An Energy Policy Runs Through It
Hydropower projects on Mon River directly in the flow with our
future
Morgantown Dominion Post
- EDITORIAL
23 November 2011
None of us knows the length of our days. However, they are finite,
unlike a river’s. Sure, we can measure a river’s length and
determine its headwaters and mouth. But little, aside from dams
and droughts, ever slows its advance. Rivers like the Monongahela
will be streaming inside their banks — and occasionally over them
— for eons. Last week, we learned a Massachusetts-based company is
sizing up the Monongahela River’s constant flow for two possible
hydropower projects at dams in Monongalia County. In recent years
energy policy has become a topic, like politics and religion, that
can make many people uncomfortable. Our position is simple: We do
not favor gutting our state’s economy and jobs by curbing coal and
gas revenues. And we also unequivocally favor exploration of
alternative energy sources and compliance with environmental
regulations. As we have said before, the economy and the
environment are inspeparable. You cannot maintain one without the
other. Plans to build hydropower projects at the Morgantown Lock
and Dam and the Opekiska Lock and Dam should be fully explored
with not only an eye to additional jobs and tax revenues, but to
its impact on the river and our environment. There’s no price on
this river’s flow, like the sun; just on the equipment that
captures, saves and transmits its power. Those are fixed costs.
Businesses likes few things more than predictability. At the very
same time, initiatives, like those at Morgantown’s National Energy
Technology Laboratory (NETL) should also continue on clean coal.
There are a centuries of coal reserves and other fossil energy
below our feet. We’re confident labs like NETL and others can do
the research to make the use of coal more cost effective and
cleaner. We see an increasingly bigger market for clean energy
technology in the future, including hydropower and clean coal.
Moving toward healthy, more sustainable sources of energy should
be encouraged. If we can couple cleaner fossil fuels and
alternative energy sources, then we might not always be caught up
in this trap of thinking we must choose between jobs or the
environment. There are skeptics who neither believe in clean coal
or natural gas, or hydropower and arrays of solar panels. But we
have to stop thinking only in the short term. There is life beyond
any one of these sources of energy, but in our estimation the life
of most of them can go on — like a river — forever.