Power, Pike, and Dams
Power, Pike, and Dams
Impacts of Quebec Hydroelectricity Development
“If you set fire to the land, the land remains, and the life returns to it. If you set fire to a piece of paper, like a dollar bill, it burns away to the end, and nothing is left.”
- Charlie Gunner, Cree hunter, Mistassini (Taken from “Strangers Devour the Land” by Boyce Richardson)
Great Whale River (In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Whale_River)
Power, Pike, and Dams
Hello Next Adventure Newsletter subscribers! In this edition, I discuss hydroelectricity in Quebec and the northeastern US. The newsletter is a bit longer than usual, but this is a complicated, yet fascinating topic.
Looking for new places to fish…
In the Northwoods Sporting Journal, I've written about fishing for one of my favorite freshwater species, the Northern Pike. My search for Northern Pike fishing grounds has drawn my attention to the massive reservoirs created by HydroQuebec. I’ve long been fascinated by the scale of Quebec’s hydroelectric facilities, which encompass multiple projects built over many decades to harness the power in Quebec's (formerly) wild rivers. One project that received a lot of publicity when I was growing up in Vermont was the second phase of the James Bay Project, which sought to dam the Great Whale River, which faced significant and ultimately successful opposition by the Cree, Inuit, and environmental groups.
La Grande Complex
The La Grande Complex is one part of the James Bay Project, and its namesake is the La Grande River. The La Grande complex contains facilities that harness the power of the La Grande River; dams, dikes, spillways, and underground generating stations produce electricity from water that flows east to west, downhill, into James Bay.
Map of the route of La Grande River
Since Vermont buys electricity from HydroQuebec, like most people in the Northeast, as a consumer, I’m implicated in this mode of electricity production.
Robert Bourassa Generating Facility
The Robert Bourassa generating facility (formerly named LaGrande 2) is the site of a 9,300-foot embankment dam built between 1973 and 1981. It is one of the multiple dams created as part of the La Grande Complex. The water body created behind this dam, the Robert Bourassa Reservoir, flooded approximately 1,000 square miles.
Giant Steps Spillway of the Robert Bourassa facility. Each step is the equivalent of two football fields.
The LaGrande Complex is enormous - it has a footprint of 67,953 square miles (an area roughly the size of Missouri).
The dark blue points are generating facilities. Some rivers, such as the Eastmain River (to the south), were redirected to the La Grande generating facilities. The water of the Eastmain River is now a trickle compared to before the diversion.
These facilities' construction required creating the Billy-Diamond Highway (formerly the James Bay Road): a paved year-round 388-mile road between Matagami and Radisson built between 1971-74. Since then, additional roads have branched out from this primary road, mainly to service dam infrastructure and Cree villages.
The Billy Diamond Highway in blue highlight.
Supply & Demand: Past, present and future
The electrical grid established an inextricable link between Quebec and the Northeastern USA over fifty years ago—and anticipated demand (and commitments) from the northeast US justified hydro development in Quebec. Commitments to purchase electricity by New England and New York during the early years of the James Bay Project continue to implicate northeast US states in this remote region’s future.
Today, electricity from HydroQuebec’s facilities accounts for nearly 14% of New England’s electricity, but this varies by state. For example, Vermont obtains 46% of its electricity from Quebec’s hydroelectric facilities. In 2022, HydroQuebec exported 16% of its electricity, most of it to New England.
Source: 2022 HydroQuebec Annual Report
Feed the Beast
In the next decade, the New England Independent System Operator (NE ISO) expects overall electricity demands to increase by 2%, mainly due to the push to replace fossil fuel sources with electricity consumption in transportation and home heating. State and federal governments promote this shift through subsidies and incentives. The messaging around this transition implies increasingly environmentalist-minded public and body politic expectations that solar and wind installations make up a greater percentage of the electricity generated within the region while remaining interestingly quiet about large-scale hydro.
Image taken from the NE ISO. Most “Net Imports” in the graphic above is hydroelectricity from QC.
While electricity generation within New England will increase due to renewable sources (namely wind, solar, and battery storage), the data makes it clear that nuclear, natural gas, and hydro will also remain critical sources.
Source: NE ISO New England’s Changing Resource Mix and Planning for the Future Grid. “Imports” in the chart above represents hydroelectricity from Quebec.
Unintended consequences: Pike & Mercury
One of the results of flooding in the La Grande River area is that the fish species inhabiting the lakes and reservoirs now contain elevated levels of mercury because smaller species (bacteria, zooplankton, fish) consume the newly available material of flooded areas released in soil and plant matter. The neurotoxin methylmercury is found in these waterways, with reservoirs yielding up to a 10-fold increase above normal levels, thereby increasing harmful human exposure, especially for subsistence communities that may rely on the animals inhabiting these areas.
What's next?
To some, these facilities represent a sunk cost; the damage done, so why not use them? Why resist further harnessing this resource, such as those efforts that stopped the Northen Pass or more recent initiatives? Some opponents of these projects cite transmission lines' negative aesthetic and economic impact. But are they OK with the hidden ecological, social, and cultural destruction? Other opponents are genuinely alarmed by importing HydroQuebec’s electricity because of its destructive legacy.
Given that the NE ISO predicts the region’s electricity consumption will increase rather than decrease, where does that leave us? Reducing imports from HydroQuebec would mean replacing it with another source, such as nuclear or natural gas. What would happen to Quebec's massive generating facilities? Decommission them and let the rivers flow where they once did?
My gaze is drawn to an area north of the La Grande Complex when I look at a map of Quebec. Here, the Great Whale River, where HydroQuebec failed to develop a mega project, runs wild into Hudson Bay…for now.
In case you missed these, check out my recent publications:
Creating a Hand Hewn Dough Bowl (Northern Woodlands Magazine)
Can you hear me now? Technology’s toll on the call of the wild (Boston Globe)
Hunting Wilderness (Vermont Sports Magazine)
Copyright (C) 2023 Jesse C. McEntee, PhD. All rights reserved.