Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#41

Post by ZeroGravitas » Thu, Oct 27, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

labrador wrote: post #22

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #10

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.

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

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.

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#42

Post by kzrdude » Thu, Oct 27, 2022, 5:06 PM UTC

exabrial wrote: post #9

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

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.

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#43

Post by ClumsyPilot » Thu, Oct 27, 2022, 5:06 PM UTC

idiotsecant wrote: post #37

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…

> 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

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#44

Post by idiotsecant » Thu, Oct 27, 2022, 5:06 PM UTC

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #27

onepointsixC wrote: post #17

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.

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

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

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#45

Post by kkfx » Thu, Oct 27, 2022, 5:08 PM UTC

onepointsixC wrote: post #17

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.

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........

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#46

Post by kortex » Thu, Oct 27, 2022, 5:08 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #30

mszcz wrote: post #4

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

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

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.

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#47

Post by dottedmag » Thu, Oct 27, 2022, 5:10 PM UTC

insane_dreamer wrote: post #21

dottedmag wrote: post #2

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...

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).

Looks like I was wrong!

This report puts current usage to 20%:

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

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#48

Post by ClumsyPilot » Thu, Oct 27, 2022, 5:10 PM UTC

mszcz wrote: post #4

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

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.

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#49

Post by adrian_b » Thu, Oct 27, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

PedroBatista wrote: post #7

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.

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.

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#50

Post by arcticbull » Thu, Oct 27, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #38

arcticbull wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mat…

> 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.

> Current methods of 'paying' for carbon emissions have ended up being corrupt wealth transfers.

Not really, Canada just refunds people whatever they collect in carbon taxes at the end of the year, with the goal being to make the decision clearer at the point of sale. [1]

> That people are still for them is pretty good evidence they aren't really concerned about the consequences of carbon emissions.

Anyone who thinks you should emit less carbon understands that making carbon more expensive does just that.

We don't need to let perfect be the enemy of good and have an absolutely unimpeachable answer as to exactly how much damage a metric ton of CO2 does to know that making it more expensive will help.

[edit] IMO we should just let gas get to $10+/gal.

[1] https://unfccc.int/climate-action/momentum-for-change/financ...