Document text
By Mark Freeman Mail Tribune October 18. 2014 12:01AM Applegate Dam hydroelectric project dead in water The federal government has pulled the plug on a utility company's more than decade-long effort to build a hydropower generation system at Applegate Dam, saying the company's work window has expired. The license holder, AG Hydro, failed to begin construction of the 10-megawatt generator at the southwestern Jackson County dam by the December 2013 deadline, despite receiving a two-year extension on its Federal Energy Regulatory Commission license granted in 2009. The commission on Wednesday formally ordered the license terminated on Nov. 17. AG Hydro took over the project from its originating company, Symbiotics LLC, four years ago. AG Hydro and Symbiotics are subsidiaries of Toronto-based Riverbank Power Corp., which builds and operates hydroelectric facilities in North America and South America, records show. The company has 30 days to appeal the decision. AG Hydro's office in rural Jacksonville is closed and its telephone disconnected. Initial plans called for installing a steel liner in the dam's outlet tunnel, two large vertical gates along with various penstocks, turbines and generators, according to FERC. In the four years that the company had the construction contract, the only work done at the 242-foot-tall dam was placement of water-monitoring gauges and a solar panel to operate them, said David Tucker, assistant operations manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which built and operates the dam. "Certainly nothing ever got installed out there, other than that small solar panel," Tucker said. The pulled license means no construction of 15 miles of buried 69-kilovolt transmission lines from the dam to Ruch, over which a bicycle path was planned. It also suspends, for now, plans to reintroduce wild steelhead to Applegate River tributaries upstream of the dam because the licensee was to fund it as part of the agreement. Reaction to the FERC decision was somewhat mixed in the Applegate Valley, where some residents and the utility clashed over planned construction of aerial transmission lines until Symbiotics agreed to bury them along Upper Applegate and Hamilton roads. "I guess I'm a little ambivalent," said Brian Della Santina, one of the landowners who opposed the aerial lines as potentially dangerous eyesores. Della Santina said he likes the use of "clean power" but will not miss the planned construction zones along Upper Applegate Road as outlined in the plans. "I guess we don't have to worry about that now," Della Santina said. After seven years of studies, Symbiotics planned to complete the estimated $19 million project in time to begin delivering up to 10 megawatts of electricity as early as 2013. A megawatt is roughly enough electricity to operate 1,000 homes or small businesses simultaneously. A similar facility at Lost Creek Dam generates up to 49 megawatts of power. Not only did the company not commence with construction on time, it failed to file required pre-construction plans for review, and at one time last year filed blueprints with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers written in Chinese without translation, according to the FERC order. The company also received a permit on March 31, 2011, from Jackson County for the transmission line work, and that permit expired June 20, 2012, said John Vial, the county's roads and parks manager. "They didn't do anything, and we haven't heard a word from them," Vial said. The project included money to reintroduce winter steelhead to about 35 miles of spawning tributaries upstream of Applegate Lake that were lost to native steelhead when the dam was built in 1980. The lost FERC license, and the money to trap adult steelhead at the dam's base and truck them over the structure for release in the reservoir, means that program is on hold but not dead, said Russ Stauff, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife's Rogue Watershed manager. "This removes the immediate opportunity for us," Stauff said. Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 541-776-4470 or [email protected]. Follow him at www.twitter.com/MTwriterFreeman. http://www.mailtribune.com/article/20141018/NEWS/141019660 © 2015 Copyright © 1995-2011 Crain Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms of Use Privacy Statement -->