October 20, 1977
Page 34636
DICKEY-LINCOLN IS BEST OF ENERGY ALTERNATIVES
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the Dickey-Lincoln School hydroelectric project on the St. John River in northern Maine is now entering the public comment phase of review, under the National Environmental Policy Act. A draft environmental impact statement was released by the Corps of Engineers on September 1 and the first public hearing is at Fort Kent, Maine on October 20.
The Dickey-Lincoln project was conceived as part of a package of proposals developed early in the 1960's by Secretary of Interior Udall to produce a plan for the balanced use of the resources of northern and eastern Maine. The early concepts for utilizing those resources included a national park, preservation of the Allagash River as the single most important white water canoeing stream in the East and development of the energy resources of the free flowing waters of the St. John River and the tidal power of Passamaquoddy Bay.
My concern then and now was that these tremendous resources be developed in a balanced way that would preserve environmental and recreational values but also provide benefits to the people in some of the most depressed parts of Maine and to the economy of our State and region. We sought to preserve the most valued canoeing river on the east coast and after years of work we achieved that objective through the legislature of Maine. When we sought to develop energy resources we found that the Passamaquoddy tidal power project could not, at that time, yield adequate annual benefits to justify the cost of construction. I challenge whether that will be the final word on "Quoddy," but it was the result achieved in the 1960's when oil fired generators looked cheap and nuclear power looked promising. It may still be the result today, although we all have to recognize that ultimately the equation will swing in favor of renewable energy sources such as tidal power and hydro power.
When we examined the upper St. John River as a source of hydroelectric power we found that the river could serve to fill gaps created by the tidal cycle at the Passamaquoddy project. We also found that the project on its own was the most promising hydro site in the Northeast and held the promise of returns far exceeding the cost of investment.
The first site considered for hydro power on the St. John was below the confluence of the Allagash River and the St. John River. The project would have produced even more power at that site but because of our interest in preserving white water canoeing on the Allagash the project was redesigned as a two dam project with the larger dam and impoundment above the confluence at Dickey, Maine, and smaller dam at Lincoln School. The potential power production was reduced in a tradeoff with recreational and environmental interests to achieve balanced development of the resources. White water canoeing on the Allagash was preserved by that early compromise which is so easily ignored today by those whose interests were served.
We are now 12 years beyond the time when Dickey-Lincoln was first authorized through the combined efforts of Senator Margaret Chase Smith and myself in the Senate and Maine Congressman Stanley Tupper and then Congressman BILL HATHAWAY in the House. The
project encountered heavy resistance from the private power interests in the Northeast in the years immediately after authorization. Progress toward construction was blocked. The Arab oil embargo and the sudden confrontation with the energy crises permitted us to renew congressional support for the project and appropriate funds to complete planning and to compile the environmental impact statement required under NEPA.
We are now approaching the final phase of a long environmental review of the Dickey-Lincoln project. And we are faced again with some difficult balancing judgments. It is absolutely critical that we make those judgments carefully with a full understanding of the real tradeoffs involved. I am deeply concerned that in some quarters judgment has been reached without adequate attention to the real choices before us.
Prof. Richard Hill of the University of Maine in Orono has been deeply involved in energy issues in Maine and closely involved in searching for renewable alternate energy sources. He is a member of Governor Longley's Advisory Committee on Dickey-Lincoln and as such he has not yet reached a final decision on the project. Professor Hill recently spoke out, however, to express his great dismay with the approach critics of Dickey-Lincoln have taken and particularly the press coverage of the draft environmental impact statement.
I share his frustration. The decisions we must make about the Dickey-Lincoln project and our energy future are too important to be made in the kind of atmosphere he describes. We must realize that our choice is not whether we need new power generating facilities. Our choice is which to build. I continue to believe the Dickey-Lincoln project meets the test of balance between development and the preservation of environmental values. And I believe it is economically and environmentally preferable to alternative generating facilities.
I ask unanimous consent that the transcript of an interview of Professor Hill by Bill Legere on the Maine Public Broadcasting Network's "Maine Things Considered" be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the interview was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
TRANSCRIPT
LEGERE. Over the past few months and especially since the release of the Environmental Impact Statement by the Army Corps of Engineers there has been an emotional consensus of opinion against the construction of Dickey Lincoln Hydroelectric project in Northern Maine. Today we talked with regular contributor Richard Hill, who incidentally is a member of the governor's advisory committee on that project, who had some thoughts about what he read in the draft Environmental Impact Statement and thoughts about the project in general.
Q. Does the EIS in your mind present an accurate picture of what will happen and does the discussion that has ensued reflect accurately what is in the EIS?
A. Now that this emerging consensus you referred to is here, I sort of had the feeling that all of us are like little children living on a diet of candy and we have now been told by our mothers that we don't have to go to the dentist.
Bill, I'm very upset by the quality of the discussion associated with the decision either to build or not build Dickey. The press coverage of the EIS has been, I think, very myopic. It's picked, to me, the very small issues and played them up because these are the issues I guess that they feel the general public can understand.
Nowhere do I see, for example, an indication of where the millions of barrels of oil are going to come from that are going to replace the energy that Dickey will not produce starting, say, in 1986. The Army Corps of Engineers looked at some 24 different alternatives for generating electricity on a face-to-face with Dickey and the only alternative they could come down on was simple cycle gas turbines burning No. 2 fuel oil. And as we know now, No. 2 fuel oil, the material we burn in home furnaces, is getting more expensive and harder to come by. And what is going to be the cost of availability of this fuel in 1986?
These issues simply weren't addressed. All that were addressed was simply what happens to the deer yards and what happens to a small number of people which, of course, should not be a matter of indifference. But the real trade offs, in my estimation, were not examined. There is another thing about this, Bill, I think is terribly important. And here, I want to say very emphatically that after Brooks Hamilton's presentations you always disavow the station's responsibility to what Brooks says and here, I think, I demand equal treatment that you disavow this. All right, this is my own opinion and not that of the station.
The one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that Dickey is a bad deal because it doesn't do much for Maine. The fact that it does very little for Maine is proof. There will be some inflation free, relatively low cost energy available to other interested counties from the Dickey School Dam. Therewill be some decent power available for the rest of the state, but it is true that the bulk of the energy would go to Massachusetts and to Southern New England. This as a reason for not doing it is, to me, the reason for doing it.
The United States is going to become wracked with a regional tension over energy. Massachusetts, for example, has 700 million tons of hard coal in the socalled Narragansett Basin. The governor of Louisiana has asked his chief of energy office to examine the constitutionality of the holding of petroleum products within Louisiana and not shipping them out of the state so he can protect jobs in Louisiana.
And here we're doing the same thing. We're saying that we've got a resource that is endless; that is nonpolluting; that is renewable, etc., but is going to mess up a little bit of our way of life and frankly, "no thank you we're not interested".
And also there is considerable discussion, Bill, of our participation in a power system that might be developed in the Bay of Fundy. Well, of course, there are 350 million kilowatt hours of energy available to the Canadians on the downriver St. John if we should pond the headwaters of Dickey. That energy is not now available to the Canadians because of the rapid fluctuations in flow in the St. John.
Bill I have not yet really come to a conculsion as I'm going to have to as a member of the Governor's Committee as to whether the St. John Dam should be built or not built but the one thing that does disturb me is I don't think the issues are being looked at and I don't think the alternatives are being properly considered.
Q. The environmental groups say that the Army Corp of Engineers haven't considered the alternatives either. They haven't presented a detailed enough analysis of what the alternative to building are.
A. Well I have the EIS in front of me here. They list 24 alternatives which they analyze in some detail and show why each one has been rejected. Well one of the alternatives they looked at was conventional pumped hydro. Here a reservoir is constructed on top of a mountain and a lower reservoir is constructed in the valley and during periods of low energy use a pump is used to raise the water from low elevation to high elevation. Then when the peak power demand is upon us we reverse the pump and make it a turbine and get the energy back.
These things can be highly insulting to the environment. These things are very expensive of energy because you must build big base loading machines in order to supply the energy for the pumped hydro. Sites are quite difficult to come by — that have the capacity — and by and large the Army Corps ofEngineers did not see fit to consider a conventional pumped hydro as an alternative to Dickey.
Although the proposal for Dickey would include some pump capacity, the Army Corps contractor also looked at lead acid storage batteries as a possibility for storing offpeak energy to be used again during peak periods. This was analyzed in some detail and rejected. They looked at flywheels, at superconducting magnets, at thermal storage, at underground compressed air storage, and this is one, Bill frankly, I never heard of. The idea is that during the times of low power consumption we find an abandoned mine or a big hole in the ground and simply wrap it full of compressed air then when the peak demand comes you open the hole and let the compressed gas come back through a turbine and get the energy back that way.
They also looked at underground pumped hydro to see whether or not that system might be applied. Well it goes on for pages and pages and the whole EIS is about 35,000 pages of documentation.
I read quite carefully the areas dealing with power alternatives and I, of course, haven't plowed through all of the 35,000 pages. But I'm convinced the Army Corps has done a proper job in saying that at the moment there seems to be no alternative to Dickey except simple cycle gas turbines. Oh yes, they did look, of course at wind energy and solar voltage, solar thermal, etc. And for good and sound technical reasons these were rejected as alternatives.
Now there is one big alternative that they did talk about which may be kind of a sleeper in the arrangement. And that is the management of load, having some system whereby we simply iron out our electric power consumption of the peak requirements.
This can be done in a variety of ways. For example, we can do it with sheer price. We can have electric meters with 2 dials on them and during periods of peak consumption the electric power can be registered on a second set of dials and the power priced on that dial would be 5 or 6 times as high as the energy price at the hours that are not on peak consumption.
There is a way of relaying power. For example, you can have a little black box in your house that when you cut on the dishwasher the hot water heater automatically cuts off so that you never draw more than 3 or 4 kilowatts in a home at a given time so you can level load that way.
But the potential for leveling begins to interfere with what we refer to as our life style so on one hand we say a few people are going to be denied the right to, say, canoe on the St. John if we build the Dickey Station. But if we don't build the Dickey Station it's going to have to be some fairly substantial changes in the way we consume electricity in order to avoid peak power consumption.
Now there is one alternative that occurs to me that was not written on the EIS and has not been discussed in any of the alternatives and that is the impact of the possible electric automobile on the way we consume electricity. For example, if in the year 2000 we have a significant number of electric power vehicles and each family has two sets of batteries; one on charge and one in the vehicle it would be a very simple technological problem to arrange the charging of the used batteries so that the charging coincided with the off peak power demands so that during the night, from 10:00 in the morning until noon, those periods when energy was not being demanded by industry, by homeowners, etc. — the power company would then dump energy into storage batteries for vehicles. This may result in load leveling that peak load requirements of a facility like Dickey would not be required.
But unless we foresee some tremendous load leveling devices like the extensive use of electric vehicles or the extensive interference of the way we use electricity by metering we'll always be faced with peak load requirements. And according to the Army Corps of Engineers it's Dickey or it's simple cycle gas turbines.
Q. The Corps also said that there was hydro potential in other areas of Northern England that have not been developed yet, and there is even a place in Maine where there might be a potential for hydro stations.
A. Yes, there are several hydro stations in Maine that add up to as many megawatts as there are at Dickey and these are already catalogued by the FPC and listed in the EIS. Now there is one at Pierce Pond on the Kennebec in Maine which is 220 megawatts which would give us 460 gigawatts a year. One at Pamcook on the Androscoggin River in New Hampshire with 300 megawatts; one at Williamsville on West River in Vermont — it's 145 megawatts; there are 2 developments on Cold Stream on the Kennebec River in Maine. All of these add up to be a capability greater than Dickey. I haven't looked at any of these in detail, Bill, but I suspect the environmental impact of building these stations in terms of the communities that would be flooded and the deer yards destroyed, etc. is probably greater than the proposed Dickey power site.
There are a lot of very small hydro sites that could be developed in Maine but the trouble with these is they are not reliable. That is, the anchor ice in the Fall will make them non-operating, low water in August will reduce the power available. The spring runoff will raise the tail water so that they are not useful. So small hydro sites that are often talked about as an alternative are simply fuel saving devices; that is, when they run they will save fuel but they won't reduce the need for capacity. We will have to build stations and have them available so that when small hydro sites are not available we will have some power available in the grid somewhere.