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GREENSBORO — The owners of several small hydroelectric dams are suing the Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority, claiming their earning potential is hurt by the water it soon will remove from the Deep River.

Owners of the small, privately operated plants are seeking millions of dollars in damages, said John Kime, the authority’s executive director.

“The last number I saw was $5 million,” Kime said of the alleged damages.

Superior Court Judge Richard W. Stone recently set the case for trial this summer after rejecting the authority’s request that the case be dismissed.

The plant owners are known as “small power generators” and own comparatively tiny dams equipped to make electricity by tapping the Deep River’s current.

“It ain’t like we’re a Duke Power that can go out there and spend billions of dollars to build a nuclear plant,” said Dean Brooks, one of the plaintiffs who owns a former Carolina Power & Light plant built in the 1920s near Moncure.

“We’re just using what nature has given us,” Brooks said in a telephone interview from a small plant he has owned for five years.

The authority is building a water-treatment plant in northern Randolph County and expects to begin operations in mid-2010. The project is being built by a partnership that includes Greensboro, High Point, Jamestown, Archdale, Randleman and Randolph County.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Brooks and his Brooks Energy, fellow dam owner Bruce H. Cox and three other dam-owning companies: Deep River Hydro, Hydrodyne Industries and L&S Water Power.

Discussion of the case emerged at Tuesday’s monthly meeting of the water authority as Kime sought to prepare board members for the next annual budget beginning in July. That budget will include a substantial increase in legal fees to defend the case, he said.

From the authority’s perspective, the new Randleman Reservoir should not hurt the small power generators, Kime said. Under the project’s operating permit, the authority is required to release a steady flow of water downstream more than triple the river’s historic rate of flow, he told board members.

Seven small hydroelectric dams are on the Deep River south of the reservoir, Brooks said. But some are not operating currently, including one bought by the authority, he said.

Power from Brooks’ plant is sold to Progress Energy, CP&L’s successor, he said.

Brooks said it’s obvious hydroelectric producers will be hurt once the authority begins withdrawing 12 million gallons of water per day, purifying it and distributing it to cities that won’t all return it to the Deep or its tributaries.

At their afternoon meeting, authority members said they were frustrated the small-dam owners have not presented any evidence showing what they actually earned from hydroelectric sales before or after the reservoir.

When the authority was seeking permits from state and federal officials in the mid-1990s, owners of the hydroelectric dams made similar claims, Kime said. But they were disregarded, partly because they failed to submit earnings data, he said.

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com