Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I grew up on a remote cattle ranch in the middle of miles of forest in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains of California. We had our own hydroelectric power plant. It was built by my father and my brother-in-law. They put a two-foot high dam across the creek (blue line), and diverted the water into a mile of ditch that they dug from there to a lake that they built by the house.
Figure 1. Renewable energy, circa 1952
Then they built a penstock and dropped part of the water back to a powerhouse by the creek. Inside the powerhouse was a Pelton Wheel that drove an alternator. Poles carried the power (4,000 volt, 10 kilowatts) to the ranchhouse. That was the only power for the ranch, and there was only us to keep it running. That was my introduction to renewable energy.
When I was a kid, our grade school took a field trip and toured Shasta Dam, in Northern California. I was astounded by it. I loved the idea that it was just a bigger version of our little powerplant.
Figure 2. Shasta Dam, Northern California. Note the five large penstocks at the lower left leading to the powerhouse. MORE PHOTOS
These days, of course, it is almost impossible to build a small dam in the US, much less something on the scale of Shasta Dam. People raise hundreds of objections, any project is stalled before it starts. This has always seemed extremely foolish to me, since hydroelectric power is proven, 24-hour, baseline power. Despite that, there’s a whole branch of the environmental movement that considers dams as forces of evil.
Which is why I laughed out loud when I saw the latest numbers on the CDM. The CDM is the “Clean Development Mechanism” of the Kyoto Protocol. The CDM is the foundation of the carbon emission credit system in use in Europe. Companies which emit more CO2 than the regulations allow can purchase credits. The companies pay the money to sponsor an emissions-reducing project in a developing country, so in theory everything balances out.
There’s a New York Times article on the CDM here. This is the part that I found to be hilarious (emphasis mine):
Since it began operating in 2006, the board has validated 2,918 projects, 40 percent of them in China, according to the U.N. Environment Program’s database at the Risoe Center, in Denmark, which tracks every project in the C.D.M. pipeline. The center’s data show that 1,668 projects are in hydroelectric power and 1,060 of those are in China.
So the effect of the Kyoto Protocol is that it is OK for the West to burn fossil fuels, as long as the West is also subsidizing hydroelectric dam construction in China …
Does anyone but me find that truly and bizarrely hilarious? I’m sure the Chinese are busting up laughing, and saying “Give us 20 Kyoto protocols, this is great, we’ll let you well-meaning Western fools build all the hydroelectric plants China can hold” …
On reflection, Crispin, I liked the era in NZ when us taxpayers owned the national grid, the hydro dams, the Post and Telegraph department, the Railways department, the National Airways Corporation, the Education department (which dispensed free university education) etc ad infinitum – it seems far better, in retrospect, than the current reality of the plethora of foreign businesses that bought everything for a song, milked it all to husks and now extort the taxpayers for what was once our birthright. All ‘privatisation’ has done has been to create the Consultant, a class of men and women in suits who neither spin nor sew, but utter endless mindless businesspeak as they add another layer of extortion and continue to make us peasants in our own country.
Watch the future world map at http://green-agenda.com and you’ll have the answer to your question. It’s deliberate planning.
@willis
A lake is generally considered to be over 5 acres and/or deep enough so that no light can reach the bottom. The “lake” pictured appears to cover about one acre and (just a guess) probably isn’t anywhere deep enough to prevent light from reaching the bottom. It’s a pond.
A really cool setup nonetheless. Davey likes it! Does the race ever need dredging? Any problems with flooding? Does the pond have a spillway?
Ron House says:
October 14, 2010 at 5:02 am
tidal power most likely shortens the life of the Earth as a habitable planet.
Will the Moon leave Earth orbit before the Sun goes red giant & envelops the Earth? Seriously, if you have such a long-term view of the future, you’d do better spending your time considering how humanity will survive the next 90ky glacial. The ice should be arriving in the next 2-20ky.
Ron House says:
October 14, 2010 at 5:02 am
Are these original thoughts or did you get them from somewhere? Has anyone attempted to quantify the effect?
Ron House says…
LOL :-))
It is the same people that stops us from building more dams in Norway.
And believe me, we could build a LOT of small power-plants. Thousands of them.
Peter whale says:
October 14, 2010 at 4:26 am
Ah the wonderful carbon equivalence, whereby nuclear is not considered renewable and is given a carbon equivalence number so you pay carbon tax.
They seem to have thought of everything. 😉
DaveE.
@Ron
Have you done any back of the envelope calculations on the energies and timescales involved?
Lucy Skywalker says:
October 14, 2010 at 3:53 am
“Willis, we need a new textbook of Basic Science.”
I think we need a Web-based Tree-of-Knowledge.
Which could be used to produce school-books for Science classes.
But how to keep the Connolleys away?
@willis
In case you didn’t know, as a “developing” nation China is exempt from the CO2 restrictions in the Kyoto protocol. A couple of years ago China also took the title away from the United States as the world’s largest single emitter of anthropogenic CO2. It probably has the number one title for methane too given that rice paddies account for about half of all anthropogenic methane emissions.
Little wonder that the United States refused to ratify Kyoto – it would have been economic Hara-kiri when it gives a free pass to the largest GHG sources. Adding insult to injury is the original protocol granted credits (emissions offsets) for reforestation. The US is very active in reforestation efforts and when it came to light that the US could meet all its potential Kyoto obligations for reducing CO2 through reforestation credits the next revision of the protocol practically negated all reforestation credits under the rubric the latest “science” had determined that reforestation doesn’t help all that much in sequestering CO2. I remember at the time (about 10 years ago) Scientific American ran an article on it and actually defended both Clinton and Bush for refusing to sign off on Kyoto for the very reasons cited above. I doubt Scientific American would have the cajones or integrity to run the same article again today.
Similar development with World Bank financing fossil fuel projects.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/LJ15Dj02.html
Dams are evil because man is evil, and dams benefit man. That’s enough reason to be against them. Gaia will punish those wicked Chinese for there sin of murdering the sacred river dolphin with their evil dams.
BTW, my main interest is freshwater ecology. I grew up in Arizona. Arizona has a lot of dams. Arizona also has more species of native fish on the endangered list then some states have in total. Dams are usually blamed. Dams are blamed for a lot of things. I have been listening to the Anti-dam arguments for 30 years. Most of them don’t hold water.
The populations of most endangered fish have not changed significantly in 20 years. The main pressure on native fish populations are from the introduced centrarchids, Morone, and that damn darling of the enviro-wacko left, Gambusia afinis.
The temperature thing has some validity, but every workable solution ever proposed has been vehemently opposed by the greenies. Its as if they don’t really want to solve the problem.
Hydroelectric has its challenges, but comparatively, it is clean, reliable and well-understood. It is even possible to deal with many of the concerns of dams: nutrient levels downstream, fish spawning upstream, etc. I don’t think it is any coincidence that places like Idaho where hydroelectric is used extensively have cheap reliable electricity (about half the average price we pay in California). No doubt there are places dams should not be built, but what amounts to an outright ban is ridiculous — and foolish. Hydroelectric should be embraced by anyone concerned with the environment and emissions.
BTW, very cool to hear about your home hydroelectric project growing up. That is true ingenuitiy at its best!
I live on a creek and have been toying with designs for hydro-power without a dam. It would be impossible to implement though, since the county is hassling me just to replace a garage within 35′ of the creek, where the old one sat for 40+ years. Seems in the new county land-use code, they don’t want anything done within 35′ of the creek, in spite of there being many residences within that space.
People have become so accustomed to reading eco-nonsense, they sometimes fail to see satire. I thought Ron’s comment was pretty funny!
Joe Lalonde says:
October 14, 2010 at 4:23 am
The energy comes from the difference in water pressure (not velocity) between the turbine inlet and outlet.
EIKE recently published an analysis to address the fantasy that pumped storage driven by wind power could fulfill Germany’s energy requirements during e.g. the typical 3-day lull in winds. It turns out that 3 cubic kilometres have to be pumped up to an altitude of about 3000 metres to store sufficient potential energy for hydro-electric recovery to power the nation during a lull — if no other source of energy is permitted.
How much water is that? EIKE point to the Starnberger See, Germany’s 4th-largest, about 20 km (12 miles) long and almost 130 metres (425 ft) deep. Pumped to the top of Germany’s highest mountain, the Zugspitze.
Calculations that anybody could replicate, using 10th-grade physics. Germany’s Chancellor has a PhD in physics.
Yeah, it’s really funny to watch the “environmentalists” destroy the economy. We are REMOVING hydroelectric facilities in the Pac. NW. Next thing you know, we will have to buy carbon credits for this completely insane nonsense?
HenryP says: “…In my 50m2 swimming pool I measured an evaporation rate of 2500 liters in one week (clear blue skies all week, max. temp. 31-34C during the day, water temp 25-26 C) . Compare this to my 40 liters of patrol (gas) that I use in one month.”
And compare it to the 5 milliliters of eyedrops I use in one month! Whoa-ho!
Sustainable source of energy. There is no renewable energy – if there was we would have perpetual motion machines!!!
The Ministry of Truth in our world should be called the Ministry of Global Warming
“Does anyone but me find that truly and bizarrely hilarious? I’m sure the Chinese are busting up laughing, and saying “Give us 20 Kyoto protocols, this is great, we’ll let you well-meaning Western fools build all the hydroelectric plants China can hold” … ”
…and they call *us* the crazy ones for criticizing the UN/Kyoto madness…
What can I say? We have lost our freedoms to a bureaucratic state. There is no reason why every year five thousand new laws are passed, each one a thousand pages thick and unread by representatives who vote for them. But water power is something the environmentalists, despite being greenies, hate. Not just here but everywhere in the world. Chile is planning to a huge hydroelectric project in Patagonia in the south. Nobody lives there so they need a long transmission line to bring it north. The land where it is to be built is entirely empty but the environmentalists went in and discovered a previously unknown coral that would be endangered by that project! These are Americans who have started a branch of their organization in Chile just to oppose that hydroelectric project. Chile happens to be sovereign country and Americans have no right to tell them what to do with their own natural resources. They have succeeded in stopping other hydro projects in South America and in Africa while at the same time agitating against coal fired power plants as well.
Steve Keohane says:
October 14, 2010 at 8:57 am
Got beaver? They’ll build a dam for you and once it’s there the same laws that stop you from building a dam will stop you from removing theirs. Kind of ironic that beavers have a right to build a dam and you don’t. That’ll solve at least one part of your problem.