Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

https://spectrum.ieee.org/hydroelectric-power

135 387 4 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

dottedmag3• 4 years 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.or...

insane_dreamer6• 4 years 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).

dottedmag3• 4 years ago

Looks like I was wrong!

This report puts current usage to 20%:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170329132409/http://www.iea.or...

chungy• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

stjohnswarts2• 4 years 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.

goodpoint• 4 years ago

Nuclear is very expensive and even increasing in price.

mszcz• 4 years 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

wolfram74• 4 years 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

arcticbull6• 4 years ago

Truthfully nobody's really heard of the Bangqiao Dam failure. I doubt this contributes to the discourse.

kortex• 4 years 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.

ClumsyPilot4• 4 years ago

Coal pollution kills more people every year and noone cares. Estimated mortality is between half a million to two million per year.

Thats more people dead in one year, that all people ever killed by all alternative fuel sources combined over entirety of human history- hydro, nuclear, geothermal, solar and wind.

If something happena daily, its uninteresting. If one person dies in a freak accident, its all over the news.

pavon• 4 years 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.

idiotsecant10• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

PedroBatista• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

jhoechtl10• 4 years ago

Does the damage overweight the benefit? Would nuclear have been better?

Do you want your bread toasted or light your room with candles?

chc• 4 years 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.

exabrial6• 4 years ago

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

cm42• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

exabrial6• 4 years 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.

kzrdude• 4 years ago

That's sacrificed by growth of agriculture and resource outtake anyway. We need to ensure we make the best out of it when we terraform this place.

Unfortunately, that's the scale of our civilization, the status quo is more destruction of ecosystems.

In some cases we need to make sure we take the last bad decisions, otherwise someone else will take worse ones.

bluescrn2• 4 years ago

Aren't we in a climate emergency at risk of catastrophic famines and the eventual extinction of the human race?

There's not going to be a perfect solution. Probably not even a good one. Pumped storage (and hydro power in general) seems a pretty great option, compared to building ridiculously vast banks of batteries that need replacing every decade or two.

ZeroGravitas2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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

ZeroGravitas2• 4 years 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_inves...

Smil was also an EV skeptic.

latchkey2• 4 years 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

insane_dreamer6• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

latchkey2• 4 years ago

Key words: "properly managed".

insane_dreamer6• 4 years 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_dreamer6• 4 years ago

Another poster found this, which is relevant: https://web.archive.org/web/20170329132409/http://www.iea.or...

josefresco• 4 years 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• 4 years 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_dreamer6• 4 years 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.

ltbarcly35• 4 years ago

Stupid little dams built as make-work are being removed. Hydroelectric dams are not being removed.

wnevets• 4 years ago

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

acheron• 4 years 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/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."

arcticbull6• 4 years 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.

ltbarcly35• 4 years 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.

onepointsixC• 4 years 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.

ltbarcly35• 4 years ago

This is the answer, if there were places we could generate a lot of hydro power we already would be.

idiotsecant10• 4 years ago

There are plenty of places we could make hydro power tomorrow if we weren't concerned with displacing people.

dragonwriter• 4 years ago

Hydro isn't unfashionable.

Its unfashionable for new capacity because much of the low-hanging fruit opportunities are plucked, and it has high upfront costs, and, while good from a climate and air pollution standpoint, it is still one of the most enviromentally destructive energy sources.

Also, while it doesn’t induce climate change, it can be vulnerable to climate change.

dmos622• 4 years ago

it doesn’t induce climate change

You could make climate change worse through bad natural water management. E.g. you could create a desert, or something in between.

sidewndr466• 4 years ago

Creating artificial lakes is the definition of climate change. Taking what was a flowing river and converting it into a huge lake massively changes the climate of the area.

bpodgursky3• 4 years ago

Actually the Yosemite valley has significant hydro potential.

stjohnswarts2• 4 years ago

Isn't that all protected wilderness though?

jhoechtl10• 4 years 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!

Quillbert182• 4 years ago

And it better be left alone. Hetch Hetchy has already been destroyed, we should preserve what little we have left.

kkfx3• 4 years ago

hydro and nuclear need the very same turbine tech, and actually turbine are the most hi-tech part of the game, reactors demand delicate construction and testing, but behind that are not much complex.

Oh, sure, IF you have a vast set of mountains and much water, let's say Norway, developing hydro is obvious. Just a bit more populated countries, let's say Swiss do want both simply because one offer good power for most of the year but not enough safety to relay on and so having two systems is better than one. If you have no suitable areas, let's say Mongolia, and you do not have the tech for nuclear... Than they are both unfashionable.

That's the practical "fashionable" or "unfashionable" part. Anything you can have, is fashionable if gives you something useful, anything who can gives you something useful but you can't have........

pencilguin40• 4 years ago

Hydro power turbines and nukes' steam turbines are similar only in the name, and that just because both turn.

muaytimbo3• 4 years ago

It IS unfashionable, dams are actively being removed across the US in order to restore the ecosystems they shattered. Migratory fish and all predators higher up the trophic chain are devastated by any type of dam.

jhoechtl10• 4 years ago

There are fish ladders, at least we have them in Europe along river dams.

When I think about the giant five valley hydroplant in China, the giant Euphrat hydroplant or the giant Nile hydroplant of Aegypt, I think its more the abscence of political force which could move ten thousands of people out of the way.

seanmcdirmid5• 4 years ago

Mostly smaller dams that were built a long time ago. They would need to be replaced anyways, so just tearing them down and not replacing them is economical and ecological.

But the big ones built in the last 100 years are going to stick around for awhile.

kixiQu• 4 years ago

I'm wondering if we should even accept the framing of that as "fashion" and not "large-scale action spurred by a rational shared reevaluation of impact"

jhoechtl10• 4 years ago

Nuclear fell out of fashion because people do not understand statics and were unable to address peoples concern about their safety.

kagakuninja• 4 years ago

Conveniently ignoring the extreme cost of nuclear power. The power companies simply do not want to invest billions and then wait 7+ years, assuming there are no project delays or cost overruns (which there always are). Renewables and natural gas are much cheaper.

seanmcdirmid5• 4 years ago

Nuclear was simply too expensive for the other side to bother debating with the environmental opposition. Unless the government subsidizes it (construction costs), private companies aren’t going to go near it. Other renewables are simply so much more profitable these days.

sien2• 4 years ago

Fun fact, the Australian Green Party was born protesting renewable electricity. They stopped the development of the Franklin Dam in Tasmania.

"In the late 1970s and 1980s, a public campaign to prevent the construction of the Franklin Dam in Tasmania saw environmentalist and activist Norm Sanders elected to the Tasmanian House of Assembly as an Australian Democrat. Brown, then director of the Wilderness Society, contested the election as an independent, but failed to win a seat.[3]"

From

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Australian_Gree...

The founder of the Green, Bob Brown, now opposes wind farms in Tasmania.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Brown#Opposition_to_a_Tasm...

ltbarcly35• 4 years 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.

idiotsecant10• 4 years 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.

ClumsyPilot4• 4 years ago

We need storage and pumped storage is the only practical way to get there with current supply chains and technology.

This really cannot be enphasised enough - this is the only game in town. The solutions are needed yesterday, and must be built on a massive scale - there is no time for a 20 year R&D to production cycle of a miracle technology. Only hydro does not require any new minerals and mining.

The only other container that is even worth mentioning is conpressed gas, but it seems to have neither the capacity nor the efficiency of a large hydro deployment

throwaway8943452• 4 years ago

Only hydro does not require any new minerals and mining.

Why is mining a major obstacle, provided it is economical and the environmental costs are some orders of magnitude less than those of climate change?

retrac• 4 years ago

Ontario recently started a pumped hydro facility in an abandoned mine, and it will hold ~400 MWh of power that can be charged or released over several days. Several other sites are in planning, including one that, if it goes forward, will hold 8000 MWh. That could run the entire city of Toronto for many hours.

Such facilities should allow Ontario to run on a mix of pure nuclear, hydro and wind. Currently about 15% of the electricity supply in the province is natural gas, used at peak times when demand exceeds the constant output of the nuclear/hydro base. At other times, their surplus is sold at a loss. More pumped storage will smooth this out.

philipkglass3• 4 years ago

The only other contender that is even worth mentioning is compressed gas, but it seems to have neither the capacity nor the efficiency of a large hydro deployment.

The largest pumped storage station in the US has a storage capacity of 24,000 MWh:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...

There's an underground hydrogen storage project underway in Delta, Utah with a capacity of 300,000 MWh:

https://www.powermag.com/massive-utah-hydrogen-storage-proje...

It would take 22 Deltas to overtake the world's largest pumped storage plant, a massive Chinese installation with 6.6 terawatt hours of storage capacity:

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/01/04/state-grid-of-china-s...

Still, potential underground hydrogen capacity is tremendous, amounting to thousands of terawatt hours in Europe alone:

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/201910.0187/v1

_hypx3• 4 years ago

The recent appearance of hydrogen energy storage has basically refuted this argument. We can now store all of the renewable energy we want. The only problem is the lack of awareness among environmentalists and engineers.

credit_guy3• 4 years ago

this is the only game in town.

There is another game in town. Emphasis on "is", as in present tense, not future. Natural gas power plants. They emit much, much less CO2 than coal. If we use them to only generate electricity when solar and wind are not enough, we end up with much lower emissions than what the trees remove from the atmosphere. We also end up needing to overbuild solar and wind by only about 30%, not by a factor of 3 or 4. The capital cost of maintaining the current, existing, natural gas power plants is basically zero. The capital cost of building new pumped storage is huge.

Here, let me do it for you. Lifting 1 kg to a height of 1 m requires about 10 Joules (more precisely 9.8, as every high school student hopefully knows). One billion kg, or one million tons is 10 giga-joule, or giga-watt-seconds. Increase to 360 million tons, and you get one GigaWatt-hour. One ton is one cubic meter of water, one million is a square of 1km2 area and 1m height, and 360 megatons is a square of horizontal width and length of 6 km and a height of 10 meters. A fairly big lake. Building an artificial one would qualify as a mega-project. It would cost multiple billions of dollars. It would be able to generate one gigawatt of power for one hour. Of course you'd raise it to a certain height, let's say 100 meters, and that would generate the 1GW of power for 4 days. If you have 100% efficiency. Which you don't have, because you lose energy both when you pump up, and when you let the water come down. Assuming an optimistic 25% overall round-trip efficiency, you get 1GW power for one day. If you want for one month, well, you multiply this by 30.

Or you can just keep around a 1GW natural gas power plant, and use it when you need it.

theptip6• 4 years ago

Since you’re in the industry I’m interested in your perspective on this report from Lawrence Berkeley lab on integrated battery storage for wind/solar projects: https://emp.lbl.gov/hybrid

It seems to me that high capacity integrated battery projects are being built in large numbers, and they are much closer to cost-competitive than I would have though from the general sentiment in the press/HN comments. Obviously they are more expensive than raw solar but still in a price range to be competitive with NatGas OpEx in the next few decades. If that’s true then we might not need to fight the environmental battles on pumped storage (which for the record I do agree could be used more).

idiotsecant10• 4 years ago

Too little, too late unfortunately. The amount of storage available from these projects is tiny and even though it's accelerating it's not accelerating at nearly the level required for the physics of a primary renewable grid to work. Chemical storage of energy is expensive and requires a long supply chain. It's huge that the costs are trending in a favorable direction and maybe eventually we can do all our load balancing that way but we don't need results 15 years from now, we need them yesterday.

creato• 4 years ago

If that’s true then we might not need to fight the environmental battles on pumped storage (which for the record I do agree could be used more).

Are pumped storage environmental battles really that much less of an obstacle than those for solar, wind, or transmission line installations?

egberts1• 4 years ago

And these battery-based storage are also exploding in more frequency.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/20/pge-says-tesla-battery-was...

plorg3• 4 years ago

When I was in school for power systems planning the the accepted notion was that pumped hydro storage is cool and great, but like hydropower, it is extremely geographically dependent, and we have basically developed all of the places where it would work (at least in the US), or at least, by order of magnitude, there are not enough remaining untapped hydro-related resources to make a dent in projected storage demand. Is that a wrong understanding?

idiotsecant10• 4 years ago

Entirely wrong. All pumped storage requires is a big high spot and a big low spot*. Take a look at this, for example:

https://www.gordonbuttepumpedstorage.com/

There are a lot of good pumped storage sites out there.

*exaggeration, but close enough.

pfdietz10• 4 years ago

It's geographically dependent if built on rivers. Beyond rivers the possibilities expand enormously.

bryanlarsen2• 4 years ago

We certainly can use solar, wind & batteries to eliminate fossil fuels from our electricity system. Estimates are that we'd need about 300TWh of batteries, which is on the edge of feasible. Pumped storage would be a lot cheaper, though.

idiotsecant10• 4 years ago

Oh great, only 300TWH of batteries! Let's put in the P.O.! Who is supplying those, again?

bluescrn2• 4 years ago

And what percentage of the immense quantity of batteries would need replacing each year?

pclmulqdq3• 4 years ago

Wind and solar energy also destroy ecosystems, but we don't stop using them. Dams may be more harmful, though.

cinntaile3• 4 years ago

What's your definition of destroy and do you have any examples of ecosystems that were destroyed by wind and solar?

99_002• 4 years ago

Why doesn't hydroelectric pumped storage have the same obvious and massive ecosystem damage as hydroelectric when it is hydro electric + the environmental damage caused by producing solar panels or wind turbines?

animal_spirits• 4 years ago

The difference is because hydroelectric generation depends on currently existing rivers, damming them and turning them into electricity sources has to change the natural ecosystem in the river.

For pumped storage, we can essentially build it anywhere there is an elevation change. So we can avoid harming river ecosystems where they naturally exist and create pipes and tanks where it would be the least damaging to the ecosystem

laverya3• 4 years ago

Pumped Hydro doesn't have to be built on a river - you just need a pair of reservoirs that you can fill and transfer water between. This obviously destroys the ecosystem of the valley you use, but at least you're not impacting river water temperatures/sedimentation/fish spawning/etc.

BatteryMountain2• 4 years ago

Check the one near Cape Town, Steenbras Dam. It is a set of two small dams near Cpt that uses a pumped storage scheme. It is currently used to provide load-shedding relieve during the day (cause the state owned entity Eskom is a failure).

So basically, during the daytime, they generate power from it and then at night the pump the water back to the upper dam. As far as I know its been working without any problems. And since the dams are fairly natural and small, and right by the coast (so very little downstream effects), it seems a bit more sustainable. The only wish would be for these mountain ranges to have multiple geographies like this so we can have multiple small pumped storage schemes with as little as possible negatives.

rr8082• 4 years ago

Agreed we need hydroelectric pumped storage - what is a typical efficiency number for that? I'd think its super inefficient, but not sure what the numbers should be.

karamanolev2• 4 years ago

The round-trip energy efficiency of PSH varies between 70%–80%, with some sources claiming up to 87%.

For me, that sounds like quite good, given the capacity possibilities. We can always build tiered storage, with smaller, but more efficient tiers (e.g. batteries) used first and PSH when that's filled up or exhausted.

api2• 4 years 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.

jhoechtl10• 4 years 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?

throwaway8943452• 4 years ago

My impression as a layperson is that the economic feasibility of pumped hydro is very location-dependent, and our electrical grid isn't so fungible that storage in one region can meaningfully store energy generated in another region. Is my understanding correct? And if so, how do we tackle that?

79523• 4 years ago

Pumped hydro is very dependent on location. But the supply of energy would not need to be. Electricity grids and DC interconnectors work really well. Having a few massive sites spread across a continent could work well.

jhoechtl10• 4 years ago

Forgive me my lack of understanding of the englisch language, but I do not understand the distinction you make.

Hydroelectricity: Is this power you obtain by placing turbines behind a huge concrete wall of a large river? If so, how is the scenario of building a large concrete dam in the mountains where water is pumped up a hill to covert it into kinetic energy any more better?

I understand that hydroelectricity is used to supply the basic power need, say 80% and a water reservoir with turbines to cover power peak needs.

Gwypaas2• 4 years ago

Because you're not disrupting a river's flow and natural ecosystem, you only utilize the watershed some more during the initial filling period. After that, it's a closed system separate from the river ecosystem where only evaporation causes leakage.

BurningFrog4• 4 years ago

I think the idea is to start pumping up water at existing hydroelectric power plants.

If you do this using wind or solar power the dam becomes a giant battery you charge.

ethbr0• 4 years ago

Pumped hydro is burning energy to pump energy into a (usually artificial) reservoir.

Then, later, allowing that filled reservoir to drain through a hydroelectric plant and generate electricity.

This solves 2 major problems, compared to alternatives.

1) The scaling costs (with respect to energy storage capacity / volume) are extremely low. E.g. instead of building twice as much battery, you're just consuming additional empty space behind the dam.

2) There is no time-cost to storing energy in pumped hydro, which affords great flexibility in when it's stored and when it's extracted. E.g. stored on a bright day when the wind is blowing, extracted at night when there's no wind.

In essence, it turns spikey supply and demand patterns into more constant ones, which are cheaper and more efficient to service.

tialaramex2• 4 years ago

I understand that hydroelectricity is used to supply the basic power need, say 80% and a water reservoir with turbines to cover power peak needs

This seems like you either didn't understand what pumped storage is, or you've confused several related technologies.

A typical pumped storage scheme goes like this: We find a mountain with a high lake and a low lake. We dam the high lake so that its natural outflow (perhaps to the low lake) ceases. We dig tunnels between the lakes, and we put an electric pump/ turbine in the tunnels.

When we put electricity into the pump, water from the low lake is pumped up to the high lake (until it gets too full and we stop). This stores energy. When we let the water down the pipe through the turbine instead, the same water flows from the high lake down to the low lake, giving slightly less electricity via the turbine.

Unlike the conventional hydro electric power plant this is not really producing electricity, it is storing it, hence the words "pumped storage". We can use this to move electricity in time, which otherwise has to be done very expensively with batteries.

For example, when it's windy in the middle of the night in the UK, the French and Belgians buy some of our cheap electricity, and the stored power hydro facilities in Wales and Scotland also use that electricity to pump water up to their top lakes. The next afternoon, when peak electricity usage occurs as the sun goes down and people begin cooking evening meals, the pumped storage releases the water, making electricity it can sell at peak prices. In the UK the pumped storage plants are privately owned, so they benefit financially from this arbitrage.

gwbas1c• 4 years ago

Think of pumped storage like a battery: In areas with a lot of solar, pumped storage runs when there is a lot of daylight to store the energy for nighttime use. Pumps run when the sun is out, turbines run at night.

marcosdumay• 4 years ago

why we aren't pumping (pun intentional) massive amounts of money into hydroelectric pumped storage

Because energy storage is currently not a problem, and consequently not profitable.

Unless you have some very bold organization to invest on things that today make negative marginal profit on any scale, or a government rushing into the solution of tomorrow's problem with today's money, you won't see any action.

It will certainly turn into a problem at some point (I expect it on this decade already). But even when it happens, it's not clear what kind of storage will be successful; and pumped hydro has a bunch of competitive issues due to its geographic limitations.

jraph• 4 years ago

Because energy storage is currently not a problem

Yes it is. It's one part of the solution to fluctuations in electricity production (renewables: wind, solar) and consumption (day / night, warm / cold).

In a grid, at all time, the production has to match the consumption perfectly. You can make the frequency vary a bit to make up for fluctuations, but only so much before damaging things. Storage helps with a production higher than consumption and then with a higher consumption later.

Good storage makes grids more flexible and ideally lower the need for electricity production, and costs.

I agree with the rest of your comment though.

tialaramex2• 4 years ago

Because energy storage is currently not a problem, and consequently not profitable.

All the big pumped storage in the UK is owned by for-profit companies.

Are they making the big money from running school tours? Maybe the gift shop? I don't think so.

In the UK they can buy 1.5GWh of electricity for say £75000 on a windy Sunday night and then sell say 1.2GWh (pumped storage is maybe 80% efficient) for £200000 on Monday afternoon. That's a £125 000 profit in under a day. And this wouldn't be their best case it's just a pretty good day although there are always worse days because doing this well involves predicting weather and other factors so as to judge when to buy and sell.

They're not going to become the next Apple doing this, but it's a healthy business.

jmclnx• 4 years ago

In my region of the US, hydro use to power a lot of manufacturing until electricity came in. Canals were built for power, leaving the rivers flow naturally. But these canals are in dis-repair. To me, why not refurb these canals to provide power. There is plenty of water and plenty of places like this in the area.

agumonkey• 4 years ago

what about artificial hydro ? make a big large raised water retention thing with generators.. it will take space but not harm existing natural spaces. Even in europe there's a lot of unused land.

zizee4• 4 years ago

Pumped hydro needs to be truely massive scale, both in the amount of water (read: lots of depth AND surface area), and the height differential between the two reservoirs. To make it cost feasible we really need very favourable natural geography. Building such structures ourselves would be astronomically expensive.

PicassoCTs• 4 years ago

Totally agree on pumped power storage capacity being needed. But those are massive infrastructure projects. Erecting a damn, to store the potential energy is bound to meet resistance.

Alternative solution: Build Lots of pressure-piston, that are stable standing on its own. Basically, a pillar of ice, coated in insulation, standing upon a small lake that provides water at pressure. If additional energy is needed after the extraction, heat is added to the system and the lake replenishes, while the piston shrinks. If energy needs to be stored, additional water is pumped on top and frozen.

If additional heat reservoirs are nearby or something in need of coolant is nearby, additional heatpump like bonuses should be findable.

Similar concepts have been explored: https://energypost.eu/gravity-batteries-any-nation-can-do-it... but they need massive construction efforts.

Instead of having the building up storage provide its own structure, with little more then a concrete base and some grain silo walls. https://i.imgur.com/iCg9LzY.png

The piston sealing the under pressure water, could be archieved via "onion" layers, steps leading down, taking up a part of the pressure, until it drops to "holding back by atmosphere" on the outmost layer.

pencilguin40• 4 years ago

Pumped-hydro need not, in fact be any sort of "massive infrastructure project".

nostromo2• 4 years ago

hydroelectricity is massively damaging to ecosystems

Sure, but compare it with the alternatives. Oil and gas are obviously very destructive of ecosystems. But so are lots of renewables.

Here's what a silicon mine looks like (used to make solar panels): https://www.mining.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/anglogold-...

Here's a lithium mine (used to make batteries): https://assets.telecomtv.com/assets/telecomtv/open-cast-mine...

Here's a uranium mine (used for nuclear energy): https://energyeducation.ca/wiki/images/8/82/Openpit.jpg

Compared to these, the habitat displacement from hydro seems very mild. There simply is no energy source that is harmless.

google2341232• 4 years ago

For uranium, there is 510 million square km of surface area on earth, what's the issue with "destroying" (a lot of the mines are in pretty uninhabitable places) a few sq km out of 510 million to power the human race?

throwayyy4790872• 4 years ago

Your second picture is a coal mine. Most lithium is produced via evaporative pools. Same process as salt.

kimburgess• 4 years ago

The good news is, that's starting to happen (in some places). A 5GW and 2GW pumped hydro station - both state owned infrastructure - have just been announced for the area I grew up: https://qldhydro.com.au.

b112• 4 years ago

Obviously hydroelectricity is massively damaging to ecosystems

False.

A river is not a static thing. Nor a lake. Rivers, lakes, swamps, bodies of water change over thousands, and even hundreds of years.

A lake today, is a river tomorrow, and vice versa. Terrain erodes, shifts, rivers dry up, or appear from nothing.

Go back in time, in 10k increments, and see how a local area changes.

To claim that a hydroelectric dam is massively damaging, is not valid, not even remotely. A dam does not destroy ecosystems, it changes them. One disappears, another appears.

And considering that some beaver dams can be seen from space, and dwarf the size of our dams, the idea that daming a river, is unnatural, is absurd!

This ridiculous mantra that dams are bad, needs to end. It needs to end, now.

If we embraced dams, we could entirely wean off of hydrocarbons, and move to h2 generation, using existing pipelines in North America.

And no, the absurd assertion that h2 is hard to store and use, is not valid either.

I swear, there is so little logic to the environmental movement.

Everything is bad, everything terrible, and so we are left with te worst outcome possible.

agalunar• 4 years ago

I assume that the problem, like global anthropogenic climate change, isn't change in and of itself, it's change faster than biological systems can adapt to or evolve for – resulting in mass extinction events or radical losses of biodiversity.

D13Fd• 4 years ago

I strongly disagree. When humans alter the natural environment, it’s inherently destructive. Even if a new environment arises in its place, we have destroyed what was there before.

That said, the environmental destruction is worth it when it comes to hydroelectric power.

idiotsecant10• 4 years ago

You're right - building a dam and waiting for a thousand years will result in a new stable ecosystem with biodiversity comparable to the original. The problem is that natural systems need 'settling time' to adapt to changing conditions. The immediate impact in dams is a dramatic drop in biodiversity, that's not even a controversial claim. It's great that the ecosystem will rebound after I'm dead but I don't think that's what most people are concerned about. Deforestation and desertification of formerly healthy riparian ecosystems isn't a trivial concern. Not all 'changes' in nature are equally beneficial to humans.

c7b• 4 years ago

Obviously hydroelectricity is massively damaging to ecosystems.

Can you elaborate? To me it always seemed like we're basically replacing a river with a lake, which doesn't seem so bad. Sure, it requires adjustment to a new equilibrium, but why is the dam lake ecosystem strictly worse than the river one?

Genuinely curious, it always seemed to me that the discussion around hydropower seemed to focus solely on what is lost from the river ecosystem, without discussing what might be gained by a lake ecosystem.

buttercraft• 4 years ago

For example, salmon migrate from the ocean to their spawning grounds in river beds. They have to go up over dams on special fish ladders. Most don't make it. Sockeye salmon were almost completely wiped out but are starting to bounce back. This also affects other species like bears which depend on these salmon runs before hibernation.

idiotsecant10• 4 years ago

changing the flow characteristics of a river is a massively disruptive event, not just for the species in the water but also the animals that rely on tertiary characteristics and effects of that river. It changes the erosion patterns and sediment carrying capacity of the stream, it changes the seasonal flows that ecosystems have come to rely on, it changes nutrient transport, changes water temperature, changes oxygen content, and a million other things that make the stream less compatible with certain species and more compatible for others. Best case this results in loss of biodiversity, worst case it results in spread of invasive species that have even further impacts on an even wider swatch of the ecosystem. It doesn't make the ecosystem go away, it just changes it to a less settled one - generally when that happens the complexity of the ecosystem goes down until natural selection can catch back up and everything adapts to fill the same niches again, which is not a fast process.

It's hugely disruptive to ecosystems.

exabrial6• 4 years ago

I think the main reason is that not everybody has the geography conducive for pumped Hydro.

Here in Kansas we have a ton of wind energy production and we’re lucky enough to have a nuclear reactor as well. It’d really be nice to store that, but we have no mountains. We have a rolling plain in the middle of the state but even the highest/lowest delta is like 200-300 ft (I made that number up).

throwayyy4790872• 4 years ago

You are spot on. Mt. Oread has 191 ft of prominence.

011000113• 4 years ago

Can you create an underground reservoir, say from an expired oil field, that is of sufficient capacity to create a pumped hydro system in concert with a ground-level reservoir?

awiesenhofer• 4 years ago

No need to think only within your own state borders. Germany has lots of wind farms and not much pump storage potential as well, they just send their surplus energy south to Austria for storage. Kansas could easily do the same with Colorado - ofc they would have to build more facilities first (afaik).

rufus_foreman• 4 years ago

Today I learned that the high point in Kansas is 4039 feet above sea level, and was marked by a plaque that states "ON THIS SITE IN 1897 NOTHING HAPPENED" until 2015 when the plaque was stolen.

011000113• 4 years ago

Is there a reason why you wouldn't combine pumped hydro with a diverted fraction of a natural river? You get the ability to store electricity along with some pure generation capacity while still allowing the river to mostly flow unimpeded. You're already building the generation capacity, and this allows you to generate some electricity 24/7 if the need arises. It seems feasible to divert a fraction of a river's flow, provided you work with natural, seasonally fluctuating flow rates, and not severely disturb wildlife. i.e. distribute the diversion plumbing over a mile of the river course.

civilized• 4 years ago

Why is hydroelectricity massively damaging while hydro pumped storage is great?

pencilguin40• 4 years ago

One destroys an ecosystem and fishery. The other moves water between ponds.

pixodaros• 4 years ago

Its also that most of the best sites for hydropower have already been heavily developed. Countries like Egypt, Canada, and Norway have massive amounts of hydro because it was obviously a good deal since the late 19th century. In western Canada, there is a big debate about the Site C dam site which is not just destructive but based on unstable rock.

lvxferre• 4 years ago

It gets worse once we remember that electricity can be transported, but the damage stays mostly in place.

jeffparsons• 4 years ago

Here in Australia we apparently have a virtually limitless supply of sites that are very well suited to "off-river pumped hydro", and yet there doesn't seem to be any action on this front.

I find this extra surprising because we also desperately need better fresh water management for other reasons, not least of which being our country's tendency to alternate between drought and flood.

There must be some reason we're not doing it, but I can't for the life of me figure it out. It seems to tick a lot of boxes:

- Powered by intermittent renewables, and can even be collocated

- Helps with fresh water management

- Easily to parallelize construction

- Can be operated in a federated way and replaced/upgraded/maintained piecemeal

- Requires only technology that is already extremely well-understood

- Relatively cheap

- Relatively clean

- Quick and easy to turn on/off

pencilguin40• 4 years ago

There is no "action" because it would be actively stupid to build storage you have not spare renewable generation capacity to charge up. The money is, instead, correctly spent on generation capacity that actually displaces CO2 output.

Storage will be built out later.

It is not yet clear which kinds of storage are cheapest, because the costs of many are still falling fast. By the time we have a use for storage, it will be cheaper and we will know which to build.

sien2• 4 years ago

Australia is constructing the Snowy River 2 pumped hydro setup.

Initial cost estimate was $AU 3 Bn, it's now headed toward $AU 6 Bn plus a connector that could also cost billions.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/snowy-2-0-hit-by-another-blow-ou...

sbm_au• 4 years ago

I really don't think we have a "virtually limitless supply of sites" here in Australia - in fact I would suggest the opposite. It's a really flat continent.

I'm more familiar with the southeast, so I can't speak for Queensland, but areas that have both good rainfall and high topological relief, already have a lot of damn construction (and associated destruction of wilderness).

There's the Snowy Mountains scheme of course (which has drained dry the Snowy River of Banjo Patterson's day) and also the lesser known Shoalhaven Scheme, and in Tasmania practically every river except the Franklin is dammed.

Handytinge• 4 years ago

What are you talking about?

Tasmania has had significant hydro since 1895, is currently 80% hydro powered and is 100% renewable (and aiming for 200%, to increase green supply to the mainland).

baxtr• 4 years ago

Is that the case for all Hydro? Or only for specific types of Hydro applications?

I am curious to understand the different technologies. I am also asking because in the end every kind of power generation will have some effect on the ecosystems. It's always a question of trade-offs.

theshrike79• 4 years ago

River ecosystems are really complex and far-reaching. It's about more than just fish swimming upstream to spawn.

Hydroelectric dams destroy these ecosystems completely. Yes, you can build bypass channels for fish, but that's just a part of the system and the channels don't work properly in many cases.

blippage2• 4 years ago

Obviously hydroelectricity is massively damaging to ecosystems.

The whole of the human race is massively damaging to ecosystems. That bit isn't in doubt. The question is as to whether the benefits outweigh the costs. And naturally, humans get to be judge and jury on the matter. But hey, do you want to be able to get to work, afford that iPhone, or not?

dmos622• 4 years ago

What are you saying? Are you asking if the benefits of the human race outweigh the costs? Or of hydroelectricity? If it's the latter, I think OP clearly said that in his opinion hydro is a "no-brainer" in a minority of cases.

SuoDuanDao• 4 years ago

I think the reason is, pumped hydro competes with fossil fuels as a storage mechanism, and it's very hard to compete with fossil fuels as a storage mechanism on economic terms. In terms of clean tech, it's probably still the best in pure economics, but batteries are currently getting more attention because Tesla found that by bundling its batteries with wheels and motors it can sell them as luxury goods. That circumvented the need to store energy cheaper than fossil fuels, but it's obviously hard to do anything similar with pumped hydro storage.

pyrale• 4 years ago

My hypothesis is that market-driven electricity production simply doesn't handle this correctly. Planification would probably work better, but that's not politically accepted.

liketochill2• 4 years ago

The lead times are too long on power plants. It takes years of permitting and studies and then years of procurement and construction for large projects.

Kukumber2• 4 years 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

jandrese4• 4 years ago

That sounds just like hand wringing over killing off the buggy whip industry. Markets are disrupted sometimes, people cope.

Giorgi• 4 years ago

Yeah, US is not oil-export dependent in any way.

Kukumber2• 4 years 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.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

kkfx3• 4 years 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_002• 4 years ago

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

bArray• 4 years 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.

_uvv0• 4 years 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...

2 https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/web/2016/11/Dams-increase-me...

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterville,_Manitoba , can get free press article via google cache if you want

chewbacha• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

And wind turbines decimate bird populations.

On what planet have wind turbines killed off 10% of the bird population?

tchaffee2• 4 years 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-fa...

tb_technical• 4 years ago

Because of NIMBYs

rgmerk• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

StanislavPetrov• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

causi• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

loehnsberg• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

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