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RAMSEUR -- A reasonable person could be forgiven for doubting the Ramseur Hydroelectric Plant will ever be back in working order.

The canal that once sped water to its turbines sits high and dry, sprouting trees from a patch of fill dirt dumped there years back.

The plant hasn’t produced electricity since the early 1960s. And the only sign of life in the brick “power house” is graffiti on its walls and partly gutted generating equipment.

But that’s not the picture you get at the Guilford County courthouse, where the plant’s owners and other “hydro” operators on the Deep River are suing the Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority for millions of dollars in damages.

Testifying in the case earlier this year, Ramseur Plant co-owner Bruce Cox gave an upbeat appraisal of its future:

“We’re going to try to get it running by 2010. We’ve got some repair work to do to the dam. We’ve got repair work to do to the canal and also maintenance work to do to the power house.”

Critics say Cox and other owners of the Deep’s seven hydro plants, including the husband of U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan, are holding hostage the water needs of the eastern Triad on the altar of an outmoded, erratic technology from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Nonetheless, if Cox and the other hydro owners prevail, they could end up with a pile of cash to pump into the crippled 1930s-era plant, including the 8-foot-wide hole in its 19th-century dam that no longer fully restrains the river.

Any payment would come directly from residents of Greensboro, High Point, Jamestown, Archdale, Randleman and Randolph County. The six local governments formed the authority almost 25 years ago to build and run Randleman Reservoir; their residents are on the hook for whatever befalls it.

The lawsuit contends the authority ultimately will owe the hydro owners more than $5 million because the reservoir soon will be distributing drinking water. The owners claim that water otherwise could fuel their plants’ water-driven turbines to make more electricity.

Yet the Deep’s hydro plants run intermittently when they are in working condition, often relying on equipment at least 70 years old. And some struggled to make ends meet way before the Randleman project.

“They’re not suing the big-bad authority; they’re suing the citizens of Greensboro, High Point and the other communities,” John Kime, the water agency’s veteran director, said. “The only money we have comes from you guys.”

Plant operators argue they are only defending their right to use the Deep as riverfront property owners, a right deeply ingrained in state law.

“It’s a taking of property,” said Greensboro lawyer J. Scott Hale, an attorney in the law firm led by the senator’s husband, Chip Hagan.

“The water authority is a governmental entity, and it does not have the right to take anyone’s property without just compensation,” said Hale, spokesman for the plaintiffs in the case.

The owners extol hydro as a nonpolluting fount of electricity that aptly complements North Carolina’s goal of meeting a fifth of its energy needs from such “renewable” resources. Hydro runs much more efficiently than such other fossil-fuel alternatives as solar and wind power, Hale said.

“Unfortunately, the water authority’s operation of Randleman Reservoir has and will continue to reduce the amount of power being produced on the Deep River,” Hale said. “The energy that can no longer be produced on the Deep River will have to come from another source, most likely coal or natural gas.”

Power in high places

The suit also could result in an unusual situation in which the family of a U.S. senator reaps hundreds of thousands of dollars in a court fight with a public agency seeking to meet the most elemental needs of its constituents.

The hydroelectric owners include Chip Hagan and his brothers, John and David, who jointly own part of a plant at High Falls that, unlike the one in Ramseur, does work.

They have been partners in the company with Steve Cook of Greensboro since 1994 “when we joined with him to continue and expand the generation of renewable energy at hydroelectric facilities,” Chip Hagan said.

“We wanted to be a part of our nation’s effort to move us toward energy independence,” Hagan said.

But like the four other working plants along the Deep, the Hagan-Cook operation in Moore County runs sporadically. Like them, it depends on the river’s varying flows, so that major utilities can’t rely on it as a steady source of power.

“They run and then they are not able to run for a while, so they don’t produce power all the time,” Progress Energy spokesman Scott Sutton said, speaking generally of small hydro plants.

Progress Energy buys power when it’s available from the Deep’s working plants — Cox Lake Hydroelectric in Randleman, also owned by Bruce Cox; L&S Water Power in Franklinville; Deep River Hydro in Coleridge; the Hagan-Cook plant at High Falls; and the Lockville Hydroelectric Plant 80 miles downstream at Moncure near the river’s mouth.

The entire Deep, with all working plants running full tilt, produces only enough power per year to serve a maximum 2,100 of Progress Energy’s 1 million household customers in North Carolina.

And even that estimate errs on the high side, according to Kim Jones of the N.C. Utilities Commission.

“It assumes the plants are available 100 percent of the time, which is not true,” Jones said, also speaking generally of smaller hydro plants. “They typically have high availability in spring and fall, during the rainy season. Not so much during the winter and summer.”

On again, off again

Records of each private plant’s operating frequency are not available to the public. But evidence suggests that some faced financial ills well before the authority started filling Randleman Reservoir in 2005.

The Hagans’ High Falls plant didn’t operate “for the majority of three years” because of a drought starting in 1999, their partner Cook told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in July 2004.

Cook wrote the commission to explain why the plant lacked records about river levels that state environmental officials wanted. The commission oversees America’s hydroelectric and other energy plants.

High Falls’ owners could only afford to have someone measure river levels once a week during the drought, Cook said.

“Please understand that we must save whatever man- hours we can when the plant is shut down,” Cook said in a letter dated July 12, 2004. “Our per-kw (kilowatt) income is down 62 percent from what it was 15 years ago. Annual running time is down significantly, also.”

Similarly, hydro owner Cox testified in the local lawsuit that he never made a profit from the Worthville Power Plant — another of the three Deep River plants he is involved with.

He and a business partner shuttered Worthville in 1995 after several years of unprofitable operation in which all earnings went back into plant upkeep, he said: “The income that come off that was just to keep it fixed back, to get it fixed back, and there was no income to split between the two (partners).”

These days, its power house sits in disrepair at the water’s edge, beside the crumbling shell of a textile mill with roots dating back to the 1880s.

A judge ruled last month that because they are closed right now, the Worthville and Ramseur plants are not due any money from the water authority “at this time.” But Superior Court Judge Calvin Murphy left the door open for them to submit claims anew if they return to operation.

The authority plans to appeal the ruling, which also said the authority should pay the five working plants for its initial withdrawals of reservoir water and might owe more later as those withdrawals grow in size.

A jury should decide how much is owed, Murphy said. The judge signed the order nine days after Sen. Hagan recommended him as one of three candidates for a vacant seat on the U.S. District Court for North Carolina’s western district.

She rescinded the recommendation when asked about its timing. Hagan said she did not know Murphy was handling a case involving her husband and did not believe the judge did anything wrong but wanted to avoid any appearance of impropriety.

Reborn by energy crisis

It’s no coincidence the Deep’s hydro plants sit amid the decaying ruins of old industrial sites. History made a place for them where North Carolina’s early settlers built water-powered grist mills and where businessmen later opened some of the region’s first successful factories, including Worth Manufacturing, Cedar Falls Manufacturing, Enterprise Mills and High Falls Cotton Mills.

People initially used the Deep’s raw power simply to turn millstones. But eventually, they began converting hydropower to electricity with small plants that supplied the manufacturers who owned them.

The plants are pretty basic: Dams funnel some of the river into a channel, where the water is sent downhill to gain speed and spin turbines that transfer their power to a generator and, voila, electricity buzzes forth.

But tiny hydros fell by the wayside as large utilities built vastly bigger, more cost-effective and more reliable plants in the mid-20th century.

One by one, the Deep’s hydros began blinking out and appeared headed for oblivion — until the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s.

That’s when Congress, worried about over-dependence on foreign oil, revised the Federal Power Act to make major utilities buy power from smaller, homegrown sources, said Jim Mead, director of the state Division of Water Resources’ water projects office.

“Before that, they didn’t have a guaranteed market,” Mead said of small hydro operators. “So then there was a big surge in retrofitting existing dams.”

The self-sufficient type

Small hydro seems to attract Indiana Jones sorts, individualists who often are mechanically gifted.

“They’re very interesting people, very self-sufficient,” said John Morris, former chief of the Division of Water Resources in Raleigh.

Cox, for example, is a former Randolph County tobacco farmer who also designs, builds and maintains plants that make biodiesel fuel.

He got his start in hydroelectric power more than 25 years ago working on the L&S and Deep River Hydro plants still owned by Bill Lee of Asheboro, a former Chrysler engineer who pioneered the industry in North Carolina.

“It kind of always thrilled me to let Mother Nature do your bidding,” Lee told the News & Record in 1997, discussing his fascination with hydro power.

With tight profit margins, plant operators must coax life from ancient equipment by cannibalizing parts or rebuilding them to decades-old specifications.

“All the turbines I know of — and I’ve seen probably all of them on the river — those turbines were probably built in the 1920s (or) 1930s,” Cox testified in the case.

Bending over backward

The plants along the Deep are regulated, but not tightly monitored by FERC because they are “low hazard,” said Charles Wagner of the agency’s southeastern dam-safety office.

That means the dams are small enough, they threaten no loss of life and little economic damage if they collapse.

Large-scale hydro plants with high hazard ratings get inspected once a year, but federal agents only check small hydros every three years.

Even when inspectors find shortcomings, licenses take forever to revoke, so FERC strives both to work with the owners and “force them to do the right maintenance and dam safety,” Wagner said.

“We try to bend over backward to help them as much as we can, as long as they desire to get it back and running,” Wagner said of plants such as the still-inoperable Worthville and Ramseur units.

Indeed, FERC flagged both of those Deep River projects in recent years for their long-standing failure to operate. Hale, Cox’s lawyer, blamed the plants’ difficulties on the water authority.

“Mr. Cox’s efforts to bring the Worthville and Ramseur projects operational have been hindered by the Randleman Dam, which has reduced the revenue capable of being generated at these projects,” Hale said.

But FERC threatened to pull Worthville’s license four years ago because of its dormancy, then relented after Cox and his partner promised in a January 2006 letter to get the plant back on line “by the time Randleman Lake gets full.”

The lake reached full size two years ago, but FERC took no further action on its 2005 warning.

'Dilapidated ... hazardous’

Now, the agency is getting another chance to show how far it will bend with the Ramseur Plant, originally owned by a man who died of cancer before he could begin fixing all the damage.

FERC moved to revoke Ramseur’s license several years ago “for failure to adequately maintain and operate the project” after Cox and Dean Brooks of Chatham County bought it without the required FERC approvals.

Cox and his partner recently petitioned the agency to restore the license in their names, which would authorize them to begin massive repairs.

Meanwhile, state government is urging FERC to tear down the dam with its hole “approximately 8-to-10 feet wide,” and to restore that part of the river to a “safe, environmentally sound” condition.

“It is apparent that if left in its current condition, the Ramseur dam will continue to be an impediment to navigation and a significant recreational safety hazard,” the state Attorney General’s Office said in a November 2006 petition, urging FERC not to let “this project remain in its current dilapidated and hazardous condition.”

That was three years ago. The federal government has yet to act.

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