“We hope to have a permit in our hands inside 15 months,” Tri-County General Manager Mike Berry said at Monday’s Ouray Board of County Commissioner meeting in Ouray. “At that point in time, we will start designing this project.”
According to Berry, two weeks ago the federal Bureau of Reclamation issued a federal register announcement calling for applications, which are due by December. The process is open to anyone and is intended to be an open and competitive process. After the deadline, it could take the Bureau of Reclamation anywhere from three to six months to select an applicant and then complete negotiations for a permit.
“The size of the plant will be somewhere between 1.8 and 2.5 megawatts, depending on how we can configure the construction of it,” Berry said, adding that the cost of the hydroelectric plant could be anywhere from $9 million to $15 million. “We are still talking about exactly what we [would] build.”
If Tri-County is ultimately awarded a permit, Berry said it is the utility’s intent to run the plant on historical flows to “minimize the environmental impact” and to continue to maintain the Uncompahgre River’s water flow in similar form as it has in the past.
“We are primarily responsible to provide water and irrigation down stream,” Tri-County Boardmember Frank Starr said. “So we will not alter the release of water in order to create power.”
Berry said Tri-State will probably own the plant but that could depend on how the power-purchase contracts are finally worked out.
“We do have a partner out there,” Berry said. “We have been working with the City of Aspen since 2002 to develop a project and purchase the power. They are still interested but we have not negotiated a power-purchase contract with them.”
While the application selection process will be open and competitive, Berry believes Tri-County has an edge because it owns the water rights in the reservoir and it has the dam operation maintenance and repayment contract.
“The bottom line is we have an edge on this one,” Berry said. “There is a high likelihood that it will be Tri-County.”
It has been a long time coming to reach the point where applications for a hydroelectric facility are being taken. During the construction of the dam in 1984 (it was completed in 1987), Tri-County commissioned a study to look at the possibility of hydropower at the dam. At the time, the study didn’t convince the Bureau of Reclamation that it should install a facility at the site.
“It was an economic decision, is my guess,” Berry said.
The project was revisited in 1996, but it was once again determined that it was not the best time to build a hydropower plant.
“That was because power was under-priced and the infrastructure couldn’t be built to produce electricity for more than somebody would pay us for it,” he said.
Berry said the political environment shifted in 2002, when the green power industry began taking hold. It was decided then that the time was right to once again pursue the construction of a hydropower plant at the dam.
And again, according to Berry, the Bureau of Reclamation put up another roadblock because it wanted to study and address some safety concerns at the dam. First, the agency was concerned about a “paleo-hydraulic” issue that focused on evidence that the Uncompahgre River had ancient historic river flows greater than the dam’s outlet and emergency spillway could handle.
“They just recently concluded and dismissed the hydraulic study because they, themselves, decided it was on the edge of absurd,” Berry said.
Another safety concern, Berry said, was related to the seismic safety of the dam. Apparently the Bureau of Reclamation had had some experience with foundations of dams failing due to seismic activity, and the dam’s location on two active faults caused concern.
“At that point in 2003, they started poking holes in the foundation of the dam,” he said. According to a recently release report on the seismic issue, “We have a risk downstream that we need to minimize.”
With those findings, the agency commissioned a second-phase of the seismic study – a corrective action study – that will help the agency decide what it plans to do about the issue.
With that study ongoing, it was just two weeks ago that the Bureau of Reclamation decided to seek applicants for a hydroelectric facility at the dam. It remains unclear when the results of the second seismic study will be released.
As for the application to build the hydroelectric facility, “It’s going to start to come together a little clearer in the next 12 months,” said Berry.
Post a Comment