3 ms·

We're not talking about "100% of the river's flow". We're talking about 1/2000 of the river's flow.

• Retric 9y ago
  1/2000 is a meaningless number because you don't know if hypothetically 2000/2000 of the flow is already assigned to other uses then there is zero left over and someone is losing out. Hydro power for example uses 100% of the flow so removing that water directly reduces power output of downstream power plants.
  • maxerickson 9y ago
    Water rights aren't terribly contentious in that part of Michigan. The Muskegon is tiny and the sort of river hydro is being removed from. http://glpf.org/funded-projects/muskegon-river-dam-removal/ http://glpf.org/funded-projects/muskegon-river-dam-removal/
    • Retric 9y ago
      The Muskegon feeds into the Lake Michigan which is thus upstream of Niagara Falls and a lot of hydro power generation. Granted we are not talking about a huge amount of energy, but it is one of many costs that are not being compensated.
      • Turing_Machine 9y ago
        Compare the amount of water they're taking out per day (576,000 gallons) to amount of water that goes over Niagara Falls in a day (about 54,345,600,000 gallons). "Not a huge amount of energy", indeed.
        • Retric 9y ago
          In the short term perhaps, but it's not going to take that long to hit 10,000$ worth of energy and again that's just one of many uses of this water which as far as I can tell is uncompensated.