Giving Compass' Take:
- Peter Fairley, at Grist, describes how an electricity grid on the Columbia River -- a model for clean energy in theory -- can have a much more disruptive impact on surrounding communities.
- If clean energy efforts neglect environmental justice, can we truly consider them sustainability practices? What can you do to educate yourself fully on the impact of 'clean' energy strategies before lending your support?
- Learn about sustainability strategies led by and for North American indigenous communities.
What is Giving Compass?
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Can slicing a 100-mile-long trench into the bed of the Columbia River — the iconic giant whose flow binds British Columbia, Washington and Oregon — be good for the environment? The answer is a big yes, says a team of energy developers that proposes submerging power cables in the riverbed.
The developers say the submerged cables could deliver “clean” energy that will be crucial for getting the most densely developed areas of Cascadia off fossil fuels.
The cables also would intersect and plug into the monster transmission lines at the Bonneville Power Administration’s Big Eddy substation, drawing cheaper solar power from the Southwest, steadier wind power from Montana and Wyoming, and reliable backup power from British Columbia’s supersized hydropower reservoirs.
To Elaine Harvey, however, the Cascade Renewable Transmission pitch sounds like one more industrial enterprise in a seemingly endless stream of projects that have harmed her people. Such ventures have decimated the Columbia River’s fisheries and fenced off and degraded the shrub-steppe grasslands that the Yakama and other tribes and bands ceded in an 1855 treaty with the United States.
A member of the Yakama’s Kah-milt-pa, or Rock Creek, Band, Harvey lives with the legacy of dams, aluminum production, wind farms, expanding solar plants and other development. Each has infringed her people’s right to pursue their traditional practices.
As Harvey and Kah-milt-pa Chief Bronsco Jim Jr. wrote earlier this year in the quarterly newsletter of Columbia Riverkeeper: “Ours is a living culture, and we are being cheated by progress. An unrelenting cultural extinction in the name of energy development.”
To explore the role of power transmission and the tradeoffs involved in grid expansion, InvestigateWest spoke with Kupersmith, Harvey and Lauren Goldberg, the legal and program director for Columbia Riverkeeper.
Read the full article about electricity grids on the Columbia River by Peter Fairley at Grist.