Large hydropower dams 'not sustainable' in the developing world
A new study says that many large scale hydropower projects in Europe and the US have been disastrous for the environment. Dozens of these dams are being removed every year, with many considered dangerous and uneconomic. But the authors fear that the unsustainable nature of these projects has not been recognised in the developing world. Thousands of new dams are now being planned for rivers in Africa and Asia.
[...] Dams are now being removed at a rate of more than one a week on both sides of the Atlantic. The problem, say the authors of this new paper [open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1809426115] [DX], is that governments were blindsided by the prospect of cheap electricity without taking into account the full environmental and social costs of these installations. More than 90% of dams built since the 1930s were more expensive than anticipated. They have damaged river ecology, displaced millions of people and have contributed to climate change by releasing greenhouse gases from the decomposition of flooded lands and forests.
[...] In the developing world, an estimated 3,700 dams, large and small are now in various stages of development. The authors say their big worry is that many of the bigger projects will do irreparable damage to the major rivers on which they are likely to be built. On the Congo river, the Grand Inga project is expected to produce more than a third of the total electricity currently being generated in Africa. However, the new study points out that the main goal for the $80bn installation will be to provide electricity to industry. "Over 90% of the energy from this project is going to go to South Africa for mining and the people in the Congo will not get that power," said Prof Moran.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday November 07 2018, @12:17AM (7 children)
"We have too many people in poverty!!"
Let's get them some power to lift them up
"But we have too much CO2!!!"
Let's build some dams, so the poor people get power, flood protection, and water safety, without the constant CO2 emissions
"But dams are an unsustainable ecological disaster!!!!'
Me gonna slap you now.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 07 2018, @12:22AM (3 children)
Solar++
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Wednesday November 07 2018, @09:01AM (2 children)
Yeah, until you find out solar is also "unsustainable" according to their metrics.
Fact is, the matter of "sustainability" is one of scale. Those micro/mini hydro plants are fine, they don't affect the environment too much. However once you scale up to massive hydroplants capable of providing baseload power to a modern society, all kinds of negative side effects ensure.
Same thing with Solar. Having some solar panels on the roof of your house, or a mini/micro solar plant is generally ok. Replacing all baseload power generation with it, you would find it causes problems as well. Off the top of my head I can think of the toxic elements used in solar panel creation, to the rare earths (and other toxic materials) used in the absolutely massive battery banks required to convert the peak power generation into a longer stable base load (unless you go for pumped storage hydro, but then you got the same environmental issues as a hydro plant), to the fact that you are reducing the amount of sunlight hitting the ground, and by extension, causing all kinds of problems to the local plants and animals.
If you define humans as not part of nature, and therefore all they do is unnatural and should be curbed to a level where their actions do not alter the environment, then there is no real way to have human existence. Modern society thrives on power, which is not really possible to achieve without permanently altering the environment. If we abandoned modern society and went to being farmers, we would destroy so much land for farming (far more than we do now). If we went to being hunter gatherers, we will hunt animals to extinction.
So a pure "sustainable" existence as the paper suggests is not possible. If we remove all the Hydro, we will just switch to burning fossil fuels for our baseload.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 07 2018, @09:12AM (1 child)
There's significant room for improvement for solar. I'm thinking of the lower efficiency panels that are thinner, flexible, much cheaper, cheaper to install, etc. Maybe they could be made with graphene. They could be stored as huge carpet-sized rolls and loaded into a truck.
For the rest, we will probably see a lot of natural gas, and hopefully some new and improved attempts at using fission before we move to fusion.
https://www.cmu.edu/epp/news/2016/is-replacing-coal-with-natural-gas-actually-good-for-the-climate.html [cmu.edu]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday November 07 2018, @12:22PM
There is significant room for improvement in all kinds of technologies. Problem is (a) can that improvement be achieved, (b) if it can, anytime soon, or will we be waiting decades, and (c) can the improvements be applied in a cost effective way.
Thing is, now we are talking "what if" scenarios. Sure, if we make an uber amazing solar panel that can collect all the energy we need without blocking sunlight needed for living things underneath it, then yeah, we could cover the earth in them (and possibly the seas too), and then solve our energy needs (and the storage problem, with a worldwide integrated grid, it is always sunny on one side of the earth, so "night power" for the other side is sorted too).
However, that is unlikely to happen. In the present reality, solar is nowhere near that good, and neither is wind, or pretty much any renewable resource, with the exception of hydro and fossil fuels (which are renewable, just that their rate of renewal is far far slower than our rate of consumption thereof).
Yes, while I agree natural gas is better than coal (hell, considering that coal belches out more radioactive waste in its smoke than nuclear reactors do, anything else is better), my original point is that Hydro is one of the (if not the) "least worst" options we currently have for base load generation of power in a renewable way.
Fusion is still "30 years away", which is what they were telling us 30 years ago. Doesn't help that ITER was agreed in 1987, they finally started work in 2006, and blew past the deadline so much that, as we approach 2019, we are still nowhere near completion (according to the plan, ITER was supposed to have been completed in 2016 and running for 2 years now).
All that is left is fission, which is the best current solution IMO, but there is too much fear of "nuclear", hence we are somewhat stagnating on the energy front. Historically, every time a new, more powerful/dense form of energy was discovered, humanity jumped at the chance to harness it for its own ends. Atomic power is the first time we actually stepped back from seizing it, and instead looked for alternatives, and as a result we are current stagnating across the board (economies are basically applied energy, your energy supply goes down, so goes your society)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday November 07 2018, @12:27AM (1 child)
Use your browser's Search In Page to find "90%".
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday November 07 2018, @12:38AM
10% of "more than a third of the total electricity currently being generated in Africa" is an absolutely massive amount of power.
Unless you haven't noticed that Africa has some pretty impressive cities and industries.
Wikipedia tell me it's 39GW nameplate capacity (52x750MW).
Since the locals don't waste at US rates, that's enough for a LOT of families/businesses.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by edIII on Wednesday November 07 2018, @06:29AM
I just laughed really fucking hard thinking about taking down Hoover Dam. It's done, it's over, it's never going anywhere. Draining it would be something that could literally take years at full effort, and may not be possible without catastrophic failure. I know they accounted for the weight of the water against the wall. When that weight disappears, I don't know how the dam will react. They're claims of greenhouse gases are bullshit with Hoover Dam, as the local ecology was not dense as as forest. It's a fucking desert.
Ohhh, and people in Las Vegas don't want to pay out the ass for water from another state, or dig an aqueduct from northern Nevada. That's also our water supply.
Fucking morons indeed.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by marcello_dl on Wednesday November 07 2018, @12:29AM
Literally inside my town, near the center, there are two little hydroelectric power plants, the second one is only a few hundred mt. downstream of the first, using the same small canal, no need to flood anything. Residents, mice and ducks tolerate them no prob, fish I dunno. Barbieri power plant [500px.com]. Some other watermills are there, but static, I guess kept for decorative purposes.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pav on Wednesday November 07 2018, @12:35AM
If your country has cliffs and low value land adjacent to the ocean there's always salt water pumped hydro [reneweconomy.com.au]. In South Australia the proposed 225W 1770 MWh Cultana project would store 14 times the electricity of Elon Musks megabattery, and would serve existing and future adjacent solar farms.
(Score: 5, Touché) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday November 07 2018, @02:15AM
> governments were blindsided by the prospect of cheap electricity
This is incorrect. The leaders were blinded by the giant piles of money from their World bank loans. The multi-nationals responsible for building these facilities were very studious to make sure the suppliers that happened to be the leader's families and closest friends became very wealthy.
It is good that they were blinded by this money. Those that refused to partake were killed and replaced by less honorable men.
See Also: Confessions of an Economic Hitman, John Perkins (2004) Berrett-Koehler Publishers
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07 2018, @12:13PM
"i lost my whole family today" said one fish to another in the fish-bar, one evening.
"was it because of the dam?" the second fish asked.
"yeah, it's f...king terrible. my son and daughter would either run up or downstream when the fisher man came.
now we can't go anywhere. he got us going in circles".
later that evening:
"so did you catch any fish today?" the fisher mans wife asked?
"only this small one" the fisherman replied.
"see, i told you not to catch all those fish and sell them on the market when the dam was finished" ...
and then there was the story of the mt. sediment ... now lost at sea.
or the story of john-reverse-osmosis, getting rich removing salt from lake water pumped from the ocean.
last but not least, the story of little penny circumvent, displaced, who didn't understand that the fertile (non-arid) area around a line is less then around a god-damn-freaking LAKE!
also, let's destroy dams, because global-warming will bring LESS water and build ...uhm ..err... water cooled nu-clear reactors instead. we can mark-up the scarce water to finance it!