Hoover Dams For Lilliput: Does Small Hydroelectric Power Have a Future? 302
Posted
by
timothy
from the plenty-of-room-at-the-bottom dept.
from the plenty-of-room-at-the-bottom dept.
New submitter MatthewVD writes "Boing Boing's Maggie Koerth-Baker, author of Before The Lights Go Out, writes that the era of giant hydroelectric projects like the Hoover Dam has passed. But the Department of Energy has identified 5,400 potential sites for small hydro projects of 30 MWs or less. The sites, in states as dry as Kansas, represent a total 18,000 MW of power — enough to increase by 50 percent America's hydro power. Even New York City's East River has pilot projects to produce power from underwater turbines. As we stare down global warming and peak oil, could small hydroelectric power be a key solution?"
Economies of scale (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything but fossil fuels (Score:5, Insightful)
Until everyone realizes that the only short/medium term solution is nuclear, we'll need everything we can get that isn't fossil. Especially coal, but natural gas isn't much better.
Oil won't get much cheaper anytime soon, and will probably get more expensvie. If that happens, this kind of project will be much more appealing.
Idiotic Leading Questions in Summaries (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear editors/submitters for Slashdot stories:
Please eliminate the stupid leading/inflammatory/etc. questions at the end of the summaries. Anyone with an IQ higher than that of a grape has already mentally asked themselves far more insightful questions than the ones posed at the end of the summaries. You are just making yourselves look like idiots by asking them.
Sincerely,
An Old AC
Contained Hydro (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:something about reservoirs (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, smaller dams means smaller, shallower reservoirs. Which in turn means that they tend to silt up pretty quickly.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
When total energy required on the order of TWatts, you want to boast about 18GWatt being more than EVERYTHING already out there, hydro-wise?
No. Really. The ecological damage for that pittance of power just isn't worth it.
You're doing it wrong. You need to look at opportunity cost and give more than a vague comparison. The correct question from an environmental perspective is, "How does the environmental impact of 18 GW of micro-hydro compare to the environmental impact of the 18 GW of power that will be generated through other means in its absence?"
You fall into the trap of thinking any solution that isn't a silver bullet is useless. Sadly, this is how most decision making is done. Hell, your comment is probably better reasoned than most energy decisions made by governments in the form of legislation or about governments in the form of voting.
Re:Scarce? Where? (Score:3, Insightful)
technology also finds new ways to get at and find oil.
If that were the case, then the energy returned on energy invested would be increasing, instead of decreasing. It doesn't have to hit "1" to stop, either.
Re:Economies of scale (Score:4, Insightful)
What we need is less people (i.e. less babies). All of these problems like scarce energy, high pollution, and dwindling water supplies wouldn't exist if the North American population was only 16 million (1800). Or even 85 million (1900).
Re:Economies of scale (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The finicky environmentalist (Score:5, Insightful)
So you're saying that environmentalists change their opinions as new facts come to light? How dare they? Those flip-floppers!
Re:Economies of scale (Score:3, Insightful)
"Replacing oil with a plant-based fuel (ethanol, biodiesel) makes a lot more sense."
Have you done the math? Replacing, say, half of the demand for oil with either of those would not be practical with current agricultural techniques. It's not that they aren't viable -- they are -- but the sheer *size* of the energy demand is the problem. Heck, whale oil was a renewable resource. It could have lasted forever. The problem was the quantities demanded. It's not easy to replace an average of 85 million barrels of oil per day with *anything*, and while there are many options for doing so, when you try to scale them up to that size or even a decent chunk of it you run into problems. We have a BIG problem coming in the next few decades, so we're going to have to employ many different solutions. And we need to start investing heavily in all of them now.
Re:Scarce? Where? (Score:5, Insightful)
In real life we have hundreds of years of fossil fuels left.
In real life we have millions of years; because somewhere between 50 and 200 it'll become increasingly uneconomical to extract said fossil fuels such that alternatives are actually cheaper. The first it's likely to happen to is oil. In 50 years we're likely to let most of it sit in the ground because pulling it out is too expensive except for certain scientific testing.
Thus the 'peak oil' - at some point extraction cost will exceed the economic worth, and production will start dropping.
Nuclear is already viable in all but political arenas. Jump the price of power enough and people will hold their nose and select it. Of course, you can't exactly shove nuclear power into a car, and oil is mostly used for transportation. So you're looking at a BIG change if you're going to use nuclear power to provide transport. Something like vast electrification of rail lines, restoration of electric trolly car systems, etc... More dense housing where mass transit is viable.
Coal is more a competitor for Nuclear, and we have a lot more of it.
Re:Economies of scale (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Scarce? Where? (Score:5, Insightful)
Tragically, nobody wants to look at nuclear, especially new generation nuclear that is far safer or thorium that is both safer and not subject to nuclear arms proliferation concerns. Fusion is still on a distant horizon, but if/when it is realized everything else goes away.
With the possible exception of gasoline. Like it or not, it is difficult to imagine any other way of storing 35 kW-hours in the volume occupied by one gallon of gasoline, in a reasonably stable and safe way. Even if fusion is perfected, solar becomes secondary universal and coal goes away, we'll probably end up synthesizing gasoline (or an equally energy dense equivalent) simply because of that.
BTW, not all dams are evil, nor are their reservoirs. I'd guess most of them are more beneficial than not. But either way, that can be decided on a case by case basis -- it isn't reasonable to say "building dams is always bad" as people have built dams without worrying about generating power just to regulate flooding or facilitate irrigation or cheap transportation. Beavers build dams in the wild -- sometimes they are "good", sometimes humans go and tear them down as "bad" -- depending on where they are and what results from the dams.
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