that features 320 campsites, 15 boat docks, 4 launches and waterfront houses. It’s proper that the inhabitants of those now-lakeshore communities fear about draining property values, and dried up tourism economies which are foundational to their cities. Who will benefit from the fish if there’s nobody there? they ask.
Fortunately, we will apply the teachings of the previous to the selections of the longer term. We will ask the questions that weren’t requested 100 years in the past, and look at the ripple results.
Like what if this doesn’t go as deliberate? We bear in mind our personal botched dam elimination with Brown Bridge. Can lake communities change into river communities? The place is the alternative vitality coming from, if the hydroelectric dams are decommissioned? Is Customers Vitality doing its job in creating dependable vitality for Michigan, or pushing creation downstream to less-regulated locations — leaving us susceptible to outages and value spikes?
2034 might look like a good distance off, but it surely’s a blink on the subject of massive infrastructure and authorities process. Now could be the time in contemplating Michigan’s dams to let nonetheless waters run deep.
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