I don’t think private investors can rake in fat subsidies off of hydropower.
Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?
271–280 of 397 posts
Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?
#272Hydro 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.
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.
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"
Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The extreme cost of nuclear power are partially the fault of scaremongers stopping all production of them in the west. China has 100s being built or planned and obviously they can't cost 10s of billions each. Thanks for blackouts when it's cloudy and not windy.
China’s nuclear program is just getting started and is almost completely state funded. They only have 49 plants right now with 16 under construction, I’m not sure where your 100s came from. Their plan is to quadruple generating capacity (current at 50 Gw) to 200 Gw by 2035.
France is still the model country when it comes to nuclear power. Even in 2035, nuclear will be less than 10% of its energy mix.
Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?
#274I 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.
Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?
#275Earlier 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…
> 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…
To explain the economics of pumped storage, you must first understand it.
Pumped storage round-trip efficiency is not, in fact, 25%, but routinely above 70%.
Nobody pumps water up just 10 meters. It is, instead, pumped (say) a thousand meters up to a reservoir commonly 10 meters deep. A 10m-deep reservoir needs only a cheap earthen dike. A dike is hardly a "megaproject", even if km long. Dikes are low tech.
The energy is extracted at the bottom end of a penstock. Each ton of water in a reservoir 1000m up stores 10MJ. One just 100x100x10 meters thus holds 100,000 tons, 1000 GJ, >270 MWh, 6 hours at ~40 MW.
Nobody needs 30 days' storage. If your hydro storage runs low, and local fuel tankage looks like it might, too, you order out for LNG or, soon, NH3 or LH2 from solar farms in the tropics.
Few would need or want a 1km x 1km reservoir. Smaller ones distributed where the power is needed are more useful.
An underground cavity, where it exists, can be used instead of a hilltop reservoir, or with one.
Burning NG once in a while is no big deal, but NH3 will be cheaper in the near future.
Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?
#276Obviously 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…
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
Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Still need a place to keep all the water after you pump it out of the cave.
We call that a "pond".
Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?
#278Obviously 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…
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…
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.
Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Such hydrogen storage facilities already exist, actually. But the hydrogen the store is produced via steam reformation which emits carbon. The big issue with hydrogen storage cheaply producing hydrogen without producing CO2.
There is in fact no such issue because literally no one is even considering producing hydrogen for energy storage in that way.
Re: Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Because lots of mined metals come either from 3rd world countries like Congo with no environmental protection laws or are mined in few places like Russia where a trade war can lead to shortages. Hydro requires the most common mayerials like steel or concrete.
And, not even concrete.
But there are numerous other storage alternatives that also do not need any special materials. We don't know yet which ones will be cheapest.