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Yeah, let's get rid of one of the most effective sources of green energy that works around the clock! The environmental concerns around dams are legitimate, but
by slaymaker1907 3y ago
Yeah, let's get rid of one of the most effective sources of green energy that works around the clock! The environmental concerns around dams are legitimate, but they need to be balanced against the consequences of how those energy sources will be replaced. There are also mitigation strategies that can be done instead, like the fish ladders that were mentioned in passing, to help mitigate the environmental impact.
Edit: I see climate change isn't even mentioned which is an enormous red flag when talking about hydro power.
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- Ekaros 3y agoI don't think any dams that produce meaningful amount of energy are going to be removed any time soon. These are the ones that used to power mills and like. So we are talking about way under 1MW in power each.
- Gibbon1 3y agoThey are removing all the old dams on the Klamath River. Company that ended up owning them considers them a white elephant because the revenue from power isn't enough to pay for needed refurbishment, operating costs, and insurance.
- sumtechguy 3y agoThis is the real reason most of these are removed. No one wants a 100+ year old dam that need several million dollars worth of work and the ROI is negative. So they remove them and everyone is happy. Most of the ones that are removed are well past their use by sticker date.
- bobthepanda 3y agoEven according to the owners, the Klamath River dams represent less than 2% of the power generated by that electric company. https://www.opb.org/article/2022/11/18/klamath-river-dam-removal-southern-oregon-dams-northern-california-drought/ https://www.opb.org/article/2022/11/18/klamath-river-dam-rem...
- Gibbon1 3y agoI've been meaning to compare the energy produced by those dams to a similar area of solar panels. Square miles of reservoir to similar square miles of solar farm. The Three Gorges Dam covers 419 sq miles. Produces 100 X 10^12 watt hours a year. Internet: 1,000 megawatt-hours per year requires, on average, 2.8 acres for the solar panels. Calc: 2.3 X 10^11 watt-hours per square mile. 100 X 10^12 wh / 2.3 X 10^11 wh/mile2 => 437 square miles. The Chinese done goofed.
- Ekaros 3y agoForgetting the slight thing that you might want to have electricity at night too...
- samus 3y agoGrid-level batteries and pumped hydro (which only requires a height differential, not a riverbed) have been a thing for quite a while now.
- Ekaros 3y agoSo where exactly do you find the hundreds of square miles of space to fit pumped hydro to match this scale? Or even tens square miles with thousand meter drop height? And if that was so easy and cheap, why isn't it already build? Or grid level batteries storing 140 GWh for even intra-day storage...
- samus 3y agoAdmittedly pumped hydro can't be scaled up that much. However, the few places that are suitable are very well appreciated and likely won't ever be dismantled like these dams. For grid-level batteries, absolute space efficiency is not critical, so they allow a wider range of battery types to be used. Prices are rushing down. They are being deployed on such a massive scale that many new gas powerplant projects get cancelled.
- arp242 3y agoAccording to the article, not that effective: > Evaluations concluded that their electricity production had become unprofitable for the power plant owners – especially when the costs of maintenance and mandatory environmental protections, such as fish-ladder introductions, were taken into account, Ollikainen says. So the dams were sold and dismantled. [..] Across Europe, many dams are either approaching the end of their operational life, or the costs of their maintenance are outweighing the benefits they provide. Aside from various other problems mentioned in the article, which really don't seem that easy to work around, and doing so would make them even less cost-efficient. Never mind all of this takes energy so would reduce the efficiency (although I don't know by what amount, but it does need to be factored in).
- doctoboggan 3y ago> So the dams were sold and dismantled. Sold to who? Who would buy it just to dismantle it?
- throwaway894345 3y agoMy guess would be "governments"
- dessimus 3y agoThe buyers of a certain bridge in Brooklyn, clearly.
- habinero 3y agoLocal governments or consortiums. You usually need to own something before you can destroy it. Besides, the government has a vested interest in acting before the dams fail and kill people.
- bell-cot 3y agoI'd guess it's often the owner of the dam's surrounding property, or the property surrounding the reservoir. That'd make it easier to make sensible use of the "new" land, after the dam is removed.
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- logtempo 3y ago> Research now shows that at least 1.2 million instream obstacles block river flows in 36 European countries, with about 68% less than 2m (6.6ft) in height I think we are talking about those dam, not the big ones. > "Absolutely nobody is proposing to blow up or remove barriers which are in use," clarifies Garcia de Leaniz, "We are targeting barriers which are obsolete, which are no longer providing any services to society, that have silted up, and pose a flow hazard."
- soperj 3y agoDams are terrible for the environment(generally poison everything with methyl mercury), and in many cases aren't even that green, since they produce a lot of methane (dam water goes down in summer, that area growns plants, fills up in winter, plants then decompose in an anaerobic environment, producing methane). Depending on the size of the lakes this can be a very large area, ie: big hydro dams in Quebec/BC. There's been research to show one hydro dam produces more greenhouse gases than an equivalently sized coal plant in Brazil.
- mrguyorama 3y ago>Dams are terrible for the environment(generally poison everything with methyl mercury) What? Where does that mercury come from?
- soperj 3y agomercury in the soil ends up being converted to methyl mercury. Generally anything forested with large amounts of carbon in the soil tend to be the worse.
- skullone 3y agoIt sounds like you're trying to speak for everyone. Clearly there is a balance (money needs to be spent building new generation of some type). But we can work on climate -and- avoiding the extinction of vital fish species by restoring the flows of rivers. I don't think the systems at large will afford humanity a second chance or "over time" if we fail to act.
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- mrguyorama 3y agoMost of these dams are explicitly uneconomical to run with modern safety standards and 50 years of being under-maintained. There's a lot of dams that were built, the original owners eventually figured out they weren't as profitable as planned, and just wanted to abandon it. An abandoned dam is a future "natural" disaster waiting to happen. And most of these dams were built with pretty mediocre standards, and we don't even build these kinds of dams anymore because they have all sorts of ways of failing unexpectedly. They have to come down because they were privatized gains, socialized losses as usual. Private companies built them, decided they didn't want them anymore, and basically handed communities unmaintained dams and said "deal with this or drown when it fails". Communities generally don't like being saddled with the waste and consequences of a failed or finished private venture. We in the US had a huge dam boom at one point, turns out most of them were over-optimistic.