Slashdot Mirror
Hoover Dams For Lilliput: Does Small Hydroelectric Power Have a Future?
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?"
Small hydro is nothing new. The state of Georgia has something like fifty or sixty small hydro sites, and they barely make any electricity -- as those stated in the article. The problem is, however, that hydroelectric power -- even without dams -- is fairly ecologically disturbing. Not only that, but you have to maintain it. Why would you want to have to maintain 5400 power plants that each only make less than 30MW? Yes, it's about four or five thousand households, but that's also about a thirtieth of an average coal plant. There's no incentive to do this. Your ROI is low, your maintenance is high (and difficult)...particularly when chemical belchers like Plant Scherer can exist, which produce upwards of three and a half gigawatts. They aren't trendy, but I've yet to see a conclusive argument against breeder reactors.
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.
...and their environmental effect.
I suspect that, in a situation where fossil fuels are becoming scarce, you'd quite rapidly see people's interest in the environment shrink to one a simple question about every object around them: "Am I better off eating this or burning this?"
I know of existing dams in the US - several on the Rock River (north-central Illinois, U.S.A.) - Rockton, Rockford, Dixon, Byron, Sterling/Rock Falls, etc. that were built years ago by Commonwealth Edison for min-hydro power. The dams are still there to provide floodwater control, but have been decom'd for electrical generation.
Last time I looked, the dam in Dixon station still had generators in operation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_River_(Mississippi_River)
Now, I'm no civil engineer.. but if you already have a dam, and the environmental impact associated with it, why not us the head you have to generate some? Yea, your not getting the 200-300' head that you would like, but there is still a lot of potential energy to be captured out of the 20' 30' head out of one of these.
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
There are many places such as irrigation channels where you can place micro turbines that will have no ill environmental effect as these do not support aquatic life. It looks like this was not included in the report. For example see hydrovolts.com/ for a unique hydro generator that does not need a damn. These can even be placed in the outflow from some sewage or industrial plants. Not big power, but lots of places you can wedge these in to add distributed generation into the grid - often at the ends of branches where it is needed the most.
One of my biggest problems with the environmentalist "movement" (and, in fairness, it's really more a mish-mash of a bunch of somewhat different movements) is its propensity for embracing fashionable fads and then tossing them aside the second some new thing comes along. Hydro was once the darling of clean energy, but then someone started complaining about the poor fish not being able to spawn as good as before, and so it was tossed aside like some embarrassing stepchild--in favor of the current green stars-of-the-moment, wind and solar. This in spite of the fact that hydro has BY FAR the longest and most productive history of any of the green energy generators. There are still working dams out there today that have been generating electricity for close to a century (probably some over a century now).
Makes me wonder how long it will be before someone finds fault with wind and solar and those get tossed aside for some new fad too.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Also, smaller dams means smaller, shallower reservoirs. Which in turn means that they tend to silt up pretty quickly.
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.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Here in Norway we got more mountains and rain per square kilometer or per person the US could dream about - okay we have a cold climate too - but not even we are self-sufficient on hydro power or for that matter renewable power. Sure as fossil fuels run out they'll surely be built - just like wind, water, solar, geothermal, biofuel and everything else you can think of - but they won't add up to the current energy usage. This figure pretty much says it all.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I suspect that, in a situation where fossil fuels are becoming scarce,
Nice fiction Asimov.
In real life we have hundreds of years of fossil fuels left.
The problem with your assertion is that just like technology help us fend off anything like "peak population", technology also finds new ways to get at and find oil.
So in the U.S. alone we have way more than enough fossil fuel to last us until really good nuclear / solar sources become viable.
Like wind turbines, hydro power is kind of a dead end. It requires a lot of effort to maintain and only really makes much sense on the scale where you are really harming the environment around it.
Look at the history of any large dam and you'll see a trail of destruction behind it. How funny that more dams are being proposed as green...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Indeed. Far more people have been killed by accidental release of DHMO from hydro schemes than accidental release of radiation from nuclear plants.
> When total energy required on the order of TWatts, you want to boast about 18GWatt...
This. If hydro is currently producing 6% of our electricity, increasing that by 50% gets you all the way up to 9% but the cost in construction and maintaining so many small installs will dwarf the benefit. To borrow someone else's phrase, "Electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."
> The ecological damage for that pittance of power just isn't worth it.
While I do agree in this case, note that the enviros ALWAYS say the ecological damage isn't worth it. ALWAYS. Since they cry wolf so regular most normal folk have taken to discounting claims of enviromental harm. Enviros really should consider that and instead of opposing everything every time tell us what they are FOR.
Me, I say build the crap of nukes and convert fleets to natural gas.
It would be a case where the government could make a positive impact and NOT be exceeding their legal bounds. If all large government fleets went natural gas every service station would quickly add the ability to sell to them without any mandate or tax breaks needed. Imagine every new school bus, city bus, police car, etc. converting. Every one of those vehicles stopped needing gas it would relieve a lot of pressure on crude prices AND on our strained refining capacity. Then we could think about the big rigs.
As for nukes, we should be building them. New safer designs so we can retire the current units which were less safe than a modern design before we have operated them far beyond their original service life. Which design is best? Who knows, so have a bake off and pick a half dozen different designs and build some. Dump some R&D into thorium, if only to get those people on board. Right now electric vehicles are just indirect coal burners, get enough nuke capacity onto the grid and they make a lot more sense. Now if we could just get the battery tech up to scratch....
Democrat delenda est
In real life we have hundreds of years of fossil fuels left.
Sort of true. There certainly will be oil in the ground 200 years from now. It won't be easy to get, nor will it be inexpensive. The global taste for fossil fuels, especially liquid fossil fuels is truly enormous and growing (think China and India who are attempting to get to US per capita energy expenditures). The supply of fossil fuels isn't growing much at all (happy words from various US politicians notwithstanding).
What we have hear is a failure to communicate. Nice writeup on the concept of Peak oil and how we need to change a few things.....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The good ones are running out; but there still seems to be enough coal, vaguely-bituminous-shale, frackable gas, and assorted other burnables sloshing around, if you are willing to ignore the smell... Which we are.
The answer is a solid NO .
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.
I don't read AC A human right
Small scale hydro can make a heck of a lot of sense. I work with a small community high in the mountains of Washington State, where the primary power supply is a small scale hydro-electric generation system. The funny part is that this technology isn't "new"... The turbines and generators they're using have patent plates on them that read 10-04-86, and that's not 1986. Despite being easily 100 years old, the technology is still easy to maintain, and efficient. Based on the electrical output compared to the water flow, we figure this plant is about 80% efficient, which is pretty good.
In the summer, the system will generate upwards of 250kW of power, which is more than adequate for the community. In the winter, this does drop down to 30kW or so, but that is still more or less sufficient for the lower winter population.
The water supply for this system comes off a small creek flowing down the mountain, about 300' up there is a small diversion dam that the creek flows into. Water will either flow into the penstock, or continue down the creek depending on demand. As a side note, the water pressure is sufficient to push some of the water through the entire water treatment plant, and then into a storage tank, to supply the community's drinking water without the use of a single pump.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
In general I agree with your point, but in fact hydroelectric ties with nuclear for currently having the lowest cost per delivered watt of power of all the extant methods of power generation. Wind is, as you point out, a dead end except for (possibly) solar updraft that is really a variant of solar, not a hillside of windmills. Solar PV has a Moore's Law that appears applicable, which predicts that by the end of this decade it will likely be break even compared to e.g. coal in amortized cost per delivered watt, without subsidy, and thereafter will become ever more economically profitable on a comparative basis.
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.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
> ...and their environmental effect.
I think you missed this part:
"produce power from underwater turbines"
These are called "run of river" systems. Instead of a dam that creates an artificial height difference, they are based on using natural changes in height of the landscape. What you do is dig a tube between two points on the river, and the difference in height between the two provides the power.
Although everyone things of dams, run-of-river systems are very common. Niagara Falls is a good example. This project has little visual impact, and none of the detrimental effects normally associated with hydro. The failure modes are also quite benign, generally loss-of-power, not loss-of-life.
I've never seen a good argument not to build these where possible. Except for financial, of course.
In general I agree with your point, but in fact hydroelectric ties with nuclear for currently having the lowest cost per delivered watt of power of all the extant methods of power generation. Wind is, as you point out, a dead end except for (possibly) solar updraft that is really a variant of solar, not a hillside of windmills. Solar PV has a Moore's Law that appears applicable, which predicts that by the end of this decade it will likely be break even compared to e.g. coal in amortized cost per delivered watt, without subsidy, and thereafter will become ever more economically profitable on a comparative basis.
On the surface, it looks like he knows what he's talking about. However, ask a subject matter expert [myself] and it's clear he's spouting nonsense. Maybe some collection of facts that were true at some time... But let's examine them now.
1. Wind is a dead end?
Except for having the largest project pipeline of any energy conversion technology. FYI, it will remain the largest pipeline until solar eclipses it. These industries will grow to 10 - 100x at current economics without hitting storage walls and without improving economics. I can not consider how a 10 - 100 fold increase in production and 6 - 13% of global production (at the storage wall) can be considered a dead end
2. The application of Moore's law to PV
No. The barriers to PV production have been varied, most reasons are are not related to semiconductor production. Historically it was the cost of production of high purity polysilicon because they competed with semiconductor industry (nothing to do with transistor count). We can make cheap solar grade 6-9N poly now. Slow technological advances have decreased wafer costs and increased wafer efficiency. Cell/Module production costs have scaled well with production capacity (standard manufacturing learning curve). Equipment costs are cheap enough to compete with coal / nuclear. We might see another 50% drop in silicon module asp (due to ~19-21% quasi-mono cells displacing mono) PV in the next few years, but for all intents and purposes they are cheap enough. BOS will go down by a factor of 2 - 3 with cheaper inverters from China or microinverters. All that's left are to tackle ridiculously disproportionate installation costs, which are a relic of the tortuous development of the industry. Large firms will swallow up the crappy downstream industry we now have, prices will/are drop/dropping and install costs will find a home at less than 1 $/Wp. Again, nothing to do with Moore's law or anything like it... Utility scale projects are already approaching $3/Wp installed ! because they can efficiently minimize these ridiculous human costs. There will be utility installs at 1.50 $/Wp in 2012. These utilities will run these plants for 30-40 years and produce electricity at 0.03-0.04 $/kWh. Nothing will come close except high capacity factor natural gas.
3.break even with coal by 2020
There is no magic coal/solar price point. Historically $1/Wp module ASP has been a target that approximates coal grid parity. We achieved this in Q2 2011. Otherwise solar beats coal in some places and solar will never beat coal in other places. Presently, module ASPs are less than 0.9 $/Wp and will probably be less than 0.8$/Wp by the end of 2012. Furthermore, coal is no longer the target. Coals prices have been steadily increasing for 15 years, while quality steadily decreasing for decades. Natural gas is the cost leader at present day prices, mainly due to fracking. Solar may never catch up to gas, but a solar / gas grid is already more flexible and cheaper than nuclear or coal.
4. nuclear and coal are the cheapest
Yeah yeah, let's stop comparing the cost of generating fully-depreciated 40 year old equipment with new solar plants. Solar is cheaper than both today. There are plenty of issues with solar (e.g. less than 0.25 capacity factor), but raw economics is no longer one of them. W'ere pr