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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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 numbe…
"Green", if you exclude absolute sacrifice of an entire downstream ecosystem.
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?
"Green", if you exclude absolute sacrifice of an entire downstream ecosystem.
The immediate upstream from a dam, however, is another story entirely.
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.
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.
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.
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