I'm sure this is not the case, but there are often environmental and political concerns around hydro. For example, Ethiopia's new dam on the Nile river has caused tension with their neighbours, who're worried about the control it gives Ethiopia over the water supply in the river [0]
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/21/africa/ethiopia-nile-rive...
For example, Seattle is largely hydroelectric powered. The city's public utility even owns the dams, so whatever energy that isn't used in Seattle they sell to California at market rates, which makes energy conservation a profit center for them. Washington also has major mountain ranges plus the Columbia river. Kansas, on the other hand, is short on anywhere to get falling water.
On the other hand, salmon are a crucial species to the ecosystem out here. They're the primary food source of the local orca population. They're a major commercial fishery. They're one of the major sources of nutrients along the rivers going into the interior. Isotope analysis of trees along the rivers out here shows that a large amount of their growth is driven by decaying salmon.
Ross Dam and its kin that Seattle's power comes from are high enough up where we don't think there was historically much salmon run. There's a study going on now rechecking that. We've removed the Elwa River dam on the Olympic Peninsula, though. It was egregious: the requirements for salmon access were already in place when it was built, and they just ignored it and then refused to pay the fines. The Snake River dams up the Columbia are similarly problematic, and need to be removed.
This is different from, say, Switzerland, where their high dams like Grande Dixence don't have a comparable environmental effect.
> “The river was transformed from being a thriving producer of millions of fish such as shad, herring, striped bass, Atlantic salmon, sturgeon and alewives and supporting a wide cornucopia of other species ranging from otters to eagles — into a wastewater drainage system,” Jeff Crane, a dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Saint Martin’s University, wrote in a paper published in 2009.
These are both demonstrably untrue.
1st, due to methane releases of decaying plant matter in the flood zones depending on what is flooded Hydro can actually produce over double the emissions of the worst coal plants, annually. For example the Curuá-Una dam in Pará, Brazil, has produced three-and-a-half times more emissions than an equivalent generating plant running on oil.
Based on what was flooded by the WAC Bennett dam in BC, BC likely has more GHG emmissions in their energy mix than Alberta.
And based on the size of the reservoirs(some of the largest in the world) in Quebec & that the flooded mostly boreal forest & peat land, that is also true for Quebec.
2nd, Dams breaking have caused a lot of deaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
Thanks for the info, I had no idea. Is this a long term effect where reservoirs will continue to emit CO2 into the long term future, or is it just a one-off cost to transforming land into a lake? If it is just a temporary source of CO2, how long does it take for the emissions to peter out and at what point will the hydroelectric dam become even with coal in terms of emissions?
Aside from its environmental concerns, it will be of limited use in decarbonizing the economy because pretty much all of the useful locations have already been developed.
We are very far from the max. But the concentrated opportunities are mostly taken already. What remains is geographically dispersed, and consequently expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
However, nobody told the sun that, so it keeps heating up the seas, evaporating their water, and letting the resulting moisture drift until it gets pushed up into cold air by some land obstruction like a mountain range...
"Pumping" the water uphill in this manner is very inefficient, but like all legacy technologies, we're stuck with it until we can invent a replacement ;-)