Dr. Lars Schernikau (www.unpopular-truth.com/blog)
When we think of clean energy, hydropower often sits at the top of the list. After all, it’s renewable, seemingly reliable, and emits no direct greenhouse gases during operation. But as with anything in life and in energy… the devil’s in the details. It turns out that hydropower’s reputation as the ultimate clean energy source might be more myth than reality…
I recently wrote a blog post on hydropower that sheds light on some unpopular truths… the kind of truths you won’t hear about in sustainability pitches or clean energy PR campaigns.
Is Hydropower Nature’s “Frenemy”?
At first glance, harnessing the power of flowing water sounds perfect. No burning fossil fuels, no air pollution, just a steady stream of clean energy. But here’s the twist: large-scale hydropower projects often wreak havoc on ecosystems. Damming rivers disrupts natural water flows, affects fish migration, and leads to the flooding of vast areas, sometimes displacing entire communities. The environmental toll doesn’t end with construction… but it continues for decades.
And let’s not forget about GHGs like methane…the potent greenhouse gas that’s believed to be 25 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO₂. How does GHGs come into play? When vegetation and organic matter decompose in the stagnant waters of reservoirs, they emit GHGs like methane. Isn’t that a far cry from the squeaky clean image we’ve been sold?
Reliability Isn’t Always Reliable
We like to think of hydropower as dependable, but generation depends on water availability, which in turn depends on weather patterns. Some countries that heavily rely on hydropower are finding themselves scrambling for backup energy sources during dry seasons.
Here’s the irony: in a world increasingly affected by changing weather patterns, hydropower’s reliability diminishes. That’s not the kind of limitations we would expect for our energy future…now is it?
The Unpopular Truth About “Clean” Energy
In my detailed article on Hydropower I make one thing clear: no energy source is perfect. Every option comes with trade-offs, and hydropower is no exception. What we need is an honest conversation about those trade-offs instead of the promises of a net-zero utopia.
Hydropower has a role to play, but we should approach it with eyes wide open, acknowledging its limitations and environmental impact.
So, where does that leave us? Should we be rethink what we call “clean.” Is hydropower really as sustainable as we want it to be?
What do you think about hydropower? clean energy saviour or overhyped disruptor? I would like to hear your feedback.
Full article here: The “Unpopular Truth” about Hydro Power
Ps: feel free to subscribe to my blog and keep questioning, keep learning, and keep pushing for transparency in energy discussions.
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Methane is a favorite satanic gas for greens. The minor little problem is that the “greenhouse” effects are calculated for “dry air”, as the absorption spectrum for CH4 is overlapped by that of water vapor.
‘…as the absorption spectrum for CH4 is overlapped by that of water vapor.’
True for CO2, as well. Just saying…
”methane…the potent greenhouse gas that’s believed to be 25 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO₂”
Has anyone ever done a deep dive into how Global Warming Potential is calculated for gasses as methane? As Halla says, Dry Air is assumed in calculations which automatically invalidates results. But then there is also the spectrum that CH4 absorbs long wave radiation (@ur momisugly 3.5 and 8 microns), and there is not much radiation to absorb at surface temperature and especially top of atmosphere temperature.
Calculating Global Warming Potential for different greenhouse gasses is a nice concept, but when the calculations do not include interference with water vapor nor spectral intensity of long wave radiation as temperature changes, the results are crap. Methane being 25x more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 is obviously not reasonable.
Not crap so much as an easy “false because”; to provide folks with less than the whole picture an easy “science proof” for CAGW.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-makes-methane-more-potent-greenhouse-gas-carbon-dioxide
“Now here’s where the differences between methane and CO2 really come into play,” says Plata. “Methane is a central carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogen atoms. CO2, in contrast, is a central carbon atom with just two oxygen atoms attached to it. So if you think about the ways that those molecules can vibrate and move, methane has got many more dance moves.
“And because there are so many more vibrational and rotational modes associated with the methane molecule—a simple consequence of its geometry—it makes it a much more potent greenhouse gas.””
Can we have the precise parameters of “much more” please?
All true in a way. The problem with such statements is that methane is present in air at parts per billion – way to little to have any measurable effect even if doubled, or quadrupled, or ….. plus it’s blocked by water vapor.
Anthony,
This link does not explain:
Methane absorbs at frequencies that do not have much outgoing long wave radiation intensity.
Water vapor, which is a much more effective greenhouse gas, absorbs radiation at the same frequencies, and this interference is not accounted for in the global warming potential calculation.
Got to “How to Think About Climate Change” right here on WUWT down a few articles. Its by Will Happer and very thorough. Methane is indeed blocked by water vapor, it is present in the atmosphere in minute quantities and decomposes quickly. The “25 times” number appears by other extremist articles as up to 90 times but is meaningless because of water vapor blocking. Doubling methane will cause a small fraction of a degree increase in temperature, too small to measure.
Methane is insignificant first because it is 200 times less abundant (2 ppm CH4 v 400+ ppm CO2) and second because it has always been present at about this level since it is continuously produced by biological processes. The uncertainty of human contribution to methane concentration is larger than the measured change in atmospheric concentration.
Present day models do line-by-line calculations for the greenhouse effect, which means the overlap of lines is included. The total column from space to ground must be and is properly accounted. The modelers are not idiots, just minions.
It is the assumption that GHGs are controlling climate, and that addition of more greenhouse gases automatically means drastic global warming is the fundamental blunder. That conclusion comes, of course, from modeling. Models incorporate assumed ‘climate sensitivities’, a manipulable parameter. One might justifiably say that “To parametrize is to weaponize“.
To date, all warming since 1800 is the recovery from earlier cooling. In fact, the often reported appearance from beneath glacier ice of human artifacts thousands of years old simply tells us that conditions now are repeating the conditions of thousands of years in the past when the now melted ice was laid down.
The conviction that adding greenhouse gases, as has occurred during the exponential population growth of humanity, is “boiling” the planet to use Guterres’ phrase, is a propaganda coup. That coup has made spending of 10s of $trillions possible in a quest to decarbonize the globe, making it safe from Humanity – the most moronic concept since the Enlightenment.
The notion that rotting vegetation in reservoirs is a significant contribution to methane gas production is utterly preposterous.
There is only a significant mass of rotting vegetation in a reservoir when it is first filled, and that happens only once. After that, any such rotting vegetation is insignificant. And constituting far less biomass than the forests and scrub that get inundated when the reservoir is filled for the first time.
Even when reservoirs are drawn down during dry season, the exposed mud and rock does not produce a bumper crop of new vegetation, just a bit of grass and weed growth that dies when the reservoir fills up again in each annual cycle
And of course free flowing rivers also experience high water and low water, and along the shorelines of such streams, vegetation will grow back each year just as much as it will alongside the shorelines of reservoirs.
Finally, associated with riverine vs. impoundment vegetation growth mentioned above, there is geometry – a long relatively narrow stream, with hundreds if not thousands of miles of shoreline, will have vastly more shoreline length so exposed and inundated than a relatively short wide impoundment. The smallest ratio of perimeter length to enclosed area is of course a perfect circle.
Plus of course all reservoirs are far deeper than the rivers that discharge into or from them. Meaning the ratio of shoreline length where vegetation may regrow to mass or volume of liquid water in a reservoir vs. a stream is reduced accordingly.
Of course, warmunists don’t do math or geometry … or science for that matter.
What makes you think Lars is a “warmunist”?
TNSTAAFL
pedantic me, says TANSTAAFL -there AIN”T no such thing as a free lunch…of which I totally agree; just being a smart ass is all.
I love the look of pedantry in the morning.
Looks like – NickPick.
It is important to be wise like an owl
Norway gets 90% of its electricity from reservoir hydropower, already for about 100 years.
and about 10% from windmills on the west coast which has lots of wind.
Quebec gets 95% of its electricity from reservoir hydropower already for about 100 years.
The reservoirs do emit methane, but so do wetlands, permafrost, lakes, etc., which, on a worldwide basis, are far greater than from hydropower reservoirs, which is a flea on an elephant’s ass.
Yes, countries with tiny populations and the right terrain can and IMO should get most of their power from hydro. However, it doesn’t scale up enough for the whole world to do that.
What a useless article. Absolutely no quantification. Yes of course there may be some methane, but how much? And yes, there is risk of prolonged drought, but how much?
Can you name an entirely clean green energy source, Nick? No, of course not.
“What a useless article.”
No nitpicking opportunity here. Never mind, eh.
What you mean is, not falsifiable. Well, yes. Useless.
Why does a very simple question always vex you so, Nick?
Try again
Can you name an entirely clean green energy source?
Either you can, or…. you cannot.
Stupid question.
Because renewables are the filthiest going and require a lot of [child] slave labour.
My conscience is clear. How about yours?
No, you give a Stupid answer to a reasonable question.
Stupid comment.
By stupid question am I right in assuming than you mean there is no entirely green energy source?
There is no perfect anything.
“Falsifiable.” Interesting concept.
Does this apply to the climate change hypothesis? (Other than waiting 100 years?)
Falsifiable =
“Runaway global warming caused by elevated CO2?
Show where climates have ever demonstrated that this happened when CO2 levels were n times current or projected levels”
Incorrect. Your definition (rising temperatures with rising CO2) is correlation, and ‘correlation is not causation.’
“Falsifiability (or refutability) is a deductive standard of evaluation of scientific theories and hypotheses, introduced by the philosopher of science Karl Popper in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934).[B] A theory or hypothesis is falsifiable if it can be logically contradicted by an empirical test.
Popper… contrasted falsifiability to the intuitively similar concept of verifiability that was then current in logical positivism.” Wikipedia
Climate is regional, and the time scales are arbitrary, pick what suits you. Can you have an “empirical test” on a real planet with uncontrolled variables?
Again, is the hypothesis falsifiable? If so, how?
I don’t really know David.
But I can pose suggestions.
But then again the “brains trust” behind AGW don’t know either.
Let’s debate a subject with more impact on the human condition –
how many angels can dance on Michael Mann’s slippery head?
Lol, no room for angels with all the unicorns and fairies already there.
Nick ==> Gads! I hate it when I agree with you…. 😉
Kip, Nick has a few comments on this thread, not sure which one you are agreeing with. (See my unanswered question regarding falsifiability.)
It would have been better with some quantification, but the article appears to be intended as an invitation to do more research on hydropower as opposed to assuming it is clean. Do note that a number of hydropower dams have been removed in the US for reasons touched on in the article.
What wasn’t touched was the consequences of a dam failure for people downstream. An extreme example would be the Three Gorges dam.
The article was right on in describing hydro as an intermittent energy source, although with a time scale of months to years as opposed to seconds or minutes with wind and solar. It was known 100 years ago, where writings on utility planning mentioned the need for backing up hydro generation. On the other hand, on a short term basis, hydro is a dispatchable power source with the advantage of a very rapid response to demand.
Yes, and many hydro plants are a by-product of dams primarily created to mitigate recurrent disastrous downstream flooding events.
At least 8 dams were removed near Asheville, North Carolina, to free up the rivers and let the fish play….then Hurricane Helena arrived and the results were really bad. The locals are still trying to dig out.
To underscore Nick’s points:
To my knowledge, the number of major hydro-electric stations abandoned due to long term drought is zero. Sure fish habitat is disrupted. Its also created, he left that part out. Flooding control is another benefit to dams. As for droughts, what better thing to have on hand during a drought can there be besides a full reservoir? (The cement heads in California may want to insert “forest fire” in lieu of drought.) Methane, per your note he didn’t quantify. But while I think the warming potential of methane is overblown, so what? We’re talking about a one time pulse as the flooded area adapts in an area that accounts for a fraction of a fraction of world surface, and not a constant and continuous new source. Surprised he didn’t mention the amount of CO2 released by all the concrete, but that’s also a one time pulse.
Does it matter? My understanding is that the majority of opportunities for hydro-electric have already been exploited.
Just a writer trying to drive traffic to his blog. No value here to either side of the debate.
Doesn’t LA get good bit of it’s water from a dam in Nevada?
Without that dam and others built before CA went “green”, what would the population of LA be?
Owens river aqueduct is in central CA
Wow, finally a post by NS that makes some sense. Wonders will never cease!
From the article:”And let’s not forget about GHGs like methane…the potent greenhouse gas that’s believed to be 25 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO₂.”
Lars you forgot about the concrete. Just think of all the CO2 produced because of it. /s
Green is in the end a euphemism –
It is important to understand the drivers of green consumption
..
The results confirm the perception of green products as moral agents and provide marketers with insights into the marketing value of virtue cues in green product consumption.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-020-04493-6
— for whatever takes your virtue-seeking fancy.
From my perspective in NY:
https://www.nyiso.com/real-time-dashboard
Hydro good.
Nuclear good.
Gas good.
Dual fuel (gas or oil) good.
Wind comes and goes.
Solar buried in “other”.
It’s that simple.
So hydro is great under the right conditions.
NY’s Niagara Falls and St. Lawrence generation stations are terrific resources, along with the Gilboa pumped storage site.
https://www.nypa.gov/power/generation/generation-overview
Oh, and methane is irrelevant to “climate.”
Blazing Saddles proved that long ago… In fact schoolchildren know
Beans, beans
Good for the heart
The more you eat
The more you…
I learned it as ‘Beans, beans the musical fruit.
The more you eat, the more you toot.
The more you toot the better you feel,
then you’re ready for another meal.
So eat those beans with every meal
No one mentions that dams also mitigate floods and provide irrigation. We focus too much on a particular facet and not on the whole picture.
Yes, too true Albert
(I similarly commented above to Erik before I saw your comment.)
And supply drinking water.
How many of our large cities would exist without dams to supply drinking water?
Also, recreation. Many local economies depend on them.
The right way to use hydro is in conjunction with wind and solar. Hydro can easily smooth out the diurnal and even seasonal variation of solar, and if necessary weeks without wind. And when the wind is blowing, or sun shining, save your water.
There is a quantified account of what it would take to do this for the UK in ‘Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air’, by McKay (greatly missed).
https://www.withouthotair.com/
From memory, if you wanted to do this at scale for the UK you would have to turn most of North Wales, the English Lake District and the Scottish Highlands into pumped storage.
What about the Royal Society, a few years later?
The Royal Society did consider pumped hydro storage in its report on large-scale electricity storage, but concluded that it would have only a marginal impact on the UK’s future energy storage needs34. The report emphasized that the expansion of pumped storage in the UK is limited by geography3.The Royal Society’s analysis found that by 2050, the UK will need up to 100 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of storage capacity, which is equivalent to more than 5,000 Dinorwig pumped hydroelectric dams4. This scale of storage is not possible with pumped hydro or batteries4
Its a hiding to nowhere. Use hydro if you have the geography, no reason not to, but its pretty much irrelevant to the task of materially reducing global CO2 emissions. Well, as are all renewables.
Wind and solar are useless. With or without, in conjunction with or not, they are useless to a modern progressing society.
Back to the Future
How climate-friendly waterwheels are coming around again
https://www.inkl.com/news/how-climate-friendly-waterwheels-are-coming-around-again
If you live in a city, where will you stable your donkey or horse?
And how many poo bags will you have to carry to clean up after it?
But only if you have the geography to support that level of hydro, for most countries that simply isn’t the case.
A small amount of hydro can do a lot of smoothing.
How about some quantification. Take the UK as an example, the task at present is to ‘smooth’ a variation from about 25GW peak, or 15GW average, to less than 1GW, of several hours duration. Under 5GW for several days.
How much hydro do you need? And if its to be pumped, how much extra wind do you need to fill it?
I agree with Michel that you need to provide some quantification. One anecdote was that in the western U.S. the swing capacity from hydro was already max’ed out in 2010.
I strongly believe that the smoothing be done at at the wind or solar installations and paid for by those installations. One way to do this is limit non-dispatch facility ramp rate to 2% per minute or face substantial penalties.
With respect to batteries – Moss Landing? having mentioned that, there are battery chemistries better suited for short term smoothing.
How about some numbers. How much hydro do you need to handle a month of cloudy weather with no wind?
And by the way, smoothing our seasonal variation and if necessary weeks without wind?
Dinorwig Power Station has an energy storage capacity of approximately 9.1 GWh (gigawatt-hours)123.
This pumped-storage hydroelectric facility can provide a maximum power output of 1,728 MW (megawatts) for up to six hours before depleting its water supply15
UK peak demand is 47GW. Wind is about 30GW faceplate, average about 15GW.
Dinorwig is one of the largest such facilities in Europe.
The idea of making up ‘weeks without wind’ from that or any number of them is absurd. Solar in the UK is 17GW. Equally absurd.
I’m not talking about pumped hydro. Just ordinary hydro using a regular dam as storage, with enhanced generation capability..
Nick, how long do you reckon the William Hovell Dam on the King River near you would provide the necessary power to supply the smoothing required when the wind goes walkabout (as it frequently does without notice, and for indeterminate lengths of time)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hovell_Dam
That dam is a small dam for irrigation, with hydro as a minor byproduct. But OK, it has 13.5e9 kg at 35m head (max). Say 1e12 Joules you can use. That is about 280 MWh, enough to supply Victoria for about 6 min. But Eildon, down the way, has about 70 times the capacity*height. That is looking at about 7 hours, almost enough to see us through the night. Add in Dartmouth, Hume and you have at least a day, if Vic were 100% solar. And Victoria is not a hydro state.
So is what you’re saying that if Vic was 100% wind & solar powered, and if the wind stopped blowing for 1 day, then all the hydro dams across the State would have to be sucked dry to keep the grid delivering for just 7 hours?
Also Nick, Eildon, Hume, Dartmouth would not have anywhere near the storages you indicate if the blackout happened in say March – June, when they would all be significantly emptied of water for downstream irrigation commitments.
I guess the Goulburn River would be running a banker with irrigation delivery even now as we’re typing?
Nick,
Great idea, and after you have drained Eildon, how are you going to refill it?
I’m sure that the users of the irrigation systems attached to the lake would appreciate the lack of water for all subsequent years. If you look at the historical levels in Eildon you would soon realise that it is no good for electrical generation, grid scale. How much water would you have approved for release in 2019?
https://www.g-mwater.com.au/storages/history.asp?ContainerID=lakeeildon
Yes, of course river flow is a limitation. But you can amplify it. If it is supplementing solar, then you only get about 50% gain, with hydro needed only 2/3 of the time. But with wind, you might only need hydro about a tenth of the time, which is a much better use of on the basic river flow.
The irrigation area is about 100 km downstream, and has large pondages (eg Waranga). Hydro generation doesn’t consume water. They still get it.
Did you just argue the case for the other side there? 🙂
I think I did low ball the calc. Another one says that if Eildon alone had to supply the state, the level would drop (starting from full) as 20 cm/hr.
Hydro and wind together get much more value from the river flow. Maybe 10x. But Vic rivers aren’t that big. That is why hydro is a small part of our generation.
There are a couple of rivers in the tropics which get a fair bit of rainfall every couple of years.
Oh, and some in SW Tassie. The Gary, or Graeme or Geoffrey or something like that. Near the confluence with the Ernest?
Is another reason why hydro is a small part of Vic’s power generation the prediction of “climate guru” Tim Flannery that
“even the rains that fall from the sky won’t fill the rivers and dams”?
(How’s that one working out?)
Take the case of the UK again. It has roughly 17GW of solar which vanishes almost totally in the winter. What would it take to back that up for the three winter months?
It would take the entire Quebec James Bay Project, which includes Robert-Bourassa, La Grande-3, and La Grande-4 at a few thousand GW earch. And then you would still have to worry about wind going AWOL. There is no way they can do what you’re suggesting, use any kind of hydro, pumped or not, for that scale of purpose..
Dinorwig by the way is the largest UK hydro installation, pumped or not.
Three Gorges is huge, I think far and away the biggest in the world. If you have that kind of geography, fine. But very few places do. The Royal Society was right. Idiotically wrong about hydrogen of course, but one has to wonder if that was not tongue in cheek. Proposing to dam North Wales, Lake District and Scottish Highlands to reduce 1% of global emissions by half would have provoked howls of rage… Whereas hydrogen provoked what I suspect was the desired Yes Minister reaction, kicked it into the long grass.
It was something like, this is what it will take. Now are you really sure you want to try it?
Nick some facts for you.
There are 62 countries in the world with so called renewable electricity shares of over 60%. All these countries account for just 9% of electricity consumption worldwide and they rely heavily on hydropower not wind or solar which only provide 11% of their power.
There are only 5 countries (Namibia, Uruguay, Denmark, Lithuania and Portugal) where wind and solar provide around 30% of generation.
Sweden also makes heavy use of woody biomass. Found the following with Google.
no smoothing would be necessary without green energy- then the hydro would be a real addition to total power production
For some geographically favoured countries and regions, e.g. Norway or the Pacific North-West part of North America, that may indeed be a viable option.
For others, such as the island of Great Britain ? … Not so much …
The attached graph is a “Demand + CCGT + Renewables + Inter-connectors (ICTs) + Water-based” subset of the data for the GB grid for the last week (Saturday the 18th to yesterday, Friday the 24th).
Please examine it carefully, then come back and explain just how “easy” it would be for NESO to replace the CCGT component of the GB grid with “Hydro” (and/or Pumped Storage).
But if flexible hydro isn’t available do not install wind or solar because battery and hydrogen storage are both not fit for purpose.
“Hydro can easily smooth out the diurnal and even seasonal variation of solar, and if necessary weeks without wind”
Go sell your smooth hydro to the Dutch.
An even better way to use hydro is in conjunction with fossil fuel and nuclear. Use the hydro to manage the peaks so that you don’t have to over build these other sources.
You mean the way the grid used to operate, way back before we lost our collective minds and put up all the windmills and solar panels?
That approach will work well in a computer game where the right amounts of wind, sun and river flow can be programmed in. Sadly, the approach does not work well in real life. It won’t work for the UK, the US and a few hundred other countries and I don’t think the Chinese care.
Aw Nick, you made a great comment up thread and now you’ve gone and ruined it. Using hydro to smooth out wind and solar makes no more sense than using anything else to smooth wind and solar. If you are building a grid that uses sources that require smoothing, you’re building an inefficient, expensive, grid.
The only smoothing any grid should do is in response to fluctuating demand. Designing a grid that must smooth both fluctuating demand and fluctuating generation is not stupid. Its so many orders of magnitude worse than stupid that there is no word for it.
“ Designing a grid that must smooth both fluctuating demand and fluctuating generation is not stupid.”
There is little difference. The basic problem is a gap between supply and demand, and it is the gap which must be fixed, whether caused by high demand or low supply.
It’s happening in many places. Tasmania has enough hydro for its citizens. But it exports to Victoria when the price is high (low wind) and imports when it is cheap (windy). They make money, keep the lights on locally, and keep up dam levels.
Or hydro can reduce the need for other reliable power sources such as coal and gas and nuclear.
Orbs, great big brass ones. British Columbia supplies 82% of its electricity from hydro and less than 1% from wind and solar. Maybe in Australia you need to save water but in the real PNW there’s more water than you really want most of the time.
and Site C will add even more capacity.
Sell some to WA, OR, CA?
Yes, of course. Hydro becomes very valuable when the price fluctuates, since it can sell high.
“When vegetation and organic matter decompose in the stagnant waters of reservoirs, they emit GHGs like methane.”
I could be wrong but I believe most vegetation is removed.
Some but not all. The first few years after flooding there is a burst of aquatic (fish) action that tapers off. After about 10 years under water the organic debris is gone and so is the good fishing. So I have been told.
“Damming rivers disrupts natural water flows, affects fish migration, and leads to the flooding of vast areas, sometimes displacing entire communities.”
Yuh, but you then have a nice lake useful for many purposes- public water supply, recreation, different aquatic flora and fauna, etc.
And a “new” ecosystem develops.
There’s a lot of bullshit in this post, especially the notion that the planet is getting drier due to “climate change”, as well as worries over methane. The vegetation only collects and rots at any significant scale with a brand new reservoir, which most hydro plants are not.
He is correct that reservoirs cause disruptions in naturally flowing river systems, but there are both positive as well as negative impacts from impoundments. Including hydro power production, flood control, and recreation.
This sounds like somebody who wants to shut down and remove dams and replace them with windmills and solar panels. Not gonna happen. Of course he is invited to move into a flood plain not protected from flooding.
It was extremely low-effort, lightweight garbage. Utterly worthless writing. WUWT should be ashamed of itself for wasting our time with this trash.
You didn’t have to read to the end or comment !!!
thanks for your comments, i completely disagree that wind and solar are a viable grid scale solution. the point of this article is to make people aware that all power sources have issues and there are no “clean” or “net-zero” power sources in this world todate. i am in full favor of nuclear and most efficient coal and gas as well as hydro and gethermal solutions
I’ve lived near 3 dams. on the upper Missouri River for much of my life. On a whole
they are immensely beneficial to the local communities. As far as the impact on
the fisheries’ the “tailwater” sections below the dams are world renowned with
fishermen from around the world coming to experience and are considered one
of Montana’s best trout fisheries.
Electricity trade between the US and Canada varies a lot from year to year. We buy more electricity from them than they buy from us.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2024.11.12/main.svg
We mainly buy hydropower from them.
If a year does not have much rain hydro power output will be below average. I imagine the Canadian hydro power exports would be the first to be reduced if the hydro electricity supply was weaker than average.
I used to live near the (RURAL) path of a 765kV transmission line between Quebec and NYC; sending hydro power south. It’s LOUD.
I think I read somewhere that Quebec is in a drought, so perhaps there’s less power to sell to NY.
Not at all clear to me that hydropower issues are due to weather variability as opposed to: incompetence, increasing water demand by urban residents (higher population), overall increasing water demand by higher population overall, silting, poor maintenance/mismanagement etc etc.
Sounds like a US West coast state that’s been in the news lately.
Weather variability has been a known problem with hydro for more than a century – e.g. take a look in the Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers from around 1920. having said that, I don’t think weather variability is any worse now than it was then.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
What a short-sighted and pathetic article. Little perspective and avoidance of relevance.
Lars ==> Hydro is one of the best power sources available to mankind. Each of the “downsides” you point out is also an “upside”.
The lakes created by hydro dams offer recreation, fishing and are nominally an ecological improvement in most locations. The resultant lakes add beauty and more ecological opportunity. We seldom worry about the methane production from natural lakes, so why worry about it from hydro-dam lakes?
Properly managed hydro is exceedingly dependable — though not fool-proof, very few large hydro projects have experienced dead-pool conditions. Hydro-dam lakes are almost always fresh water reservoirs, supplying drinking and irrigation water, and are used for flood-control. It is often true that these competing demands threaten dependability — but it is not the hydro use that does so, but water demand.
The energy used to generate electricity is the stored energy of falling rain and water running downhill. The water is not used up, not wasted, and remains in the Earth’s water cycle in a very natural way.
Until we have reliable and widely distributed Small Modular Nuclear and Large New Generation Nuclear, hydro will continue to be our ‘greenest’ (hate that word!) source.
And, because hydro is also reservoirs, there will no no abandoning it soon.
It seemed to me that the intent of the article was to consider the downsides of hydro as well as the upsides as opposed to saying “hydro is all bad”. There isn’t a single energy source that doesn’t have downsides.
Having said that, I agree that hydro has a lot of upsides as you have pointed out.
thanks Kip, i mention that i am in full suppport of Hydro.. but the notion that Hydro is “clean” or without issues is simpley wrong… and to count hydro as “zero GHG” is also wrong…
Fossil fuel is terrible stuff. And everything else is even worse. Including living without fossil fuel.
Now CH4 is proclaimed the primary culprit held against hydropower. As usual, there is a kernel of truth buried beneath this obsessive campaign: Flooding of biomass does result in decomposition accompanied by some release of CH4 and CO2. From HydroQuebec: Greenhouse gas emissions and reservoirs
“Impoundment of hydroelectric reservoirs induces decomposition of a small fraction of the flooded biomass (forests, peatlands and other soil types) and an increase in the aquatic wildlife and vegetation in the reservoir.
The result is higher greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions after impoundment, mainly CO2 (carbon dioxide) and a small amount of CH4 (methane).
However, these emissions are temporary and peak two to four years after the reservoir is filled.
During the ensuing decade, CO2 emissions gradually diminish and return to the levels given off by neighboring lakes and rivers.
Hydropower generation, on average, emits 50 times less GHGs than a natural gas generating station and about 70 times less than a coal-fired generating station.”
Activists also claim that dams in boreal regions like Quebec are not the problem, but tropical reservoirs are a big threat to the climate. Contradicting that is an intensive study of Brazilian dams and reservoirs, Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Reservoirs: Studying the Issue in Brazil
“1) The budget approach is essential for a proper grasp of the processes going on in reservoirs. This approach involves taking into account the ways in which the system exchanged GHGs with the atmosphere before the reservoir was flooded. Older studies measured only the emissions of GHG from the reservoir surface or, more recently, from downstream de-gassing. But without the measurement of the inputs of carbon to the system, no conclusions can be drawn from surface measurements alone.
2) When you consider the total budgets, most reservoirs acted as sinks of carbon in the short run (our measurements covered one year in each reservoir). In other words, they received more carbon than they exported to the atmosphere and to downstream.
3) Smaller reservoirs are more efficient as carbon traps than the larger ones.
4) As for the GHG impact, in order to determine it, we should add the methane (CH4) emissions to the fraction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions which comes from the flooded biomass and organic carbon in the flooded (terrestrial) soil. The other CO2 emissions, arising from the respiration of aquatic organisms or from the decomposition of terrestrial detritus that flows into the reservoir (including domestic sewage), are not impacts of the reservoir. From this sum, we should deduct the amount of carbon that is stored in the sediment and which will be kept there for at least the life of the reservoir (usually more than 80 years). This “stored carbon” ranges from as little as 2 percent of the total carbon output to more than 25 percent, depending on the reservoirs.
5) When we assess the GHG impacts following the guidelines just described, all of FURNAS’s reservoirs have lower emissions than the cleanest European oil plant. The worst case – Manso, which was sampled only three years after the impoundment, and therefore in a time in which the contribution from the flooded biomass was still very significant – emitted about half as much carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2 eq) as the average oil plant from the United States (CO2 eq is a metric measure used to compare the emissions from various greenhouse gases based upon their global warming potential, GWP. CO2 eq for a gas is derived by multiplying the tons of the gas by the associated GWP.) We also observed a very good correlation between GHG emissions and the age of the reservoirs. The reservoirs older than 30 years had negligible emissions, and some of them had a net absorption of CO2eq.”
Hydro dams are not scalable. They are like freeways where you can’t add more lanes to keep traffic flowing. As population increases you reach the point where demand overwhelms supply.
” a world increasingly affected by changing weather patterns, “
So weather changes. Who knew?
“increasingly” . . . the world is infested by influencers (those with a keyboard and a video camera) with only one oar in the water.
One can build railroad tracks up a hill in a spoke-like configuration with the hub a large wind tower. Then pull heavy waste-filled box cars up and release them when electrons are needed. I doubt this will keep the oceans from boiling, but it could make a good tourist attraction. And, double plus good — no methane!
The amount of energy you would get vs the cost of building and operating would make this one of the most expensive forms of energy storage. Even batteries would be cheaper.
Boo hoo!
Notwithstanding that we are already saturated with CO2, ultraviolet light degrades methane into CO2.
I’m mystified as to what he means by ‘ in a world increasingly affected by changing weather patterns’. No such thing is happening.
Technically, he’s right (less the “increasingly” part).
But if there were not meetings of cold fronts and warm fronts across the globe, there’d be no “weather”.