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Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

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Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#111

Post by BurningFrog »

jhoechtl wrote: post #90
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…

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 us…

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.

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#112

Post by jhoechtl »

adrian_b wrote: post #49
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.

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

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

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#113

Post by jjk166 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #96
idiotsecant wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

300TWh of batteries per decade is a lot easier than 90 million barrels of oil per day yet somehow we manage to do the latter.

At current battery prices of $132/kwh and oil at $88/barrel, 300 TWh of batteries per decade is actually 40% more expensive than 90 million barrels of oil per day.

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#114

Post by Kukumber »

Giorgi wrote: post #99
Kukumber wrote: post #39

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

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

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

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#115

Post by BurningFrog »

jhoechtl wrote: post #97
api wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

It's 72 meters below, but it's not very big, and once it's full you'll have to wait for the water to evaporate away, I assume?

If it could be made a permanent bay of the ocean, that might make the area less of a disaster. But it seems real hard...

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#116

Post by jhoechtl »

arcticbull wrote: post #51
kortex wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I knew about it, but I don't think if you asked an average individual on the street, they'd have any clue - unlike asking any American or Canadian about Chernobyl, or any Canadian about Bhopal or Halifax. I think Chernobyl has a much bigger influence on nuclear policy than Bangqiao on hydro despite the latter causing two orders of magnitude more deaths.

Maybe westerners alread damn themselves that they largely exaggerated with the Chernobyl incident for poltical 'system'-reasons, now that building new power plants becomes necessary?

Of which nuclear ones are an obvious alternative?

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#117

Post by gernb »

theptip wrote: post #79
idiotsecant wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 balan…

Is this supported by the report though? We have yet to build most of the solar we need, and IIUC almost half of new solar is now being built with storage: > At the close of 2021, there were more than 670 GW of solar plants in the nation’s queues; 285 GW (~42%) of this capacity was proposed as a hybrid, most typically pairing PV with battery storage (PV+storage represented nearly 90% of all hybrid capacity in the queu…

You need 2 weeks of storage.

https://energytransition.org/2017/07/germanys-worse-case-sce...

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#118

Post by philipkglass »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #43
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 c…

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

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#119

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

> 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.

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#120

Post by muaytimbo »

jhoechtl wrote: post #102
muaytimbo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Fish ladders are completely ineffective [1].

[1] https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/conl....

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