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Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

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Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#191

Post by pmyteh »

plorg wrote: post #182
mnw21cam wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dinorwig power station [0] is in the middle of a national park. A pretty one, even. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station

Yes, and add you can see it's already been developed - for over 60 years. That's not to say more can't be developed, but the rate of new development has been pretty low, and the prevailing belief was that this was the result of all of the best resources being used up.

...and even then they built it mostly inside the mountain, next to an old slate quarry. Which is going to help national park acceptability but not the unit cost of construction I suspect.

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#192

Post by kennend3 »

kagakuninja wrote: post #152
jhoechtl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

"Renewables" cost our government here in Ontario.

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2018/06/07/kathleen-wynne-ran-en...

They were in power for ~11 years, but thanks to their "green energy" programs they not only lost the election, they lost political party status and have yet to regain it.

Renewables are not cheaper.

"The FAO estimates that the renewable generation subsidy program will cost the Province a net $2.8 billion over the first three years of the program, from 2020-21 to 2022-23. The FAO's three-year cost estimate is significantly higher than the Province's cost estimate of $1.3 billion reported in the 2020 Ontario Budget."

These long-term "green energy" programs were expensive, and the government knowingly lied about how much it would cost.

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#193

Post by HyperSane »

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…

"almost half of new solar is now being built with storage:"

I very strongly doubt this, storage is very expensive.

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#194

Post by b112 »

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…

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.

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#195

Post by agalunar »

b112 wrote: post #194
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…

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…

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.

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#196

Post by speakfreely »

_hypx wrote: post #173
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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.

My limited understanding was that the electrolysis tech is not yet efficient enough at scale to make this feasible. Do you have links where I could read more about the cutting edge in hydrogen production? This is a very fascinating potential tool for solving the "we don't have enough batteries" problem with renewables.

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#197

Post by D13Fd »

b112 wrote: post #194
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…

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…

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.

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#198

Post by rgmerk »

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.

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#199

Post by im3w1l »

jjk166 wrote: post #107
idiotsecant wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is ridiculously uneconomical to create the volume for pumped storage. For context, with 100 meters of pressure head, you'd need 25,000 olympic swimming pools worth of water to store 12 hours of electricity from a 1 GW electric plant with 70% roundtrip efficiency. At a cost of $216/cubic yard of excavation, that's over $17 Billion. If you can make 3 cents per kwh profit buying at low times and selling at high, it w…

Excavating a circle of area A costs O(A). Building a wall around a circle of area A costs O(A^0.5).

Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

#200

Post by pydry »

_hypx wrote: post #173
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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.

Hydrogen leaks like crazy and corrodes storage cannisters. It isnt especially practical.
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