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International Hydroelectric Thread

Re: Need to rant about hydroelectric sources!!

Unread postby Macsporan » Fri 09 Sep 2005, 02:12:11

Monte,

If you would care to dispell my ignorance, I would care to listen. :)
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Re: Need to rant about hydroelectric sources!!

Unread postby FairMaiden » Fri 09 Sep 2005, 13:30:22

Hmm...we COULD have made a fortune with our hydro - but we sold it out and now we'll be paying thru the nose to a US company to get electricity in the future. I can feel it in my bones!

Its BC, not Newfoundland.

We have sold every natural resource we own - hydro was the last one. I wish you would see rioting in the streets over it but in BC everyone thinks we live in the best place on earth and nothing can touch us. I kid you not.

Its amazing our economy has survived this long.
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Re: Need to rant about hydroelectric sources!!

Unread postby richardmmm » Fri 09 Sep 2005, 18:37:45

hydro produces large amounts of green houses gas in the form of methane, which is worse than CO2 from many other energy sources.

it also invovles flooding large areas of land.

the main problem is all the rotting gunk in the bottom of the lakes produces vast amounts of methane.

it's not everything it's cracked up to be.

it works for certain areas like switzerland where there are mountains and natural valleys to contain large amounts of water, in areas that are semi useless due to extreme topography, but it doesn't work where you have to flood such large areas, like the new dams in china.
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Re: Need to rant about hydroelectric sources!!

Unread postby Macsporan » Sat 10 Sep 2005, 08:38:14

Yes, nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

Do all lakes emit methene or is this curse restricted to dams?

Pardon my scepticism but I think that the greenhouse gas damage of dam, even given that its methane not CO2, is going to be trifling compared to a coal, gas or oil plant.

As for damage to the environment hydro and nuclear aren't even on the same planet.

Build more dams, I say.

Build more of them.
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Re: Need to rant about hydroelectric sources!!

Unread postby Ludi » Sat 10 Sep 2005, 08:55:27

Who will pay for dredging these dams?

Most of the world's 45,000 large dams don't do their jobs properly. So concludes the first ever global audit of a technology that has cost $2 trillion over the past century...

Dams generate hydroelectricity, prevent floods, irrigate farms and supply water to cities. But they have also wrecked ecosystems and "led to the impoverishment of millions", who lost their land to reservoirs or saw dams destroy their fisheries.

The report calls for an end to dams that are imposed on communities without their agreement. But its most remarkable findings are on the widespread technical failures of dams.

Studies carried out by the commission found that:

• One in four dams irrigate "less than 35 per cent" of the land they were supposed to

• The cost over-runs of construction are 56 per cent on average

• Two-thirds of dams deliver less water to cities than promised. A quarter delivered less than half the promised water

• Over half of hydroelectric dams do not generate as much power as promised

• Some flood-control dams "have increased the vulnerability of river communities to floods"

One reason many dams have failed to deliver is that their reservoirs have clogged up with silt far faster than expected. Every year an extra one per cent of the world's reservoir capacity is taken up with silt. In the worst cases, reservoirs lost more than 80 per cent of their storage capacity to silt in less than 30 years.


http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn181
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Re: Need to rant about hydroelectric sources!!

Unread postby Macsporan » Sat 10 Sep 2005, 09:29:46

The State shall pay in the common interest, financed by heavy taxation on the wealthy.

Are these failings the fault of the dams, or perhaps the result of lack of follow-up investment?
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Re: Need to rant about hydroelectric sources!!

Unread postby Ludi » Sat 10 Sep 2005, 09:35:55

Macsporan wrote:The State shall pay in the common interest, financed by heavy taxation on the wealthy.

Are these failings the fault of the dams, or perhaps the result of lack of follow-up investment?


To me it looks like a failing to take into account the actual effect of the dam under real-world conditions.

Smaller dams make much more sense environmentally, and can still be used for hydroelectric generation, though on a more local scale.

A good discussion of dams on the local scale is Yeoman's classic book "Water for Every Farm." If you're interested in this topic, I recommend it.
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Re: Need to rant about hydroelectric sources!!

Unread postby Macsporan » Sat 10 Sep 2005, 09:48:25

I think smaller dams would be good too.

Anything to large tends to suffer from apoplexy at the centre and anemia in the extremities.
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Re: Need to rant about hydroelectric sources!!

Unread postby oiless » Sat 10 Sep 2005, 18:41:32

Quoting myself from another topic:

Not really part of anything, but when they filled Williston Lake during the early '70's it screwed up the weather for years. I expect it permanently changed it, however I didn't have the experience of the weather beforehand to compare to. I do remember the "oldtimers" discussing it though. From my own memory I do remember the winter of 1971. Moose everywhere in the Omenica Valley, bellying through five or six feet of snow, starving. The lowland willow flats of the Peace river were the moose' winter forage, they came down from the higher valleys of the upper Peace river, Omenica, Osilika, Ingenika, and Prophet Rivers, as well as other smaller rivers, to winter. When the resevoir flooded they lost that habitat in a season. I would guess that tens of thousands died, I was informed by a ministry of the enviroment biologist a few years back, long after the fact, that it was "only a handful of animals". That defies the evidence of my own eyes. Green power at work. For every action, a reaction.


Large hydro projects are often disasterous in their consequences. Fisheries are often wiped out for instance.
The Bennett dam enabled a local bottom feeding fish (local name "squaw fish") to migrate into river systems which it had not inhabited before. This decreased stocks of rainbow trout and other sport fish in those rivers, due to egg bed depredation. Arctic Graying are now red listed in the Williston Lake watersheds, far cry from when I was a kid. There were times when the rivers were absolutely thick with them, you couldn't look at the water without seeing grayling, if you tossed out a line with a dry fly on it grayling would fight over it.
Over fishing is also a concern, as the area is made much more accessible by the lake than it was before.

Where some see a few furry animals losing their homes, I see (from personal experience) vast enviromental impacts, whole ecosytems destroyed, river deltas eroded away, polluted water, destruction of the very things we will need one day, when we can no longer wander about pretending we are gods above nature, and have to live within our means.



Short overview of dam effects.
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Re: Need to rant about hydroelectric sources!!

Unread postby richardmmm » Sat 10 Sep 2005, 19:35:49

Macsporan wrote:Yes, nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

Do all lakes emit methene or is this curse restricted to dams?

Pardon my scepticism but I think that the greenhouse gas damage of dam, even given that its methane not CO2, is going to be trifling compared to a coal, gas or oil plant.

As for damage to the environment hydro and nuclear aren't even on the same planet.

Build more dams, I say.

Build more of them.




I believe that methane as a greenhouse gas is far worse then CO2. It traps heat much more effectively. Of course all bodies of fresh water are subject to rotting matter at the bottom, but creating large artifical ones is not necessarily intelligent.
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Re: Need to rant about hydroelectric sources!!

Unread postby redfire » Sun 11 Sep 2005, 10:59:14

With today's technology do you have to dam a river to produce hydro power? I remember seeing a show on how small veriable pitch turbine generators could be installed in a river and you could not tell they where there. What if 10,000 of these type of generators were linked together?

Most hydro projects look they were designed with 1920's technology with massive dams and turbines.

Something to think about, every car has an alternator in it producing electricity and there are millions of car's out there. Why can't there be millions of small hydro generators feeding the grid?
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Re: Need to rant about hydroelectric sources!!

Unread postby cube » Sun 11 Sep 2005, 19:51:53

redfire wrote:With today's technology do you have to dam a river to produce hydro power? I remember seeing a show on how small veriable pitch turbine generators could be installed in a river and you could not tell they where there. What if 10,000 of these type of generators were linked together?
...........
Nope it wouldn't work. A couple of fish would get wacked across the head by one of these 10,000 "veriable pitch turbines" and before you know it the greenies would have you marked for death for even coming up with the idea. Maybe if you put foam padding on the turbine blades to protect the fish you'll get the greenies approval. :roll:
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Re: Need to rant about hydroelectric sources!!

Unread postby aahala » Wed 14 Sep 2005, 14:24:44

If it's true hydro produces a lot of methane, we ought to suck it up,
add a little this, a little that and viola, natural gas.
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Re: Need to rant about hydroelectric sources!!

Unread postby SHiFTY » Wed 14 Sep 2005, 16:29:10

Now I found out that, even though Europeans have only been in NZ since 1840 they still found time to build a village and then decide to drown it.

Some place in the South Island, it was on TV on a program showing how much rail had been ripped up in NZ, I didn't know we had much to start with.


The coolest hydro power schem in NZ is the Manapouri- Carved into a cavern inside a mountain, the water falls vertically 25m from the lake through the turbines then 10km along tunnels out to the sea.

I have been to the turbine hall, its like being in Dr. No :)

NZ generates 60-80% of its power from hydro power, unfortunately its mostly away from the population centres.
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Re: Need to rant about hydroelectric sources!!

Unread postby Ludi » Wed 14 Sep 2005, 17:04:35

redfire wrote:With today's technology do you have to dam a river to produce hydro power? I remember seeing a show on how small veriable pitch turbine generators could be installed in a river and you could not tell they where there.


Yep, there are some neat little turbines out there. But decentralized energy production is very unpopular, you might have noticed.
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Maximized hydroelectric USA

Unread postby Tanada » Wed 06 Dec 2006, 06:51:57

There are at least three major 1950's hydroelectric dam projects on a large scale in the USA which were stalled and went quiet under environmental pressure. The three I am referring to are Rampart Canyon Alaska, Marble Canyon Arizona and the Lower Canyon Arizona projects. Rampart canyon would flood an area in AK the size of Lake Eire now designated the yukon Flats Federal Wildlife Preserve or some similer name, the Marble Canyon project would creat a resevoir lake between Glenn Canyon Dam and the Lake Mead, and the third would flood the lower 13 miles of the Grand Canyon itself creating a 90 mile long resevoir lake.

On the economic side the Marble and Lower Canyon dam's would increase electricity production from existing water supplies by 100%, doubling the power from the Colorado River. The argument goes that the river is already impounded so no new ecological effects would be incited. In Alaska it would allow Anchorage to shut down their coal power plants and switch to renewable power. Of course the Yukon Flats are a wild waterfowl breeding ground for much of NA, but don't let that bother you!


My prediction, at least one of these three projects will come back to life and be built as we slide down the PO slope, possibly all three. These are only the three major projects I know about, I am sure others will be resurrected in other places as well. :(
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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Re: Maximized hydroelectric USA

Unread postby FoxV » Wed 06 Dec 2006, 11:07:40

Tanada wrote:In Alaska it would allow Anchorage to shut down their coal power plants and switch to renewable power.

Not if the coal miners have anything to do with it.

They funded the Indians in to making a mess out of the various James Bay projects in the 70s and 80s

Only recently has quebec been able to move forward to complete the projects (an additional 8gW) when they agreed to pay the Indians compensation for the inundated land (I believe $5M over ten years which I thought was a bit of a sell out).

In anycase fossil fuel companies have powerful friends so don't expect them to go quietly into that good night
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Re: Maximized hydroelectric USA

Unread postby Loki » Wed 06 Dec 2006, 15:50:57

Here in the Columbia River Basin there was one major project (the Ben Franklin Dam) that was shelved, not because of environmentalists but because it would have flooded portions of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. I don't think it was a mega-project, certainly not on the scale of Grand Coulee, but it was a large dam. That dam site is still available should all environmental concerns be tossed by the wayside. I'm not aware of any other sites suitable for large dams in the CRB.

There were plans to build a mega-project in Hells Canyon (the Nez Perce Dam), but instead three smaller dams were built. Same with The Dalles Dam---one of the original plans envisioned a high storage dam that would have supposedly created a reservoir the size of Puget Sound---instead they built a few run-of-the-river projects. Probably not outside the realm of possibility that the smaller projects could be dismantled and larger dams put in their place. But unlikely---I don't think the Chinese will loan us that much money.
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Re: Maximized hydroelectric USA

Unread postby Loki » Wed 06 Dec 2006, 15:53:00

I forgot to mention the Fraser River Basin. Now that is a potentially highly productive hydro area that is largely untapped. They didn't build large dams on the mainstem (they did build some on the tribs) because the CRB and Peace River Basin were already being developed and because of fishery concerns. But if we did see a new spate of dam building, the Fraser would be prime pickings.
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Re: Maximized hydroelectric USA

Unread postby TorrKing » Wed 06 Dec 2006, 16:06:20

Don't worry, dams can be blown up and landscapes heal.
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