Our rivers cannot afford any additional burdens. Trying to hop aboard the energy crisis bandwagon, a pair of recently introduced legislative measures in California propose selling billions of dollars in bonds to fund a new wave of dam building. Below is background on why dams are not the answer. The are many reasons why we cannot solve the energy crisis by building more dams, including the basic fact that the best and most cost-effective dam sites in California have already been used. The remaining sites tend to be the least accessible and the most costly to develop.
Hydroelectric generation is also at the mercy of the weather and climate changes.
During times of drought, hydro dams can produce comparatively little power, while significantly increasing the damaged caused to the environment by further draining rivers already suffering from low flows. Certainly we need to increase the amount of energy available now. Large hydroelectric dams can take as long as 10-15 years to construct and can require a decade or more of hydropower generation to make up for the energy used for construction. Passage of these bills will not assist us with our problems today. Instead of destructive new dams, the solution to the energy crisis is to create a plan for energy conservation, production, and sales that will carry Californians into the next few decades.