Water and Power - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 146

Given this history, the future of regional water quantity and quality will continue to de-
mand the public's attention and engagement across the modern U.S. South. Today's cit-
izens increasingly ask the region's private and public water and energy managers to operate
projects and provide benefits for which they were never designed. The legal tussle over
Lake Lanier's official designation as a municipal water supply source during the mid-2000s
drought and metro Atlanta's subsequent flooding in 2009, in addition to the Carolinas' set-
tlement in a brief bi-state water war, poignantly demonstrate the persistent nature of the
Southeast's water problems and political landscape. 2 Georgians, South Carolinians, and
their neighbors have toiled for more than a century to use and control water resources to
manage flooding and drought risks. But for all the corporate, state, and citizen investment,
the flooding and droughts continue to compromise ever-growing communities, cut into cor-
porate bottom lines, and mold river valleys. Flooding and drought, the so-called natural
disasters, have shaped the Southeast's political economy for more than a century and a half.
As time has demonstrated, droughts and flooding will return, and these anticipated envir-
onmental conditions make our future energy, agricultural, and municipal energy and water
choices matter.
Southern energy companies and the Corps continue to define and obscure the relation-
ship between water and power. Energy utilities' authority and vulnerability surfaced dra-
matically in 2007, just as they had in the 1920s and 1940s. As a stinging drought dried out
the region's rivers, including two major river basins embroiled in protracted water wars,
representatives from the Southern Company, Duke Energy, Progress Energy, South Caro-
lina Electric and Gas, Santee Cooper, Dominion (Virginia Power), East Kentucky Power
Cooperative, PowerSouth Energy Cooperative (Alabama Electric Cooperative), the TVA,
the Southeastern Power Administration, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Environmental Protection Agency convened at At-
lanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport to discuss “drought in the Southeast and
the potential electricity sector impacts.” When asked by federal representatives about the
drought's anticipated influence on energy generation and utility operations, delegates from
the Southern Company responded, “The issue is how much water are we gonna get” from
the Corps' five facilities that worked in sequence with the company's fifteen hydroelec-
tric, coal, natural gas, and nuclear generation facilities spread throughout the Apalachicola-
Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) river basin. In other words, the investor-owned company's or-
ganic, fossil, and mineral energy regimes wholly depend on the federal government's pub-
licly financed water storage operations at Buford Dam (Lake Lanier) and other Corps hy-
droelectric, flood control, and navigation projects. Beyond the ACF's example, the major
goal for the meeting's private and public representatives remained figuring out how energy
utilities—from Alabama to Virginia and from the Carolinas to Kentucky—would continue
generating electricity for millions of Americans in the face of diminishing water supplies in