5 ms·

I think it's an unfortunate omission from this article, but, with every question like this you have to consider things on balance. Everything you do to generat

I think it's an unfortunate omission from this article, but, with every question like this you have to consider things on balance. Everything you do to generate power will have some impact and conversely some benefit. They talk a lot about the impact here, but, not at all about the benefit. All of the dams on the Klamath River produce a combined power of only 169MW (and this isn't even removing all of them, I think its actually removing not even 40MW of power generating capacity. Again, you have to consider everything on balance. This is an absolutely pitiful amount of energy. For example, three gorges produces 22,500 MW of power. Common designs for self-contained PORTABLE nuclear reactors easily outclass the entire generating capacity of these dams. The balance of impact vs benefit on these is incredibly tilted against these projects continuing to exist. Also, Chinook is delicious and anything which means more lox is a win in my book.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
maxerickson 6y ago
Lots of dams are flood control projects that also produce electricity.
- AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
  True, that's another possible item in the benefit column, but, it also creates risk of a catastrophic failures like Michigan and almost-orville.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  The Chinese Three Gorges Dam is an electricity project (that benefits one family), and doesn't do flood control (it's 100' too short. The reason is that if it was the correct height, it could flood a major city upstream.) :)
paledot 6y ago
Indeed. This is why hydro shouldn't be considered green energy. (That, and the methane reduced when hundreds or thousands of hectares of living, breathing land are flooded and decompose in an anoxic environment.)
- AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
  Does anyone consider hydro as green anymore? Nuclear has far less impact.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Very few people consider nuclear power as "green". It's better than almost all the alternatives but those arguments don't work with you average citizen any longer so nuclear power is plateaued for the forseeable future in Western nations.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > This is why hydro shouldn't be considered green energy. Minuscule emissions when it's built that are amortized over a 50 year lifespan qualifies as very green in my books. The idea that it's not green anymore is absolutely ridiculous. I sometime wonder if environmentalism greatest threat isn't... environmentalists themselves!
sjdbdjd 6y ago
You are comparing the power output of a damn that displaced some fish to one that displaced tens of millions? Doesn’t seem very proportional
- AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
  I wasn't trying to compare the two and make a judgement on if 3 gorges is worth it while these aren't, I'm merely saying that 3 gorges is so much more massive in scale.
rhodozelia 6y ago
The article made it sound like they would lose less than 8% of their 2200 MW renewable generation for a reduction of less than 176 MW. Maybe the article confused the total generation from the 8 plants with and the 4 being removed. They estimated 450 million to add fish ladders and rehabilitate the facilities for the next 100 years. If it was $450 million for 170 MW $2.6 million / MW is pretty cheap construction cost. I am surprised that it isn’t an attractive investment
- AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
  Correct, so, 176MW is the power generation for ALL dams on that river. They are only removing 4 of them of which I think only 2 produce power and I can't find exact figures on the MW output of each of them. 169 was an upper bound and seems VERY small. 450M was the cost of removal according to the article, not the cost of adding new fish ladders?
  - rhodozelia 6y ago
    >This is because to renew the operating licence for these dams, its ratepayers would have to foot an approximately $400m (£308m) bill for upgrades to ensure compliance with legislation (including the installation of costly fish ladders at each dam that would enable migration). Upgrading the dams cost $400m. >Overall, little will be lost in terms of renewable energy generation: the dams represent less than 8% of PacfiCorp’s 2,208 MW current renewable generation capacity, [1] indicates that you are correct and 7 dams produce 169 MW. so indeed these dams produce a relatively small amount of electricity. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klamath_River_Hydroelectric_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klamath_River_Hydroelectric_Pr...
oefrha 6y ago
> three gorges produces 22,500 MW of power. Correction: 22,500MW is the installed capacity, i.e. what the generators are capable of. It only reaches about half capacity on average, going by the numbers listed in the Wikipedia article (101.6TWh in 2018 => average ~11,600MW).
stjohnswarts 6y ago
The problems is they aren't building any power to deal with the decrease and no one is building nuke plants that haven't been in the works for 15+ years. I all for this if they want their rivers back though, but we can act like there won't be consequences.
- csomar 6y ago
  Solar production in the US is growing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_Monthly_Solar_Power_Generation.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Stat... No need for them to produce electricity, they can trade fish for electrons.
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    Unfortunately, the usefulness of solar is limited by our energy storage capabilities. Water is one of the best ways of fixing this (either to supplement solar, like running a hydro dam on a cloudy day, or as a direct storage system, where excess electricity is used to pump water uphill so that the potential energy can be harvested later)
    - csomar 6y ago
      The way I see it, we haven't worked had on energy storage capabilities. We optimized for cellphones and Laptops, and these cover most of your day or more now. For homes, the market is still no that big, because batteries are expensive and electricity is widely available. As we move to solar, electricity will become very cheap in the day and very expensive at night. This will create the required capital to create storage solutions in houses and factories. Also you don't need a portable battery when installing it at home, so I think the cost could be reasonable.
    - Retric 6y ago
      Peaking power plants actually cost more per kWh than solar backed battery storage. However, until we install enough solar that’s a pointless exercise as simply directly using solar energy is more efficient and there isn’t a regular surplus to capture. The economics of this get really interesting. In a largely solar grid, 1 axis Solar tracking systems add production in the morning and evenings, thus offsetting the need for a lot of battery storage. However, we aren’t currently using significant battery storage so that isn’t worth it yet. Similarly shipping a surplus East / West time shifts it, but we don’t currently have that surplus.
eigenvector 6y ago
Well said. To paraphrase Wade Davis, the question is not hydro or no hydro but where, how much and for whose benefit. Many dams produce very little electricity and can be removed with minimal impact to the cost or carbon intensity of our power supply. We should not conflate dams that are integral to the power system like Grand Coulee with those that are insignificant.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Eliminating Grand Coulee could produce overwhelmingly greater benefit for fisheries.
mschuster91 6y ago
> Common designs for self-contained PORTABLE nuclear reactors easily outclass the entire generating capacity of these dams. None of these designs has been turned to production yet, and no one has solved the waste storage question.
dredmorbius 6y ago
Nameplate capacity (power, in MW) isn't the only consideration in electrical generation, but total generation (energy, in MWh), dispatchability, cold-start capability, pollution, other impacts, maintenance, storage, accident risk, waste storage, and other factors. Even smaller hydro sites are valuable in that they represent very raapidly dispatchable load --- a dam's turbines can be put online or taken offline in seconds to minutes, where other sources (notably conventional and nuclear thermal power) require hours to days to make large cycling changes. Solar and wind rely on incident available energy, and are not deployable at operator discretion, though balancing over the grid or via storage, or dispachable load, may be possible. Hydro banks power in the form of impounded water. And with relatively simple moddifications offers 90%+ efficient pumped hydro storage capabilities. The downsides are the large ecological impacts noted in the BBC article, sedimentation (a particularly large problem on the silt-heavy Colorado River), as well as some risk of structural failure, though the US record on this is generally quite good. With many thousands of dams, there've been a handful of major failures. Planning, alerts, and response generally eliminate of minimise deaths, though disruption from evacuations, or property damage can still be substantial. Long-term consequences spanning centuries, as with nuclear failures, are not a factor, even in utterly catastrophic failures, largely experienced outside the US. I'm not defending the Klamath hydro facilities, only noting factors. Your obsevation that there are both benefits and negative impacts is true of any technology or technological intervention.
seltzered_ 6y ago
Honestly this framing just makes me wonder about what the impacts of three gorges dam has then, or it's risks. It's more complicated than just finding balance vs. impact on dam power level, it's the other things introduced by human population that isn't aware or engaged with the local ecology. To ramble aloud, Recently tire dust was linked to salmon getting sick ( https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/climate/salmon-kill-washington.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/climate/salmon-kill-washi... ), and in talking with people in the northwest home construction around urbanism/single family home suburbs over the past 30 years has hugely impacted the pacific northwest ecology.
bmitc 6y ago
> Also, Chinook is delicious and anything which means more lox is a win in my book. The salmon isn’t for you. It’s for the orcas who are literally starving.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  There was once plenty for everyone. There could be, again, given time and action. The destroyed fisheries always produced more value than the electrical production that replaced them. The dam people just had enough political influence to overcome reasoned opposition. Central power production represented Progress, vs. distributed, disunited and archaic fishing communities that, you know, fed people.
lumberingjack 6y ago
Nearly weekly and sometimes daily outages in Sand City and surrounding areas people actually packing up and leaving and they're still using our tax dollars to tear down infrastructure. My tribe was also in that area still is the fish are fine. Just because this tribe was on the American side of the border when they drew the lines doesn't mean that they are the only tribe that used that area. California has a blanket ban on any nuclear energy projects or research in California it's never going to happen. get ready to buy China coal because that's what you're going to be using in about 6 years.
- reportingsjr 6y ago
  Please leave the fear mongering to other sites, and try to use critical thinking a bit more. Your comment history is full of half truths to try and make some terrible arguments, which is seriously unethical.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

maxerickson 6y ago

Lots of dams are flood control projects that also produce electricity.

AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
True, that's another possible item in the benefit column, but, it also creates risk of a catastrophic failures like Michigan and almost-orville.
redis_mlc 6y ago
The Chinese Three Gorges Dam is an electricity project (that benefits one family), and doesn't do flood control (it's 100' too short. The reason is that if it was the correct height, it could flood a major city upstream.) :)

paledot 6y ago

Indeed. This is why hydro shouldn't be considered green energy. (That, and the methane reduced when hundreds or thousands of hectares of living, breathing land are flooded and decompose in an anoxic environment.)

AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
Does anyone consider hydro as green anymore? Nuclear has far less impact.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Very few people consider nuclear power as "green". It's better than almost all the alternatives but those arguments don't work with you average citizen any longer so nuclear power is plateaued for the forseeable future in Western nations.
908B64B197 6y ago
> This is why hydro shouldn't be considered green energy. Minuscule emissions when it's built that are amortized over a 50 year lifespan qualifies as very green in my books. The idea that it's not green anymore is absolutely ridiculous. I sometime wonder if environmentalism greatest threat isn't... environmentalists themselves!

sjdbdjd 6y ago

You are comparing the power output of a damn that displaced some fish to one that displaced tens of millions? Doesn’t seem very proportional

AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
I wasn't trying to compare the two and make a judgement on if 3 gorges is worth it while these aren't, I'm merely saying that 3 gorges is so much more massive in scale.

rhodozelia 6y ago

The article made it sound like they would lose less than 8% of their 2200 MW renewable generation for a reduction of less than 176 MW. Maybe the article confused the total generation from the 8 plants with and the 4 being removed. They estimated 450 million to add fish ladders and rehabilitate the facilities for the next 100 years. If it was $450 million for 170 MW $2.6 million / MW is pretty cheap construction cost. I am surprised that it isn’t an attractive investment

AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
Correct, so, 176MW is the power generation for ALL dams on that river. They are only removing 4 of them of which I think only 2 produce power and I can't find exact figures on the MW output of each of them. 169 was an upper bound and seems VERY small. 450M was the cost of removal according to the article, not the cost of adding new fish ladders?
- rhodozelia 6y ago
  >This is because to renew the operating licence for these dams, its ratepayers would have to foot an approximately $400m (£308m) bill for upgrades to ensure compliance with legislation (including the installation of costly fish ladders at each dam that would enable migration). Upgrading the dams cost $400m. >Overall, little will be lost in terms of renewable energy generation: the dams represent less than 8% of PacfiCorp’s 2,208 MW current renewable generation capacity, [1] indicates that you are correct and 7 dams produce 169 MW. so indeed these dams produce a relatively small amount of electricity. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klamath_River_Hydroelectric_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klamath_River_Hydroelectric_Pr...

oefrha 6y ago

> three gorges produces 22,500 MW of power. Correction: 22,500MW is the installed capacity, i.e. what the generators are capable of. It only reaches about half capacity on average, going by the numbers listed in the Wikipedia article (101.6TWh in 2018 => average ~11,600MW).

stjohnswarts 6y ago

The problems is they aren't building any power to deal with the decrease and no one is building nuke plants that haven't been in the works for 15+ years. I all for this if they want their rivers back though, but we can act like there won't be consequences.

csomar 6y ago
Solar production in the US is growing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_Monthly_Solar_Power_Generation.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Stat... No need for them to produce electricity, they can trade fish for electrons.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  Unfortunately, the usefulness of solar is limited by our energy storage capabilities. Water is one of the best ways of fixing this (either to supplement solar, like running a hydro dam on a cloudy day, or as a direct storage system, where excess electricity is used to pump water uphill so that the potential energy can be harvested later)
  - csomar 6y ago
    The way I see it, we haven't worked had on energy storage capabilities. We optimized for cellphones and Laptops, and these cover most of your day or more now. For homes, the market is still no that big, because batteries are expensive and electricity is widely available. As we move to solar, electricity will become very cheap in the day and very expensive at night. This will create the required capital to create storage solutions in houses and factories. Also you don't need a portable battery when installing it at home, so I think the cost could be reasonable.
  - Retric 6y ago
    Peaking power plants actually cost more per kWh than solar backed battery storage. However, until we install enough solar that’s a pointless exercise as simply directly using solar energy is more efficient and there isn’t a regular surplus to capture. The economics of this get really interesting. In a largely solar grid, 1 axis Solar tracking systems add production in the morning and evenings, thus offsetting the need for a lot of battery storage. However, we aren’t currently using significant battery storage so that isn’t worth it yet. Similarly shipping a surplus East / West time shifts it, but we don’t currently have that surplus.

eigenvector 6y ago

Well said. To paraphrase Wade Davis, the question is not hydro or no hydro but where, how much and for whose benefit. Many dams produce very little electricity and can be removed with minimal impact to the cost or carbon intensity of our power supply. We should not conflate dams that are integral to the power system like Grand Coulee with those that are insignificant.

ncmncm 6y ago
Eliminating Grand Coulee could produce overwhelmingly greater benefit for fisheries.

mschuster91 6y ago

> Common designs for self-contained PORTABLE nuclear reactors easily outclass the entire generating capacity of these dams. None of these designs has been turned to production yet, and no one has solved the waste storage question.

dredmorbius 6y ago

Nameplate capacity (power, in MW) isn't the only consideration in electrical generation, but total generation (energy, in MWh), dispatchability, cold-start capability, pollution, other impacts, maintenance, storage, accident risk, waste storage, and other factors. Even smaller hydro sites are valuable in that they represent very raapidly dispatchable load --- a dam's turbines can be put online or taken offline in seconds to minutes, where other sources (notably conventional and nuclear thermal power) require hours to days to make large cycling changes. Solar and wind rely on incident available energy, and are not deployable at operator discretion, though balancing over the grid or via storage, or dispachable load, may be possible. Hydro banks power in the form of impounded water. And with relatively simple moddifications offers 90%+ efficient pumped hydro storage capabilities. The downsides are the large ecological impacts noted in the BBC article, sedimentation (a particularly large problem on the silt-heavy Colorado River), as well as some risk of structural failure, though the US record on this is generally quite good. With many thousands of dams, there've been a handful of major failures. Planning, alerts, and response generally eliminate of minimise deaths, though disruption from evacuations, or property damage can still be substantial. Long-term consequences spanning centuries, as with nuclear failures, are not a factor, even in utterly catastrophic failures, largely experienced outside the US. I'm not defending the Klamath hydro facilities, only noting factors. Your obsevation that there are both benefits and negative impacts is true of any technology or technological intervention.

seltzered_ 6y ago

Honestly this framing just makes me wonder about what the impacts of three gorges dam has then, or it's risks. It's more complicated than just finding balance vs. impact on dam power level, it's the other things introduced by human population that isn't aware or engaged with the local ecology. To ramble aloud, Recently tire dust was linked to salmon getting sick ( https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/climate/salmon-kill-washington.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/climate/salmon-kill-washi... ), and in talking with people in the northwest home construction around urbanism/single family home suburbs over the past 30 years has hugely impacted the pacific northwest ecology.

bmitc 6y ago

> Also, Chinook is delicious and anything which means more lox is a win in my book. The salmon isn’t for you. It’s for the orcas who are literally starving.

ncmncm 6y ago
There was once plenty for everyone. There could be, again, given time and action. The destroyed fisheries always produced more value than the electrical production that replaced them. The dam people just had enough political influence to overcome reasoned opposition. Central power production represented Progress, vs. distributed, disunited and archaic fishing communities that, you know, fed people.

lumberingjack 6y ago

Nearly weekly and sometimes daily outages in Sand City and surrounding areas people actually packing up and leaving and they're still using our tax dollars to tear down infrastructure. My tribe was also in that area still is the fish are fine. Just because this tribe was on the American side of the border when they drew the lines doesn't mean that they are the only tribe that used that area. California has a blanket ban on any nuclear energy projects or research in California it's never going to happen. get ready to buy China coal because that's what you're going to be using in about 6 years.

reportingsjr 6y ago
Please leave the fear mongering to other sites, and try to use critical thinking a bit more. Your comment history is full of half truths to try and make some terrible arguments, which is seriously unethical.