For Star subscribers: It could cost $500 million to $3 billion to modify the 60-year-old Glen Canyon Dam to keep it generating electricity when Lake Powell falls below the level at which its turbines would need to be turned off.
Tony Davis The Glen Canyon Dam may get a partial but pricey makeover over the next decade so it can keep producing electricity when, and if, the water it stores falls below the level where it would have to turn off the juice.
Federal officials, utility officials and many scientists have been concerned for years that the river's continued drying conditions could drive Powell to the point where power could no longer be generated. That concern has grown in recent years, as Powell plunged roughly 100 feet just in the past three years from a July 2019 peak of 3,621 feet.
To prepare for the lake falling below 3,490, the bureau's study is looking at six alternatives requiring structural modifications of the 60-year-old dam.
"Absolutely there is a danger that the lake could fall below the 3,490 foot elevation" before dam modifications are online, Wegner said."Without a strict cutback on water allocations, the reservoir storage in both Powell and Mead will continue to fall," added Wegner, saying the 2 to 4 million acre feet in cuts ordered by the bureau last year should at least be instituted.
"How many billions of dollars are we going to spend, and how many hundreds of thousands of acre feet of water are going to be lost, over the course of years, to keep this dam functioning as if it were the early 1990s?" asked Kyle Roerink, a long-time critic of the dam who is executive director of the Great Basin Water Network, which is based in eastern Nevada at its border with Utah.
"Hydropower has characteristics other renewables don’t have, just by their nature," James said."Unfortunately, Mother Nature dictates what kind of fuel we have available. I think we have to go down the path and look at every option before doing anything." As for the modifications now under study, Wegner said he doubts they'll get built, due to their high cost. Nevertheless, he supports the bureau's study in principle, saying"the public and the power users need to do due-diligence on what options might be out there.
This year, bureau first disclosed the alternatives in an early February, invitation-only webinar presentation, to which numerous interest group representatives were invited, but not the news media. A bureau slide presentation from the webinar has been publicly circulated. But Interior Department officials declined further comment on the study in response to questions from the Star, other than to send a statement.
Those two proposals also resemble in many respects a plan that was informally laid out more than 25 years ago to environmentalists wanting to drain the reservoir by Floyd Dominy, a then-retired, since-deceased Reclamation commissioner who had overseen and was a cheerleader for the dam's original construction.
"These are proposals with one thing in mind: to keep power generation at Glen Canyon Dam, with an eye to also providing a safeguard, to insure water deliveries can be made to the Lower Basin in low level conditions," added Roerink."The majority of proposals put forth are not a pathway to a Glen Canon National Park."
SRP also cited a year-old study, commissioned by it and five other utilities and published by a San Francisco consultant, that concluded the Southwest faces" a significant and urgent need" for new resources due to growing energy demands and continued plans to retire coal-fired and other fossil fuel generated power plants.
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