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Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Vaclav Smil gets hyped up as one of the smartest men on the planet, but apparently he can't google up the downsides of Hydro? Or is he 'just asking questions' to continue undermining solar PV and wind. Yes, yes he is.
- labrador 4y ago
  For what it's worth; Included among Smil's admirers is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who has read all of Smil's 36 books. "I wait for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie," Gates wrote in 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Yes, Smil appears to be the main reason Bill Gates has been actively unhelpful on climate matters. Constantly talking about how renewables aren't enough and that we need to invent new tech to save us, rather than just roll out the amazing tech we already have as fast as possible. https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/10/26/gates_green_investment_refocus/ https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/10/26/gates_green_inves... Smil was also an EV skeptic.
    - jandrese 4y ago
      Some of the "renewables aren't affordable" people are just out of date. They ran the numbers back in the early 2000s and came to the conclusion that it wouldn't be economical to switch to wind and solar. But prices, especially on solar, have been in collapse for the past 20 years. Previously unaffordable battery based grid storage quietly became a thing. EVs also dropped down to mainsteam prices. The solution to climate change is economies of scale.
wnevets 4y ago
Green has lost all meaning if we're going to include dams
bArray 4y ago
My biggest problem with hydroelectricity is the same problem I have with all dams - you're creating a structure that requires infinite maintenance. A dam does not fail gracefully.
dottedmag 4y ago
Because the amount of places where dams could be built to produce electricity is quite limited, and most of them are already in use. So hydroelectric power is fine, but there is no way to significantly increase amount of it. Edit: I was wrong, see https://web.archive.org/web/20170329132409/http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/hydropower_essentials.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170329132409/http://www.iea.or...
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  Is this indeed the case, even for smaller, localized dams? Would be interesting to see a comprehensive study on this (if one has been done).
  - dottedmag 4y ago
    Looks like I was wrong! This report puts current usage to 20%: https://web.archive.org/web/20170329132409/http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/hydropower_essentials.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170329132409/http://www.iea.or...
    - insane_dreamer 4y ago
      Nice find! Most interesting is to see potential in Africa and Asia/Pacific, where there is the greatest need for clean energy as consumption grows as a result of both population growth and industrialization.
      - dottedmag 4y ago
        Not so rosy for Asia: northern Asian Russian rivers that comprise a sizable chunk of the potential are very far from any inhabited places. I don't know where Chinese rivers with untapped potential are located, but I'd guess they are in Tibet.
    - jandrese 4y ago
      That report is interesting, but incomplete. Certainly there are diminishing returns on developing that last 80%. It's entirely possible that many of the locations are outright uneconomical to develop, possibly because they are hundreds of miles from the nearest significant civilization and would require enormous high voltage lines before they could be developed. Or maybe upstream of the location is a lot of people who would need to move first.
chungy 4y ago
It's not very green at all. It's known to kill large swaths of the ecosystem. The true green yet unfashionable energy source is nuclear fission.
- petsfed 4y ago
  That's pretty much it. The environmental objections to nuclear fission are in the same genre as objections to hydroelectric dams, but hard to compare. You pay the environmental impact of the dam upfront, in the form of ecosystem disruption by the reservoir. I'm not sure that nuclear fuel mining is worse than building a reservoir in a desert (e.g. Lake Mead), long term, to say nothing of nuclear waste storage/disposal. To be sure, power production by a wind or solar facility is at least proportional to acreage, but either of those don't entirely remove habitat. This feels more like a hit piece that amounts to "your 'green' energy sources aren't so green, hypocrites". Specifically: "This ennoblement is strange, given that wind projects require enormous quantities of embodied energy in the form of steel for towers, plastics for blades, and concrete for foundations. The manufacture of solar panels involves the environmental costs from mining, waste disposal, and carbon emissions." As if the earthworks and concrete of major dams, the steel and plastic of the generation stations didn't count. The author also ignores the justification for building megastructures on rivers in the western US (or Africa, or China, or ...): they are in deserts, so the flow (and therefore the power generation) are especially sensitive to the natural drought cycle. Build a small dam on a small river, then deal with the consequences of no power when the river runs dry every fall. Or, dam a big river, which requires a big reservoir, and only deal with drought-driven power outages when you hit the 50 or 100 year drought.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Usage of the word "green" seems to be increasingly synonymous with "carbon neutral/efficient" while ignoring other environmental costs. I suppose carbon is the most pressing issue, but I remember reading about how dams destroy natural habitats way back in grade school so this shouldn't be news.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  I'm glad more people are coming around. I just wish it was 30 years ago and we'd actually be seeing some benefits for it by now. Now it's at least 20 years out.
mszcz 4y ago
The Banqiao Dam failure [0] came to my mind the moment I read the title. The amount of deaths that single failure caused may have something to do with that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
- wolfram74 4y ago
  yeah, dam failures are pretty spectacular. Maybe we're collectively cooler with them because 1) they've been part of our accepted collateral damages list longer (hundreds of years) and 2) because we know better where the fall out will be we put more marginalized people there? I would be really interested in looking at property values or something like that for regions in suspected dam burst zones and neighborhoods that are just outside them. on topic onion sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjfrJzdx7DA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjfrJzdx7DA
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Truthfully nobody's really heard of the Bangqiao Dam failure. I doubt this contributes to the discourse.
  - kortex 4y ago
    Anyone who's spent any amount of time looking into industrial and engineering disasters knows about Bangqiao. It's up there among the greatest single event losses of human life from human-created (non-war, non-disease) catastrophies, along with Bhopal, Chernobyl, Wanggongchang explosion, Halifax explosion, and a few other big ones.
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      I knew about it, but I don't think if you asked an average individual on the street, they'd have any clue - unlike asking any American or Canadian about Chernobyl, or any Canadian about Bhopal or Halifax. I think Chernobyl has a much bigger influence on nuclear policy than Bangqiao on hydro despite the latter causing two orders of magnitude more deaths.
pavon 4y ago
This isn't hard to understand. * Most of the best sites for hydro (and geothermal) in western countries already have damns. * Between climate change and growing population, fresh water is becoming more and more scarce, making hydro a less dependable source of energy. * These projects take a long time to plan and build. Between these there is little opportunity for hydro to play a significant role in our short-term decarbonization plans, even ignoring ecological and safety concerns.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  for some definition of the word 'best' - we have plenty of places that would be perfectly suitable other than all the pesky people it would displace. If we really cared about carbon-free energy that would be a solvable problem.
  - burkaman 4y ago
    But the only reason we care about carbon-free energy is because of the pesky people. If displacing people isn't a big deal, then climate change isn't a problem and we don't need to care about carbon-free energy at all. We'd just move populations as the climate changes.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
PedroBatista 4y ago
Off of the top of my head, a giant wall of concrete is not cheap nor "green", immense negative impact on the ecosystems ( waterways, estuary downstream, fish and most species that depend on a river to survive ) Villages and cultural patrimony that sometimes must go underwater. Droughts and only small part of the Earth has rivers with enough water to make a dam that can generate power regularly.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  A typical example for the disadvantages mentioned by you is the dam on the Danube, where the island of Ada Kaleh and a few villages have gone under water, forcing the relocation of thousands of people. Moreover, that dam has been a major contributor to the great reduction in the number of sturgeons in the Black Sea.
  - jhoechtl 4y ago
    Does the damage overweight the benefit? Would nuclear have been better? Do you want your bread toasted or light your room with candles?
    - cwkoss 4y ago
      How can you quantify that? How many gigawatt hours is halving an ecosystem's biodiversity worth?
      - jhoechtl 4y ago
        That's exactly the point. I think there is a trade-off which has to be quantified. Claimimg to be unable to quantify this trade off is a death argument to any discussion.
chc 4y ago
The word "unfashionable" seems a bit ill-defined here. The article itself makes the argument that hydro is popular and many places either have adopted it or are adopting it, so obviously that's not what "unfashionable" means. It seems like the core complaint here is that some people have criticisms of excessive damming, and it has caused governments to weigh the potential impacts of hydro projects before going ahead — but surely that is a good thing. Overall, I just don't really get the issue this article is trying to call attention to.
exabrial 4y ago
"Green", if you exclude absolute sacrifice of an entire downstream ecosystem.
- cm42 4y ago
  Yeah, no - I definitely do exclude claims of THE ABSOLUTE, TOTAL, AND COMPLETE DESTRUCTION OF CATEGORICALLY EVERYTHING DOWNSTREAM. Especially given that it's a centuries-old technology, installed upstream of many (perhaps "most"?) things, and yet THE ENTIRE DOWNSTREAM ECOSYSTEM (which, since all streams lead to ABSOLUTE SACRIFICE AND TOTAL DESTRUCTION), is THE ABSOLUTE ANNIHILATION OF EVERY ECOSYSTEM. Do I need to download a new copy of TehScienceConsensus.pdf again? What page did you get this from?
- falcolas 4y ago
  Downstream actually sees benefits from a dam, since the output of the river remains unnaturally constant even during periods of drought. The immediate upstream from a dam, however, is another story entirely.
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    I think looking at the ecosystems in isolation is part of the problem. The ecosystems are connected, and affecting one affects the other. Especially for species that use both, such as salmon.
  - exabrial 4y ago
    Floods are as natural as rain, wildfires, and erosion. Entire species depend on these. A good example is how we almost managed to destroy all of the sandbars on the Colorado river because we were "controlling flooding", but it took quite a while for us to realize these are only created during surge events.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- kzrdude 4y ago
keeperoftruth 4y ago
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  What's funny about this is that the "real world" includes physics - such as the IR reflectivity of CO2. While ROI is an entirely abstract concept (piled on top of other abstractions, like currency) created by humans.
latchkey 4y ago
I spent a couple years on a motorbike traveling all through Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (15k+ kms). Water mostly flows from the north (China) to the south in that region. The Mekong River. China and Vietnam have dammed up nearly all of the large rivers in those three countries, for hydro. There are countless projects constantly being built as well. The scale is pretty epic really. Vietnam has some of the largest number of hydro dams in the world. Downstream, there are huge swaths of empty riverbeds. In the wet season, when the rains overflow the dams, there are major floods and people who have built too close to the river edge, get swept away. Hydro certainly is green, but the effect it has on everything downstream, isn't. Especially when it is poorly managed by countries that don't really have very much ecosense. They claim they are removing dams. I've seen it, they aren't... if anything they are just building more. https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/vietnam https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/vietnam
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  Yeah, the biggest problems are political, when one country controls the upstream flow. (The same issue comes up between States in the U.S.) Luckily for Smil in Manitoba this isn't an issue.
- intrepidhero 4y ago
  Properly managed hydro should help prevent flooding, which I imagine is incredibly valuable in an area with annual monsoon season. It's not like overflowing reservoirs are adding water to the watershed, it just means they don't yet have the in built capacity or were mismanaged, ie monsoon season arrived without sufficient capacity to absorb it, to prevent the natural flooding that was already occurring.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    Key words: "properly managed".
insane_dreamer 4y ago
I think the problem is the focus on huge dam projects, for which there are very few available opportunities not already taken or which would cause a great deal of damage. Small dams, as the type promoted by Smil in the article, would indeed be beneficial, though I haven't seen a study on where such dams could be reliably placed and the projected outcomes.
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  Another poster found this, which is relevant: https://web.archive.org/web/20170329132409/http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/hydropower_essentials.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170329132409/http://www.iea.or...
josefresco 4y ago
Green?!? Dams in my home state are being removed to great applause and rejoicing. Restoring fisheries and natural habitats destroyed by reckless dam building in the last century is a growing priority.
- valine 4y ago
  The effects on local ecosystems are inconsequential when compared to the impact greenhouse gasses have on the world as a whole. It doesn't matter how high you set your thermostat when your house is on fire.
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  Sure, it's destructive. But as long as humans continue to consume more energy, there's a need to balance that with the much greater destructive effect of greenhouse gases. It's about the lesser of evils.
- ltbarcly3 4y ago
  Stupid little dams built as make-work are being removed. Hydroelectric dams are not being removed.
acheron 4y ago
Because "greens" are anti-progress, anti-humanity, and pro-hairshirting, so anything that allows humanity to thrive without suffering doesn't count. The restrictions, suffering, and decrease in prosperity are the point. "Environmentalists make good movie villains because they want to make your real life worse" https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/03/environmentalists-make-good-movie-villains-because-they-want-make-your-real-life-worse/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/03/environme... "Environmentalists want to increase the costs of everyday goods and services by taxing carbon. They want you to fly less and to pay more, via offsets, when you do fly. They want you to stop eating meat. They want you to stop having kids. They want to deprive you of disabled-friendly plastic straws — and they’re coming for your delightful balloons next. They want to turn your corpse into food for plants because even the sweet release of death cannot save you from the environmentalist menace."
- arcticbull 4y ago
  > Environmentalists want to increase the costs of everyday goods and services by taxing carbon. They want you to pay for the impacts of carbon emissions at the point of sale instead of socializing them later. That seems fair to me. > They want to turn your corpse into food for plants because even the sweet release of death cannot save you from the environmentalist menace. In this particular case it doesn't really matter what you or anyone else want lol. We will all be plant food. I guess unless you shoot yourself into space, but even that's not a hard guarantee.
  - ltbarcly3 4y ago
    > They want you to pay for the impacts of carbon emissions This can't be quantified currently. Current methods of 'paying' for carbon emissions have ended up being corrupt wealth transfers. That people are still for them is pretty good evidence they aren't really concerned about the consequences of carbon emissions.
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      > Current methods of 'paying' for carbon emissions have ended up being corrupt wealth transfers. Not really, Canada just refunds people whatever they collect in carbon taxes at the end of the year, with the goal being to make the decision clearer at the point of sale. [1] > That people are still for them is pretty good evidence they aren't really concerned about the consequences of carbon emissions. Anyone who thinks you should emit less carbon understands that making carbon more expensive does just that. We don't need to let perfect be the enemy of good and have an absolutely unimpeachable answer as to exactly how much damage a metric ton of CO2 does to know that making it more expensive will help. [edit] IMO we should just let gas get to $10+/gal. [1] https://unfccc.int/climate-action/momentum-for-change/financing-for-climate-friendly/revenue-neutral-carbon-tax https://unfccc.int/climate-action/momentum-for-change/financ...
onepointsixC 4y ago
Hydro isn't unfashionable. We just don't have reasonable places to keep daming, so there's little really to talk about. Nuclear is unfashionable, because there's huge growth potential among wealthy industrial countries, but because it's not "liked" there's very little actual growth.
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  Actually the Yosemite valley has significant hydro potential.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    Isn't that all protected wilderness though?
    - bpodgursky 4y ago
      Of course, I'm saying > We just don't have reasonable places to keep daming Isn't super true from an energy perspective.
  - jhoechtl 4y ago
    Germany is anecdotally facing an Energy crisis Nuclear power:no. Wind energy: off shore out of sight yes, but not on my mountain. Russian gas: no (more). Coal instead? No! So eveyone will install mini PV systems and become self-sufficient? First this wont work during the cold season and how incredible inneficient is this going to be? I think we must stop to outsource providing cheap energy to poor countries and tap on our.shoulders how green we are. Lithium batteries? Fine, but no lithium mine round my corner!
    - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
      There is no lithium to mine around your corner. Half of all known deposits on Earth are in Bolivia and Argentina.
ltbarcly3 4y ago
HyDrO-eLeCtRiC is NoT GrEeN - half the people on this thread, right before going back to having 95% of their power generated from fossil fuels and never bothering to even check.
idiotsecant 4y ago
Obviously hydroelectricity is massively damaging to ecosystems. My day job includes designing hydroelectric control systems and even I can admit that. That's a big part of the reason that hydro is a non-starter in much of the western world, which is probably a reasonably good thing (although there are certainly some exceptions where hydro development seems like a no-brainer to me but I digress) What's not so clear to me though, is why we aren't pumping (pun intentional) massive amounts of money into hydroelectric pumped storage. These systems are capable of storing massive amount of energy cheaply, safely, and (relative to other methods) efficiently. Every single pumped storage project gets mired in protracted legal battles and they are impossible to build. Our modern energy ecosystem requires more and more storage, and somehow we are under the illusion that we can get there with overgeneration of solar and hooking up batteries. We can't. We need storage and pumped storage is the only practical way to get there with current supply chains and technology.
- api 4y ago
  I've wondered for a while if we couldn't build a pipeline between the ocean and the Salton Sea in SoCal and store quite a bit of energy that way. The Salton Sea is already kind of a wasteland so at least use it for something.
  - jhoechtl 4y ago
    What is the difference in meters? If not much, the effort of building will not be counterweighted by the energy storage capacity. AFAIK salton sea is pretty much at sea level?
    - BurningFrog 4y ago
      It's 72 meters below, but it's not very big, and once it's full you'll have to wait for the water to evaporate away, I assume? If it could be made a permanent bay of the ocean, that might make the area less of a disaster. But it seems real hard...
      - deleted 4y ago
Kukumber 4y ago
Because lobby The day you come up with infinite and free aboundant energy will be the day you put to bankruptcy both the US, the Middle East and Russia, and they don't want that But it's in the plan anyways, we are getting the taste of it right now, globally Bonus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WeoeJyJmN4&t=455s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WeoeJyJmN4&t=455s
- jandrese 4y ago
  That sounds just like hand wringing over killing off the buggy whip industry. Markets are disrupted sometimes, people cope.
- Giorgi 4y ago
  Yeah, US is not oil-export dependent in any way.
  - Kukumber 4y ago
    US depend on everyone using the petro dollar Saddam Hussein got the fate he got because he wanted to use Euro instead to trade their energy https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/feb/16/iraq.theeuro#:~:text=A%20bizarre%20political%20statement%20by,for%20the%20more%20multilateral%20euro https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/feb/16/iraq.theeur.... The moment people can be self sufficient in everything will be the moment the US collapses By collapse i mean their position of global hegemony, they'll end up becoming a normal country Same for Ghadaffi, he wanted a unique currency for Africa
kkfx 4y ago
Mountain hydro is fantastic but have an important issue: you need water and mountains, something not such rare but not so widespread either so it's VERY good to have as much as mountain hydro, but hardly suffice for most countries in the world. Sure some are luckiest like Norway or Swiss, but others are not, at least not for vast part of the country. That's the real "unfashionable" part. The rest is just a matter of expectation: PRs have sold to many the idea we can bring with us energy in significant quantity, p.v. actually offer that in a vast area of the world, of course only when the Sun shine, while you can't hardly have mountain hydro at home except veeeeeeeery few homes. Some also might fear dam incidents, oppose against not-so-small projects etc. That's is.
99_00 4y ago
Not enough potential profit to hire better lobbyists. And no easy way for politicians to profit from insider information.
_uvv0 4y ago
While I'm happy he's glad that we have reliable electricity, he should also reflect that this comes at a significant nonmonetary cost. Presumably he, like me, just hasn't paid the price of this personally in the south. The displacement of communities, loss of traditional lands, erosion of shorelines, and leached mercury into the water supply has been borne disproportionately by First Nations (indigenous) communities (1,2). This and ignorance of it is from a legacy of racist policy (at best apathy) and poor treatment of these communities. Take somewhere like Easterville that was relocated to the cheapest, least economically useful parcel of land with almost no local industry and wonder why there is poverty (3). Obviously it's not the only factor but I go up to some of these places for health care and really enjoy the work/meeting people, but it's sobering. I can't imagine it's any better in China with their massive projects but don't have any citations or experience there. 1 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-hydro-clean-environment-commission-report-1.4798560 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-hydro-clean... 2 https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/web/2016/11/Dams-increase-mercury-exposure-Canadian.html https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/web/2016/11/Dams-increase-me... 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterville,_Manitoba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterville,_Manitoba , can get free press article via google cache if you want
chewbacha 4y ago
I was hoping that the author would address the environmental concerns. But instead, they are mentioned and then dismissed without argument. The enumerations are many that are mentioned: They are blamed for displacing populations, disrupting the flow of sediments and the migration of fish, destroying natural habitat and biodiversity, degrading water quality, and for the decay of submerged vegetation and the consequent release of methane, a greenhouse gas. Yes, these all happen and are bad for the environment. Why should we still consider it to be green?
- seabrookmx 4y ago
  And wind turbines decimate bird populations. I wouldn't be surprised if solar panels had a negative impact on insect species. Where is the magical green line? I think most people equate "green" to anything not involving petroleum.
  - jbm 4y ago
    > And wind turbines decimate bird populations. On what planet have wind turbines killed off 10% of the bird population?
  - tchaffee 4y ago
    Wind turbines don't decimate bird populations. Windows and cats kill far more birds. The numbers aren't even close. Climate change and fossil fuels also kill birds. With wind turbines it is however manageable. The tech to detect birds and shut down turbines is already there. https://www.robinradar.com/bird-control-radar-system-wind-farm https://www.robinradar.com/bird-control-radar-system-wind-fa...
tb_technical 4y ago
Because of NIMBYs
rgmerk 4y ago
Hydroelectricity is unfashionable because: a) there aren't that many places left to build conventional hydro. b) of the places that are left, there's been a lot of (IMO justified) opposition on the basis that flooding wilderness and disrupting river ecosystems is bad (also, flooding rainforest tends to result in a shedload of CO2 and methane, so the climate effects of conventional hydro are nontrivial). c) Because of and b, new hydro is pretty much dead in developed countries and difficult to get funding for in the developing world. d) until very recently, there's been little need for more pumped hydro because it's cheaper to build peaking gas plants, and a wash for the environment because the energy has (mostly) been coming from coal or gas anyway. e) with the introduction of more and more wind and solar into the grid, the need for energy storage to match supply and demand has become much greater. f) Hence, there's increasing interest in new pumped storage projects around the world, or other changes to hydro to better match the peakiness of energy prices. These can be either completely new systems, or modifications to existing ones. For instance, rather than running a 100MW generator 24 hours a day, you might put an extra 300MW of capacity but only run it at peak times. g) Pumped hydro isn't the only game in town for energy storage. Aside from lithium-ion batteries (which is more economically competitive as a storage technology than some seem to think), there's things like iron flow batteries, thermal storage, and, yes, hydrogen.
GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
Has anyone seen rail-based gravity storage projects? Obviously they aren't at the scale of hydro, but they have much less environmental impact, are relatively easy to build. ARES North America seems to have the patent rights on it, but it'd be interesting to see more large scale demonstrators.
throwawaylinux 4y ago
Same reason why nuclear is unfashionable. Because it presents a grave threat to fossil fuel industries funding the "green" movements that demonize them.
shmerl 4y ago
It's pretty damaging to the environment and ecosystems. So it hardly can be called "green".
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
>They are blamed for displacing populations, disrupting the flow of sediments and the migration of fish, destroying natural habitat and biodiversity, degrading water quality, and for the decay of submerged vegetation and the consequent release of methane, a greenhouse gas. There is thus no longer a place for Big Hydro in the pantheon of electric greenery. Dams are blamed for displacing populations, disrupting the flow of sediments and the migration of fish, destroying natural habitat and biodiversity, degrading water quality, and for the decay of submerged vegetation and the consequent release of methane, a greenhouse gas because that is exactly what they do. >Instead, that pure status is now reserved above all for wind and solar. This ennoblement is strange, given that wind projects require enormous quantities of embodied energy in the form of steel for towers, plastics for blades, and concrete for foundations. What does he think they build dams out of?
halffaday 4y ago
I don’t think private investors can rake in fat subsidies off of hydropower.
causi 4y ago
I never understood why dams have suffered such a reversal of fortune. Maybe if the author did even the slightest bit of due diligence he would've found out most potential hydro sites in the West already have a dam on them. Without significant technological improvement hydro is effectively tapped-out already. IEEE is starting to match Medium for "I started and finished writing this article during the same session on the toilet" submissions.
- darkwizard42 4y ago
  I think there is also the now very well known issues it causes to the local environment mean it is truly an uphill battle for any kind of modified or increased construction too.
astro-codes 4y ago
It's not! In NZ at least. 57% of our electricity is hydro.
loehnsberg 4y ago
The potential for hydro-electricity is mostly exploited, and it does not offer a solution for the long-term storage of electricity for large parts of the world. Not all countries are like Norway (or Brazil or Canada). There is still space left, but it‘s simply not enough. Instead, many systems with two reservoirs are now being equipped with pumps, again this is ok for short-term storage from hours to days, but no solution to store the Northern sun for the winter. Better produce hydrogen with cheap solar in the sun belt and ship it elsewhere, or move heavy industry to places where green energy is abundant (Iceland, Qatar, …?).
MrPatan 4y ago
Because it was never about solving the problem, it was about absolution. Without suffering they won't feel they deserve the absolution they crave, so every solution has some "problem" - Electric cars still emit particles from the brakes! - Nuclear reminds me of a scary TV show I saw! - Solar doesn't let plants grow under them! - Wind turbines kills birds! The solution will be to come up with a way this type of person can feel properly absolved. A few decades or centuries ago they accomplished this with just a wooden box and a black robe, but that's not an option anymore. Not because it's better or worse, it just doesn't work today. This is not a joke, this is a Very Hard problem, and also the one with the higest payoff for society. Can you imagine being able to make these people happy and letting the rest of the world get on with their lives? Golden age. Come on, nerd harder!
- alex_duf 4y ago
  >A few decades or centuries ago they accomplished this with just a wooden box and a black robe What is the wooden box / black robe referring to? I'm missing the reference here.

Vaclav Smil gets hyped up as one of the smartest men on the planet, but apparently he can't google up the downsides of Hydro? Or is he 'just asking questions' to continue undermining solar PV and wind. Yes, yes he is.

labrador 4y ago
For what it's worth; Included among Smil's admirers is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who has read all of Smil's 36 books. "I wait for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie," Gates wrote in 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Yes, Smil appears to be the main reason Bill Gates has been actively unhelpful on climate matters. Constantly talking about how renewables aren't enough and that we need to invent new tech to save us, rather than just roll out the amazing tech we already have as fast as possible. https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/10/26/gates_green_investment_refocus/ https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/10/26/gates_green_inves... Smil was also an EV skeptic.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    Some of the "renewables aren't affordable" people are just out of date. They ran the numbers back in the early 2000s and came to the conclusion that it wouldn't be economical to switch to wind and solar. But prices, especially on solar, have been in collapse for the past 20 years. Previously unaffordable battery based grid storage quietly became a thing. EVs also dropped down to mainsteam prices. The solution to climate change is economies of scale.

wnevets 4y ago

Green has lost all meaning if we're going to include dams

bArray 4y ago

My biggest problem with hydroelectricity is the same problem I have with all dams - you're creating a structure that requires infinite maintenance. A dam does not fail gracefully.

dottedmag 4y ago

Because the amount of places where dams could be built to produce electricity is quite limited, and most of them are already in use. So hydroelectric power is fine, but there is no way to significantly increase amount of it. Edit: I was wrong, see https://web.archive.org/web/20170329132409/http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/hydropower_essentials.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170329132409/http://www.iea.or...

insane_dreamer 4y ago
Is this indeed the case, even for smaller, localized dams? Would be interesting to see a comprehensive study on this (if one has been done).
- dottedmag 4y ago
  Looks like I was wrong! This report puts current usage to 20%: https://web.archive.org/web/20170329132409/http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/hydropower_essentials.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170329132409/http://www.iea.or...
  - insane_dreamer 4y ago
    Nice find! Most interesting is to see potential in Africa and Asia/Pacific, where there is the greatest need for clean energy as consumption grows as a result of both population growth and industrialization.
    - dottedmag 4y ago
      Not so rosy for Asia: northern Asian Russian rivers that comprise a sizable chunk of the potential are very far from any inhabited places. I don't know where Chinese rivers with untapped potential are located, but I'd guess they are in Tibet.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    That report is interesting, but incomplete. Certainly there are diminishing returns on developing that last 80%. It's entirely possible that many of the locations are outright uneconomical to develop, possibly because they are hundreds of miles from the nearest significant civilization and would require enormous high voltage lines before they could be developed. Or maybe upstream of the location is a lot of people who would need to move first.

chungy 4y ago

It's not very green at all. It's known to kill large swaths of the ecosystem. The true green yet unfashionable energy source is nuclear fission.

petsfed 4y ago
That's pretty much it. The environmental objections to nuclear fission are in the same genre as objections to hydroelectric dams, but hard to compare. You pay the environmental impact of the dam upfront, in the form of ecosystem disruption by the reservoir. I'm not sure that nuclear fuel mining is worse than building a reservoir in a desert (e.g. Lake Mead), long term, to say nothing of nuclear waste storage/disposal. To be sure, power production by a wind or solar facility is at least proportional to acreage, but either of those don't entirely remove habitat. This feels more like a hit piece that amounts to "your 'green' energy sources aren't so green, hypocrites". Specifically: "This ennoblement is strange, given that wind projects require enormous quantities of embodied energy in the form of steel for towers, plastics for blades, and concrete for foundations. The manufacture of solar panels involves the environmental costs from mining, waste disposal, and carbon emissions." As if the earthworks and concrete of major dams, the steel and plastic of the generation stations didn't count. The author also ignores the justification for building megastructures on rivers in the western US (or Africa, or China, or ...): they are in deserts, so the flow (and therefore the power generation) are especially sensitive to the natural drought cycle. Build a small dam on a small river, then deal with the consequences of no power when the river runs dry every fall. Or, dam a big river, which requires a big reservoir, and only deal with drought-driven power outages when you hit the 50 or 100 year drought.
AlexandrB 4y ago
Usage of the word "green" seems to be increasingly synonymous with "carbon neutral/efficient" while ignoring other environmental costs. I suppose carbon is the most pressing issue, but I remember reading about how dams destroy natural habitats way back in grade school so this shouldn't be news.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
I'm glad more people are coming around. I just wish it was 30 years ago and we'd actually be seeing some benefits for it by now. Now it's at least 20 years out.

mszcz 4y ago

The Banqiao Dam failure [0] came to my mind the moment I read the title. The amount of deaths that single failure caused may have something to do with that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

wolfram74 4y ago
yeah, dam failures are pretty spectacular. Maybe we're collectively cooler with them because 1) they've been part of our accepted collateral damages list longer (hundreds of years) and 2) because we know better where the fall out will be we put more marginalized people there? I would be really interested in looking at property values or something like that for regions in suspected dam burst zones and neighborhoods that are just outside them. on topic onion sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjfrJzdx7DA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjfrJzdx7DA
arcticbull 4y ago
Truthfully nobody's really heard of the Bangqiao Dam failure. I doubt this contributes to the discourse.
- kortex 4y ago
  Anyone who's spent any amount of time looking into industrial and engineering disasters knows about Bangqiao. It's up there among the greatest single event losses of human life from human-created (non-war, non-disease) catastrophies, along with Bhopal, Chernobyl, Wanggongchang explosion, Halifax explosion, and a few other big ones.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    I knew about it, but I don't think if you asked an average individual on the street, they'd have any clue - unlike asking any American or Canadian about Chernobyl, or any Canadian about Bhopal or Halifax. I think Chernobyl has a much bigger influence on nuclear policy than Bangqiao on hydro despite the latter causing two orders of magnitude more deaths.

pavon 4y ago

This isn't hard to understand. * Most of the best sites for hydro (and geothermal) in western countries already have damns. * Between climate change and growing population, fresh water is becoming more and more scarce, making hydro a less dependable source of energy. * These projects take a long time to plan and build. Between these there is little opportunity for hydro to play a significant role in our short-term decarbonization plans, even ignoring ecological and safety concerns.

idiotsecant 4y ago
for some definition of the word 'best' - we have plenty of places that would be perfectly suitable other than all the pesky people it would displace. If we really cared about carbon-free energy that would be a solvable problem.
- burkaman 4y ago
  But the only reason we care about carbon-free energy is because of the pesky people. If displacing people isn't a big deal, then climate change isn't a problem and we don't need to care about carbon-free energy at all. We'd just move populations as the climate changes.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

PedroBatista 4y ago

Off of the top of my head, a giant wall of concrete is not cheap nor "green", immense negative impact on the ecosystems ( waterways, estuary downstream, fish and most species that depend on a river to survive ) Villages and cultural patrimony that sometimes must go underwater. Droughts and only small part of the Earth has rivers with enough water to make a dam that can generate power regularly.

adrian_b 4y ago
A typical example for the disadvantages mentioned by you is the dam on the Danube, where the island of Ada Kaleh and a few villages have gone under water, forcing the relocation of thousands of people. Moreover, that dam has been a major contributor to the great reduction in the number of sturgeons in the Black Sea.
- jhoechtl 4y ago
  Does the damage overweight the benefit? Would nuclear have been better? Do you want your bread toasted or light your room with candles?
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    How can you quantify that? How many gigawatt hours is halving an ecosystem's biodiversity worth?
    - jhoechtl 4y ago
      That's exactly the point. I think there is a trade-off which has to be quantified. Claimimg to be unable to quantify this trade off is a death argument to any discussion.

chc 4y ago

The word "unfashionable" seems a bit ill-defined here. The article itself makes the argument that hydro is popular and many places either have adopted it or are adopting it, so obviously that's not what "unfashionable" means. It seems like the core complaint here is that some people have criticisms of excessive damming, and it has caused governments to weigh the potential impacts of hydro projects before going ahead — but surely that is a good thing. Overall, I just don't really get the issue this article is trying to call attention to.

exabrial 4y ago

"Green", if you exclude absolute sacrifice of an entire downstream ecosystem.

cm42 4y ago
Yeah, no - I definitely do exclude claims of THE ABSOLUTE, TOTAL, AND COMPLETE DESTRUCTION OF CATEGORICALLY EVERYTHING DOWNSTREAM. Especially given that it's a centuries-old technology, installed upstream of many (perhaps "most"?) things, and yet THE ENTIRE DOWNSTREAM ECOSYSTEM (which, since all streams lead to ABSOLUTE SACRIFICE AND TOTAL DESTRUCTION), is THE ABSOLUTE ANNIHILATION OF EVERY ECOSYSTEM. Do I need to download a new copy of TehScienceConsensus.pdf again? What page did you get this from?
falcolas 4y ago
Downstream actually sees benefits from a dam, since the output of the river remains unnaturally constant even during periods of drought. The immediate upstream from a dam, however, is another story entirely.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  I think looking at the ecosystems in isolation is part of the problem. The ecosystems are connected, and affecting one affects the other. Especially for species that use both, such as salmon.
- exabrial 4y ago
  Floods are as natural as rain, wildfires, and erosion. Entire species depend on these. A good example is how we almost managed to destroy all of the sandbars on the Colorado river because we were "controlling flooding", but it took quite a while for us to realize these are only created during surge events.
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kzrdude 4y ago

keeperoftruth 4y ago

AlexandrB 4y ago
What's funny about this is that the "real world" includes physics - such as the IR reflectivity of CO2. While ROI is an entirely abstract concept (piled on top of other abstractions, like currency) created by humans.

latchkey 4y ago

I spent a couple years on a motorbike traveling all through Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (15k+ kms). Water mostly flows from the north (China) to the south in that region. The Mekong River. China and Vietnam have dammed up nearly all of the large rivers in those three countries, for hydro. There are countless projects constantly being built as well. The scale is pretty epic really. Vietnam has some of the largest number of hydro dams in the world. Downstream, there are huge swaths of empty riverbeds. In the wet season, when the rains overflow the dams, there are major floods and people who have built too close to the river edge, get swept away. Hydro certainly is green, but the effect it has on everything downstream, isn't. Especially when it is poorly managed by countries that don't really have very much ecosense. They claim they are removing dams. I've seen it, they aren't... if anything they are just building more. https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/vietnam https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/vietnam

insane_dreamer 4y ago
Yeah, the biggest problems are political, when one country controls the upstream flow. (The same issue comes up between States in the U.S.) Luckily for Smil in Manitoba this isn't an issue.
intrepidhero 4y ago
Properly managed hydro should help prevent flooding, which I imagine is incredibly valuable in an area with annual monsoon season. It's not like overflowing reservoirs are adding water to the watershed, it just means they don't yet have the in built capacity or were mismanaged, ie monsoon season arrived without sufficient capacity to absorb it, to prevent the natural flooding that was already occurring.
- latchkey 4y ago
  Key words: "properly managed".

insane_dreamer 4y ago

I think the problem is the focus on huge dam projects, for which there are very few available opportunities not already taken or which would cause a great deal of damage. Small dams, as the type promoted by Smil in the article, would indeed be beneficial, though I haven't seen a study on where such dams could be reliably placed and the projected outcomes.

insane_dreamer 4y ago
Another poster found this, which is relevant: https://web.archive.org/web/20170329132409/http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/hydropower_essentials.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20170329132409/http://www.iea.or...

josefresco 4y ago

Green?!? Dams in my home state are being removed to great applause and rejoicing. Restoring fisheries and natural habitats destroyed by reckless dam building in the last century is a growing priority.

valine 4y ago
The effects on local ecosystems are inconsequential when compared to the impact greenhouse gasses have on the world as a whole. It doesn't matter how high you set your thermostat when your house is on fire.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
Sure, it's destructive. But as long as humans continue to consume more energy, there's a need to balance that with the much greater destructive effect of greenhouse gases. It's about the lesser of evils.
ltbarcly3 4y ago
Stupid little dams built as make-work are being removed. Hydroelectric dams are not being removed.

acheron 4y ago

Because "greens" are anti-progress, anti-humanity, and pro-hairshirting, so anything that allows humanity to thrive without suffering doesn't count. The restrictions, suffering, and decrease in prosperity are the point. "Environmentalists make good movie villains because they want to make your real life worse" https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/03/environmentalists-make-good-movie-villains-because-they-want-make-your-real-life-worse/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/03/environme... "Environmentalists want to increase the costs of everyday goods and services by taxing carbon. They want you to fly less and to pay more, via offsets, when you do fly. They want you to stop eating meat. They want you to stop having kids. They want to deprive you of disabled-friendly plastic straws — and they’re coming for your delightful balloons next. They want to turn your corpse into food for plants because even the sweet release of death cannot save you from the environmentalist menace."

arcticbull 4y ago
> Environmentalists want to increase the costs of everyday goods and services by taxing carbon. They want you to pay for the impacts of carbon emissions at the point of sale instead of socializing them later. That seems fair to me. > They want to turn your corpse into food for plants because even the sweet release of death cannot save you from the environmentalist menace. In this particular case it doesn't really matter what you or anyone else want lol. We will all be plant food. I guess unless you shoot yourself into space, but even that's not a hard guarantee.
- ltbarcly3 4y ago
  > They want you to pay for the impacts of carbon emissions This can't be quantified currently. Current methods of 'paying' for carbon emissions have ended up being corrupt wealth transfers. That people are still for them is pretty good evidence they aren't really concerned about the consequences of carbon emissions.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    > Current methods of 'paying' for carbon emissions have ended up being corrupt wealth transfers. Not really, Canada just refunds people whatever they collect in carbon taxes at the end of the year, with the goal being to make the decision clearer at the point of sale. [1] > That people are still for them is pretty good evidence they aren't really concerned about the consequences of carbon emissions. Anyone who thinks you should emit less carbon understands that making carbon more expensive does just that. We don't need to let perfect be the enemy of good and have an absolutely unimpeachable answer as to exactly how much damage a metric ton of CO2 does to know that making it more expensive will help. [edit] IMO we should just let gas get to $10+/gal. [1] https://unfccc.int/climate-action/momentum-for-change/financing-for-climate-friendly/revenue-neutral-carbon-tax https://unfccc.int/climate-action/momentum-for-change/financ...

onepointsixC 4y ago

Hydro isn't unfashionable. We just don't have reasonable places to keep daming, so there's little really to talk about. Nuclear is unfashionable, because there's huge growth potential among wealthy industrial countries, but because it's not "liked" there's very little actual growth.

bpodgursky 4y ago
Actually the Yosemite valley has significant hydro potential.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  Isn't that all protected wilderness though?
  - bpodgursky 4y ago
    Of course, I'm saying > We just don't have reasonable places to keep daming Isn't super true from an energy perspective.
- jhoechtl 4y ago
  Germany is anecdotally facing an Energy crisis Nuclear power:no. Wind energy: off shore out of sight yes, but not on my mountain. Russian gas: no (more). Coal instead? No! So eveyone will install mini PV systems and become self-sufficient? First this wont work during the cold season and how incredible inneficient is this going to be? I think we must stop to outsource providing cheap energy to poor countries and tap on our.shoulders how green we are. Lithium batteries? Fine, but no lithium mine round my corner!
  - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
    There is no lithium to mine around your corner. Half of all known deposits on Earth are in Bolivia and Argentina.

ltbarcly3 4y ago

HyDrO-eLeCtRiC is NoT GrEeN - half the people on this thread, right before going back to having 95% of their power generated from fossil fuels and never bothering to even check.

idiotsecant 4y ago

Obviously hydroelectricity is massively damaging to ecosystems. My day job includes designing hydroelectric control systems and even I can admit that. That's a big part of the reason that hydro is a non-starter in much of the western world, which is probably a reasonably good thing (although there are certainly some exceptions where hydro development seems like a no-brainer to me but I digress) What's not so clear to me though, is why we aren't pumping (pun intentional) massive amounts of money into hydroelectric pumped storage. These systems are capable of storing massive amount of energy cheaply, safely, and (relative to other methods) efficiently. Every single pumped storage project gets mired in protracted legal battles and they are impossible to build. Our modern energy ecosystem requires more and more storage, and somehow we are under the illusion that we can get there with overgeneration of solar and hooking up batteries. We can't. We need storage and pumped storage is the only practical way to get there with current supply chains and technology.

api 4y ago
I've wondered for a while if we couldn't build a pipeline between the ocean and the Salton Sea in SoCal and store quite a bit of energy that way. The Salton Sea is already kind of a wasteland so at least use it for something.
- jhoechtl 4y ago
  What is the difference in meters? If not much, the effort of building will not be counterweighted by the energy storage capacity. AFAIK salton sea is pretty much at sea level?
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    It's 72 meters below, but it's not very big, and once it's full you'll have to wait for the water to evaporate away, I assume? If it could be made a permanent bay of the ocean, that might make the area less of a disaster. But it seems real hard...
    - deleted 4y ago

Kukumber 4y ago

Because lobby The day you come up with infinite and free aboundant energy will be the day you put to bankruptcy both the US, the Middle East and Russia, and they don't want that But it's in the plan anyways, we are getting the taste of it right now, globally Bonus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WeoeJyJmN4&t=455s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WeoeJyJmN4&t=455s

jandrese 4y ago
That sounds just like hand wringing over killing off the buggy whip industry. Markets are disrupted sometimes, people cope.
Giorgi 4y ago
Yeah, US is not oil-export dependent in any way.
- Kukumber 4y ago
  US depend on everyone using the petro dollar Saddam Hussein got the fate he got because he wanted to use Euro instead to trade their energy https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/feb/16/iraq.theeuro#:~:text=A%20bizarre%20political%20statement%20by,for%20the%20more%20multilateral%20euro https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/feb/16/iraq.theeur.... The moment people can be self sufficient in everything will be the moment the US collapses By collapse i mean their position of global hegemony, they'll end up becoming a normal country Same for Ghadaffi, he wanted a unique currency for Africa

kkfx 4y ago

Mountain hydro is fantastic but have an important issue: you need water and mountains, something not such rare but not so widespread either so it's VERY good to have as much as mountain hydro, but hardly suffice for most countries in the world. Sure some are luckiest like Norway or Swiss, but others are not, at least not for vast part of the country. That's the real "unfashionable" part. The rest is just a matter of expectation: PRs have sold to many the idea we can bring with us energy in significant quantity, p.v. actually offer that in a vast area of the world, of course only when the Sun shine, while you can't hardly have mountain hydro at home except veeeeeeeery few homes. Some also might fear dam incidents, oppose against not-so-small projects etc. That's is.

99_00 4y ago

Not enough potential profit to hire better lobbyists. And no easy way for politicians to profit from insider information.

_uvv0 4y ago

While I'm happy he's glad that we have reliable electricity, he should also reflect that this comes at a significant nonmonetary cost. Presumably he, like me, just hasn't paid the price of this personally in the south. The displacement of communities, loss of traditional lands, erosion of shorelines, and leached mercury into the water supply has been borne disproportionately by First Nations (indigenous) communities (1,2). This and ignorance of it is from a legacy of racist policy (at best apathy) and poor treatment of these communities. Take somewhere like Easterville that was relocated to the cheapest, least economically useful parcel of land with almost no local industry and wonder why there is poverty (3). Obviously it's not the only factor but I go up to some of these places for health care and really enjoy the work/meeting people, but it's sobering. I can't imagine it's any better in China with their massive projects but don't have any citations or experience there. 1 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-hydro-clean-environment-commission-report-1.4798560 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-hydro-clean... 2 https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/web/2016/11/Dams-increase-mercury-exposure-Canadian.html https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/web/2016/11/Dams-increase-me... 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterville,_Manitoba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterville,_Manitoba , can get free press article via google cache if you want

chewbacha 4y ago

I was hoping that the author would address the environmental concerns. But instead, they are mentioned and then dismissed without argument. The enumerations are many that are mentioned: They are blamed for displacing populations, disrupting the flow of sediments and the migration of fish, destroying natural habitat and biodiversity, degrading water quality, and for the decay of submerged vegetation and the consequent release of methane, a greenhouse gas. Yes, these all happen and are bad for the environment. Why should we still consider it to be green?

seabrookmx 4y ago
And wind turbines decimate bird populations. I wouldn't be surprised if solar panels had a negative impact on insect species. Where is the magical green line? I think most people equate "green" to anything not involving petroleum.
- jbm 4y ago
  > And wind turbines decimate bird populations. On what planet have wind turbines killed off 10% of the bird population?
- tchaffee 4y ago
  Wind turbines don't decimate bird populations. Windows and cats kill far more birds. The numbers aren't even close. Climate change and fossil fuels also kill birds. With wind turbines it is however manageable. The tech to detect birds and shut down turbines is already there. https://www.robinradar.com/bird-control-radar-system-wind-farm https://www.robinradar.com/bird-control-radar-system-wind-fa...

tb_technical 4y ago

Because of NIMBYs

rgmerk 4y ago

Hydroelectricity is unfashionable because: a) there aren't that many places left to build conventional hydro. b) of the places that are left, there's been a lot of (IMO justified) opposition on the basis that flooding wilderness and disrupting river ecosystems is bad (also, flooding rainforest tends to result in a shedload of CO2 and methane, so the climate effects of conventional hydro are nontrivial). c) Because of and b, new hydro is pretty much dead in developed countries and difficult to get funding for in the developing world. d) until very recently, there's been little need for more pumped hydro because it's cheaper to build peaking gas plants, and a wash for the environment because the energy has (mostly) been coming from coal or gas anyway. e) with the introduction of more and more wind and solar into the grid, the need for energy storage to match supply and demand has become much greater. f) Hence, there's increasing interest in new pumped storage projects around the world, or other changes to hydro to better match the peakiness of energy prices. These can be either completely new systems, or modifications to existing ones. For instance, rather than running a 100MW generator 24 hours a day, you might put an extra 300MW of capacity but only run it at peak times. g) Pumped hydro isn't the only game in town for energy storage. Aside from lithium-ion batteries (which is more economically competitive as a storage technology than some seem to think), there's things like iron flow batteries, thermal storage, and, yes, hydrogen.

GaryNumanVevo 4y ago

Has anyone seen rail-based gravity storage projects? Obviously they aren't at the scale of hydro, but they have much less environmental impact, are relatively easy to build. ARES North America seems to have the patent rights on it, but it'd be interesting to see more large scale demonstrators.

throwawaylinux 4y ago

Same reason why nuclear is unfashionable. Because it presents a grave threat to fossil fuel industries funding the "green" movements that demonize them.

shmerl 4y ago

It's pretty damaging to the environment and ecosystems. So it hardly can be called "green".

StanislavPetrov 4y ago

>They are blamed for displacing populations, disrupting the flow of sediments and the migration of fish, destroying natural habitat and biodiversity, degrading water quality, and for the decay of submerged vegetation and the consequent release of methane, a greenhouse gas. There is thus no longer a place for Big Hydro in the pantheon of electric greenery. Dams are blamed for displacing populations, disrupting the flow of sediments and the migration of fish, destroying natural habitat and biodiversity, degrading water quality, and for the decay of submerged vegetation and the consequent release of methane, a greenhouse gas because that is exactly what they do. >Instead, that pure status is now reserved above all for wind and solar. This ennoblement is strange, given that wind projects require enormous quantities of embodied energy in the form of steel for towers, plastics for blades, and concrete for foundations. What does he think they build dams out of?

halffaday 4y ago

I don’t think private investors can rake in fat subsidies off of hydropower.

causi 4y ago

I never understood why dams have suffered such a reversal of fortune. Maybe if the author did even the slightest bit of due diligence he would've found out most potential hydro sites in the West already have a dam on them. Without significant technological improvement hydro is effectively tapped-out already. IEEE is starting to match Medium for "I started and finished writing this article during the same session on the toilet" submissions.

darkwizard42 4y ago
I think there is also the now very well known issues it causes to the local environment mean it is truly an uphill battle for any kind of modified or increased construction too.

astro-codes 4y ago

It's not! In NZ at least. 57% of our electricity is hydro.

loehnsberg 4y ago

The potential for hydro-electricity is mostly exploited, and it does not offer a solution for the long-term storage of electricity for large parts of the world. Not all countries are like Norway (or Brazil or Canada). There is still space left, but it‘s simply not enough. Instead, many systems with two reservoirs are now being equipped with pumps, again this is ok for short-term storage from hours to days, but no solution to store the Northern sun for the winter. Better produce hydrogen with cheap solar in the sun belt and ship it elsewhere, or move heavy industry to places where green energy is abundant (Iceland, Qatar, …?).

MrPatan 4y ago

Because it was never about solving the problem, it was about absolution. Without suffering they won't feel they deserve the absolution they crave, so every solution has some "problem" - Electric cars still emit particles from the brakes! - Nuclear reminds me of a scary TV show I saw! - Solar doesn't let plants grow under them! - Wind turbines kills birds! The solution will be to come up with a way this type of person can feel properly absolved. A few decades or centuries ago they accomplished this with just a wooden box and a black robe, but that's not an option anymore. Not because it's better or worse, it just doesn't work today. This is not a joke, this is a Very Hard problem, and also the one with the higest payoff for society. Can you imagine being able to make these people happy and letting the rest of the world get on with their lives? Golden age. Come on, nerd harder!

alex_duf 4y ago
>A few decades or centuries ago they accomplished this with just a wooden box and a black robe What is the wooden box / black robe referring to? I'm missing the reference here.