4 ms·
It looks like a good way to ruin an entire ecosystem.
by Flavius 7y ago
It looks like a good way to ruin an entire ecosystem.
- jacobush 7y agoIn what way? The digging? Or the water? It seemed he only uses a very little bit of the available water.
- petschge 7y agoAt some point he was using 2/3 of the creek.
- markdown 7y agoFor a short stretch. The water goes back in at the end. It's a completely environmentally sustainable system.
- Someone 7y agoThere are at least the following environmental impacts possible: - decreasing the amount of water available downstream. - changing were the downstream water ends up. - changing the speed of water downstream. - changing the variability in the stream’s deficit the downstream. - making it harder/impossible for animals to move along the stream. I would think this does do the last, and, likely, also the next to last.
- theelous3 7y agoRunning water through pipes is going to destroy the surrounding forests how exactly? It might modify where the wetter parts of the area are, but I don't think that equates to destroying it.
- F_r_k 7y agoThere's more to water than forests. For example invertebrates, which play a key role in an ecosystem. Next time thing before you talk.
- dang 7y agoYour last two comments have been personal attacks, and we had to warn you about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18096897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18096897. If you continue to post like this to HN, we are going to ban you. I don't want to do that, so would you mind reviewing the site guidelines and taking the spirit of this site more to heart when posting here? It's not primarily an ethical thing. We're just trying to prevent this place from burning itself to the ground. That requires everyone to have a certain discipline with their angrier impulses here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (Your comment would be just fine without the last sentence.)
- endorphone 7y agoDiverting the water through pipes will definitely cause significant ecological change. Nature minus humans endlessly causes the same sort of change, but to second an earlier comment this would be a nightmare to try to do in a lot of areas. In my area the most dire thing to touch is the flow of water -- with three layers of government/protection agencies monitoring it with a very close eye.
- SECProto 7y agoAs the article says, it diverts most of the flow during low-flow periods (i.e. summer) which means there would not be much left for fish passage. Might be fine, might not, I don't know enough about the ecosystem to say. Additionally, there are some definite issues with sedimentation during construction. They excavated the channel to the intake and put all the dirt from the excavation into the stream for it to "carry away"[1]. This would not be allowed in most areas I know of - essentially, fish can't breathe if there's too much dirt in the water. Then several times it overflowed and eroded the channel - more sedimentation. The author even admitted using concrete liner would be the better choice, but opted not to because it was expensive - essentially, this externalized the cost of sedimentation to the ecosystem. [1] https://ludens.cl/paradise/turbine/intake.html https://ludens.cl/paradise/turbine/intake.html
- m-i-l 7y agoDepending on where you live, there may be a lot of government sponsored guidance on how best to manage the environmental impact of micro hydro schemes - see e.g. https://www.gov.scot/publications/hydro-schemes-planning-advice/ https://www.gov.scot/publications/hydro-schemes-planning-adv... .