Oregon’s green energy “crisis”

Oregon was initially doused with green energy tax credits to help bolster the economy while making it more green, but in recent months lawmakers have scaled back both energy credits and what it takes to acquire them. As part of the American Recovery Act, the options for Oregon’s green energy revolution are varied and complex. Green tax credits as an effective way to kickstart Oregon’s economy are being rethought as the number of new jobs being created is low compared to month-by-month job losses.

The Leaburg power substation, which acts a buffer, downstream from the Leaburg Hydroelectric plant, to the Eugene-Springfield area.

Green Tax credits have been used for a variety of things and not in the way that they were intended for our economy, according to Jeff Nelson, director of the Springfield Utilities Board (SUB) who says, “You’re probably creating local jobs if the project moves forward, just for the operation of the project.” According to Nelson, many companies are receiving the green energy tax credits to buy solar panels— but purchasing them from overseas, instead of locally. And while the credits have lured some companies to Oregon, there has been little in the way of proposed development here in Eugene. Uni-Chem, a Korean company, began making plans to utilize the defunct Hynix semi-conductor plant in West Eugene, but interest has waned. Other companies who are utilizing the credits are focusing on creating small-scale solar projects, and Peg Boulay, Co-Director of Environmental Sciences at the University of Oregon, notes that the majority of development will be in residential and business districts.

The potential for these projects to feed back into the grid is there as Oregon provides a discount for users who produce some of their own electricity, but it isn’t enough to offset the cost for most.

The issue that comes into question is the feasibility of Oregon for all of these projects. “Wind is not Oregon’s strongest point, but the [solar] profile in Oregon is not as bad as you might think,” says Nelson. Currently the majority of development for wind is in the Columbia River Gorge which is “gusty” as described by Boulay, but has the benefit of the Dams on the river to help mitigate energy overflow. When it’s very windy, the dam can shut down and act as a buffer for all of the excess energy that’s being produced. When the wind is negligible, the dam can go into full production to pick up the slack. As compared to the Midwest which has sustained winds a majority of the time, projects away from dams and other mitigating power sources are problematic. Nelson, contends, however; that having too much power is worse than not enough.

“Solar projects have incredible environmental damage because basically it’s a no-grow zone, a nuke zone, there’s nothing there other than solar panels,” says Boulay. Solar impacts our environment by taking up large tracts of real estate in which nothing else can grow. The threat to flora and fauna in a region is another factor, according to Boulay.

The same can be said for wind turbines, which require a large chunk of earth to be moved for a cement anchor to be placed.

Both forms of green energy generation require a lot of infrastructure in terms of control buildings and providing road access to each solar array and turbine— a lot of human activity is present in areas that were previously left undisturbed.

Anything is better than our current heavy reliance on hydroelectric energy, which is where 80% of the energy for the town of Springfield, Oregon comes from, according to Nelson. Older dams without fish ladders have an extremely high mortality rate of salmon, a precious food resource. Dams also stop the flow of silt downstream preventing the enriching of the soil near rivers as a negative coincidental impact on the bounty for local farmers.

In terms of the effectiveness of green energy tax credits, it’s complex, Nelson describes it as a “fragmented process” that needs to be taken as an aggregate.

Oregon reaching 25% reliance on green energy by 2025 is the goal the state has set for itself, but Oregon is getting a slow start on it.

As far as recovering Oregon’s economy goes, the expectation is to have 300,000 jobs created by 2025— Oregon has lost around 148,600 jobs to date due to the current recession.

In terms of training, there is a shortage: There are only two green energy worker training facilities in Oregon. A majority of the new green energy workers will come from out of state as it is not possible to churn out the numbers needed to fill jobs by 2025.

Oregon is trying hard to balance being green while trying to provide jobs. Oregon has a golden opportunity here to become a green energy leader in the nation and a blueprint for what to do — and not to do — in terms of making it happen. Oregon’s reliance on hydroelectricity has dramatic environmental impacts, but wind and solar will have impacts as well, just of a different kind. All things considered there is no one solution, and only through an amalgamation of solutions will an answer be found— figuring out the right combination of solutions is the biggest challenge.

Interviewee Profile: Peg Boulay

Choosing Peg Boulay as an interviewee to ask about the ecological effects of green energy was a no-brainer: The projects she leads specifically collect ecological and scientific data, with projects in the past relating specifically to my topic.

Boulay is Co-Director of the environmental leadership program, which is a community service learning program that helps students get professional experience while working with businesses. She also advises environmental-science majors. She works with another track of projects, that educates K-12 students.

That’s the boring part: Now let’s get down to the science!

For the first type of renewable energy, we talked about solar paneling systems and the vast amounts of real estate they take up, as well as the ecological damage they can cause, she says: “…we’ll probably never have super-large scale solar power.” She then talked about solar projects in the southwest that can take up to a square mile and commented: “Solar projects…have incredible environmental damage because basically it’s a no-grow zone, a nuke zone, there’s nothing there other than solar panels and they’re very large. So, a lot of impact at that one site and then transmission lines have impact.”

She added that our best bet in Oregon is on a smaller scale where individual buildings can feed energy back into the grid with no additional environmental impact: The buildings have already been built.

We moved on to wind power: “The tax credits have significantly driven development of wind power and in fact, wind power is not economically feasible without tax credits.” Our wind power is more “gusty” and isn’t sustained, so it provides a challenge and makes it less desirable than in the southwest. Despite that, the Columbia River Gorge and Steens Mountain have seen exponential growth of wind power in the last five years. Each turbine has an impact of about a 100′ radius due to a concrete block used to anchor them down. When coupled with a grid of turbines, roads, and development around it. On an environmental level, wind power has an unintended environmental effect: It harms flight-based fauna that may be sucked into the turbines and killed, specifically bats when they hit a low pressure spot in the vortex which they are drawn to. “Literally, their lungs implode and they explode from the inside out from the pressure change,” she adds as a macabre description. The other is that it affects certain types of grasses from growing.

Still and all, she reserves a certain awe for wind turbines as she describes being inside one of the towers: “Turbines are amazing if they are the size of a football field…each blade is about the size of a gray whale…”

Interviewee Profile: Jeff Nelson

At 15 years of experience with the Springfield Utilities Board(SUB) with additional job experience at Emerald People’s Utility District, the Director of Resource Management for SUB has only one anomaly to his profile: He lives in Eugene.
When asked if that’s a conflict of interests when he pays his utility bill every month, he laughs and says that it allows him to track competing utilities and to compare trends between them. He’s just another example of the commuter culture that has erupted between Eugene and Springfield, further blending the two cities together.
When asked about federal green energy tax credits he happily admits to doing his part to stay green, explaining about his new ductless water pump and the state tax credit he also received. It’s a trend he’s starting to see more and more of: residential customers taking advantage of green energy tax credits on a personal level to save a buck.
Before I can stop him, he’s already begun to discuss wind energy and potential green development here in Oregon. The “green power movement” as he describes it is a “fragmented process” and is lacking a cohesive policy. Due to this he worries about the competitiveness of the local production of wind turbines, “there’s no perfect solution that I’ve seen.” He describes competition overseas and how part of the tax credits are to create jobs, however; there are people who are going to get the tax credits and still buy their turbines overseas, he says that “…you’re probably creating local jobs if the project moves forward, just for the operation of the project.” Then he points out that the majority of federal dollars are going overseas: “Does it create jobs in the green industry? Yes. Does it always create jobs in the U.S.? No.”
As the manager of SUB’s power portfolio, he is no stranger to hydroelectric power: SUB has preference rights to the Bonneville hydroelectric plant on the Columbia river, where it receives all of its power: 80% of it is from the damn, the rest is composed of wind and nuclear energy.

He’s also no stranger to the concept of hydroelectric power’s adverse effects on the environment, there are four parts to this puzzle involving salmon, he explains: “Hatcheries, Harvest, Hydroelectric Generation, and habitat.” Habitat refers to the in-river environment, but also the ocean conditions. Hydroelectic depends on whether or not the dam was built with fish ladders in mind, if not, the mortality rate of salmon will be high. Harvest depends on how many are caught at sea, and hatcheries dictate how many new salmon there are per generation.

He sees our future as operating with a high dependency on hydroelectricity, with evermore respect to salmon, and the goal of reaching 30% renewable energy sans-hydroelectricity will depend solely on how much Oregon grows, but he does see Oregon, if the “fragmented process” becomes more cohesive, as having solar energy “…in the mix.”
“Wind is not Oregon’s strongest point…but the [solar] profile in Oregon is not as bad as you might think.”