Hidroaysen Part I: The Nitty Gritty

About a month ago on Monday, May 9th a Chilean Congressional Committee that evaluates environmental impact of perspective projects within Chile gave the okay with a vote of 11 in favor and one abstention to move forward with a project called Hidroaysen that is to take place in Patagonia, Chile. What I'm going to do is give a nuts and bolts, who, what, where, and why description of what exactly is going on with this project because I am more and more interested in this environmental BS and all that hippie we're destroying the world crap. (Don't tell anyone that).

Hidroaysen is a project to build five hydroelectic plants in Aysen, which is the second most southern region of Chile. This involves building five dams on two seperate rivers in the region. These five plants will be able to generate the equivalent of 35% of the energy consumption of Chile in 2008.[1]

So what's so bad about this? Everything sounds great and dandy, the project generates good clean energy and a significant amount of it.

The argument against Hidroaysen: Patagonia is virgin, untouched land. It is a truly breathtaking and unique nature reserve that similar to the protagonist in Madonna's hit single, has been relatively untouched by man.

Building these dams would affect an isolated number of ecosystems in one area. It would not be spreading widespread harm and damage (get it?) to the region and its inhabitants. It would affect 22 square miles out of 42,000 square miles. Less than 1% of the region. (the 22 miles is a rough calculation I did. hackers have managed to block the Hidroaysen website so you cannot log in and read about the project. That seems fair. Not.)

With that being said:

"If the Aysen region was a glass of milk, Hidroaysen would be the fly floating in it."

Here's where it gets tricky. Chile needs the energy. It has over double the population of Massachusetts and consumes less energy than Massachusetts. What that tells me is that 1) we are quite the hipocrites here in Mass. with our feel good liberal hippie rhetoric about going green and being leaders in the green revolution while on a global scale, we are incredibly wasteful offenders. (On a sidenote I think a lot of our wastefulness comes out of habit and from the fact that everything is automatic and already plugged in and a lot of what we use is out of sight out of mind. For example we turn the faucet and have hot water, set the house temperature with a thermostat and leave everything plugged in. Versus in Chile, you have to turn on the gas and light the water boiler each time you want to use hot water. If you want heat you need a to connect a 2 gallon gas tank to the space heater but for the most part just put more layers on, and this is a weird one but in Chile you don't leave everything plugged in all the time for fear of electrical surges. To reiterate, out of sight out of mind, when you are actually physically turning on the gas, filling the tank, you feel the consumption a bit more.)

and 2) you forgot there was a 2 didn't you? and 2) energy consumption is clearly linked to standard of living. As the standard of living increases down there, energy use will increase quite dramatically with it.

So why not do a similar project elsewhere or use an alternative energy sources?

Here's where the situation gets more complicated. You've got incredible economic growth in Chile going on at the moment which increases energy demand. 90% of the population lives in the 9 (of 15 total) central most regions of the country which combine to comprise just 20% of Chile. To put it in other words, you got a whole lot of people in a concentrated area in the middle of the country where energy resources are already maxed out. Chile has been experimenting with alternative solutions and in the last 15 years began to import natural gas from Argentina and oil from Brazil, Angola, and Nigeria. The problem is most of these countries are not the most stable places in the world and the supply is apt to get shut off suddenly and disrupt the Chilean economy.

(deep breath) With the concentration of population in the middle of the country it is pretty much maxed out of local resources, 43% of their electricity is already generated through hydroelectricty. Nuclear energy is not really a viable option due to earthquakes (one of the strongest earthquakes in the world occured 2 years ago in Chile) and building more plants that use oil or gas and pollute is not an option due to the forced dependence on unreliable countries and the Metropolitan Region already suffers from a terrible smog problem (kind of mixing issue here because it is mostly caused by cars and buses), this winter they have had 3 separate days of severe smog emergency, where the city recommends not going outside.

Could you imagine how beautiful a city it is without the smog? You actually don't realize you are under it until there is a clear day after it rains and you go, "where did all these snow capped mountains come from?"

and an entertaining video on the smog problem for those who like puppets and speak Spanish:




That my friends is where the issue stands today. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. It seems at the moment the project is by no means going full steam ahead as the government first tries to quell the unrest with the project.

If the Hydroaysen project is scrapped it would be a huge statement and a landmark moment against any future development in the south, basically saying that Patagonia is off limits.

Now that you made it through Part I, you're reward is Part II, the initial reaction following the decision to pass Hidroaysen. Nothing like a good old-fashioned Latin American protest where inevitably capitalism was made to be the root of all evil, government vs. the people and rich vs poor.

[1] Know what's awesome? I don't actually have to do footnotes because its my blog. I just did made that one for fun. Any journalist worth a salt keeps their sources protected.