People from Humboldt to Marin counties gathered in Cloverdale to express skepticism about future water management strategies sparked by the plant’s impending shutdown
Press Democrat, 3/24/2025
More than 200 people from Humboldt to Marin counties packed the Cloverdale Veterans Memorial Hall Thursday night for a town hall meeting about how PG&E’s planned shutdown of its Potter Valley hydropower plant would impact the region’s water supply.
The controversial project involves the removal of the Scott and Cape Horn dams and PG&E’s nearby hydroelectric facility in Lake County, with PG&E saying it won’t shut down the plant and begin dam removal until 2028 at the earliest.
Residents and some elected officials are concerned the project will spark the potential loss of water from the Eel River to the Russian River that individuals from Mendocino, Sonoma and Marin counties have relied on for more than 100 years.
“This plan is unacceptable,” said Cloverdale Fire Protection District Chief Jason Jenkins. “As a fire chief, I’m here to say this does not protect our community.”
Bronte Edwards, a first generation sheep farmer from Sebastopol, said the project is setting farmers “up for failure,” and told leaders that if “you don’t have our backs, we will organize.”
But Sonoma County Fourth District Supervisor James Gore and others, including engineers from Sonoma County’s water agency, say the plan, while not perfect, will provide the region with enough water to meet public safety, residential and business needs.
“We are here because 10 years ago PG&E decided the [Potter Valley] project wasn’t economical,” Gore told the crowd. “Those of us impacted have been fighting like dogs to figure out what is best for our communities.”
The back-and-forth comes as a key date approaches: July 29 marks the deadline for PG&E to submit and distribute its “final surrender application and decommissioning plan” with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has final say over the project.
The public comment period for the draft plan has closed. Local leaders connected to the project say the power company has no plans for town halls, but they have discussed holding additional public forums so the public can understand how the future teardown of the power plant would affect their communities.
The two-basin plan
For nearly a decade, leaders from neighboring counties, Native American tribes and nonprofits have worked together to figure out how to handle the hydroelectric plant’s impending decommissioning.
Seven entities — Sonoma County, the Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission, Humboldt County, the Round Valley Indian Tribes, Trout Unlimited, California Trout, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife — formulated a solution known as a two-basin plan.
Currently, water diversions caused by opening the Scott and Cape Horn dams are controlled by PG&E, which holds water rights related to them. Through contracts, the power company allots flows into the Potter Valley Irrigation District and Eel River, providing water into Mendocino and Sonoma counties.
Once the dams are decommissioned, the approved two-basin solution would go into effect.
David Manning, environmental resources manager with Sonoma Water, the county’s water agency, told town hall attendees, the two-basin plan would divert an amount of water from the Eel River to the Russian River “not dissimilar” to what is currently flowing.
In other words, periodic releases totaling 30,000 to 40,000 acre feet of water that are now flowing from the Eel River to the Russian River would keep coming … but at different times of the year.
Those releases would begin once the dams are decommissioned — a process that requires the aforementioned federal approval. A joint powers authority called the Eel Russian Power Authority would be responsible for managing the new diversions under the new set of rules.
Some say those new rules are too stringent and won’t bring water to Sonoma County when it’s most needed.
At the Cloverdale meeting, they voiced concerns that a bulk of the water would be released during the wintertime, when water isn’t a scarcity ― and that the county lacks adequate facilities to store it.
John Volpi, a Petaluma farmer and Geyserville business owner, echoed most people’s concerns: “We need storage. It’s common sense.”
Manning and his colleague, Donald Seymour, principal water agency engineer at Sonoma Water, don’t fully disagree. But they also noted that Sonoma Water has storage projects in the works, including aquifer storage recovery and expansions of irrigation ponds, that allow the agency to store more water than what Lake Mendocino currently holds.
Manning said, “These things need to happen simultaneously. There’s not going to be enough storage. That’s going to take time.”
Link: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/cloverdale-potter-valley-project/