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Two of the three turbines at the Cushman Dam No. 2 powerhouse on the North Fork of the Skokomish River in Mason County, Washington.
10 | HYDRO LEADER | June 2022
The penstocks and generating station of the Cushman Dam No. 2.
reservation. Whether our resources can be adequately protected in a process like this should not depend on who’s sitting in the chair of the secretary of the interior. It’s a recognition by all the stakeholders that tribes should be full partners in this process. Hydro Leader: The amendments package includes proposals to simplify or improve the processes for such things as surrendering licenses, removing nonoperating dams, powering existing nonpowered dams, and constructing closed-loop pumped storage facilities. Please tell us about the motivation behind those proposals. Richard Roos-Collins: FERC has rules for the license surrender process, but they are relatively thin. They are far less robust than the Integrated Licensing Process. As a result, the license surrender process tends to be less predictable for the licensee and other stakeholders than it should be. Our package would require a rulemaking to refine the process to provide more predictability—in effect, a more detailed description of the steps that the licensee and others will follow. As for nonoperating projects, the package proposes that FERC periodically compile a list of such projects, and for each, develop a plan for either restoring the project operation or not. Chuck Sensiba: Regarding licensing new projects at nonpowered dams and closed-loop pumped storage projects, the U.S. Department of Energy put together a Hydropower Vision Report in 2016, which concluded that the installation of hydropower at nonpowered dams and pumped-storage projects was far and away the largest opportunity for new hydropower growth in the United States. Our package seeks to leverage these opportunities by requiring an expedited licensing process for these technologies while recognizing that licensing must proceed in an environmentally responsible way. hydroleadermagazine.com
PHOTOS BY COLBY FISHER, LICENSED UNDER CC BY-SA 3.0 AND TAKESHITA KENJI, LICENSED UNDER CC BY-SA 3.0.
part licensing of the Cushman Hydroelectric Project, the secretary of the interior did nothing to protect the North Fork Skokomish River fishery and the Skokomish Reservation. For 50 years, a dam subverted 50 percent of the flow of the Skokomish River into the Hood Canal, resulting in the destruction of the fishery and the extinction of sockeye salmon in the Skokomish River. The aggradation of the mainstem of the Skokomish River caused by the dewatering of the North Fork Skokomish River resulted in the flooding and destruction of about 30 percent of the Skokomish River Reservation. When the Cushman Project came up for relicensing in 1974, my tribe, which is small and poor, went knocking on the door of the U.S. Department of the Interior, our trustee, to beg for help with the relicensing. It took almost a decade before anybody at Interior started to take the tribe’s meetings and calls. The tribes in the Northwest have some of the best resource management agencies and capacities of anybody in the world because they are comanagers of these trust resources. The Skokomish poured their blood, sweat, and treasure into developing the science to understand the effect of the Cushman project and how it could be operated in a way that would allow for the restoration of resources, species, and the reservation. Finally, we were able to get our trustee, Interior, to put forward some section 4(e) mandatory conditions, although they were half the conditions that the tribe wanted. FERC decided that the conditions put forward by Interior weren’t timely and that they exceeded the scope of the secretary’s authority under section 4(e). Ultimately, after the tribe defended Interior’s authority, the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled in favor of the tribe, saying that Interior had the authority to impose the conditions necessary to protect the purposes for which the reservation was established, as long as they were reasonably related to the impact of the Cushman Project. That made clear to tribes that it’s time for us to have that authority, just as we have the ability to manage resources under the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. We don’t need a trustee that is subject to multiple interests deciding how best to protect our