The vast majority of the dams being torn down are from old mills, not hydro dams. They serve no economic purpose and are highly dangerous, in addition to preventing millions of fish from living in the rivers.

Aside from the point that most dams don't produce a ton of power, salmonid spawning in the ecosystem also adds nitrogen to banks that encourages vegetation growth, which is beneficial in many ways for both our water supply (e.g. shade helps prevent evaporative losses, trees provide beavers opportunity to build habitat to increase net groundwater storage) and for carbon sequestration via plant growth. The American west has a drought resilience problem and restoring salmon/trout/beaver habitat can be an effective way to attack the problem on several levels. Dams are particularly damaging to Salmonids, both by acting as spawning barriers AND by warming the water to a level that can make survival difficult (salmonids need cold water).

Look at dams like Oroville and Hoover now -- despite producing a lot of electricity, they are not resilient to drought, and river systems lose a lot of drought resistance when you add dams. When you dam a river, you slow and warm the water -- this threatens entire ecosystems adapted to survival where the river runs.

Particularly in salmonid / coldwater fish habitats, dams are pretty damaging. If you want to learn more about the subject, there are a lot of books & documentaries about the Eel river that are worth reading and watching -- the Eel is a good case study in what happens when you dam a river, and what happens when you un-dam it.

Not as much energy as you think. The main obstacle to removing dams is getting funding. One dam locally is finally being removed 20 years after literally everyone local agreed it should be removed. 90% silted up as it is. But you have to pay for the unsafe bridge downstream before you cut open the dam. It sure would be nice to have had 20 years more sand on the beach to fight erosion.

Anyway, there are lots of little dams like this everywhere that have negative economic value, but no one wants to pay the cost to remove them.

There are 84,000 dams in the United States. More than one a day since we became a country. Most of them don't generate any meaningful electricity, but they do disrupt habitat for many native fish species.

I would like to see them all destroyed. We can find electricity elsewhere.

I think you're imagining Hoover dam getting torn down, when really it is a 6' dam built 150 years ago with no hydroelectric that is causing problems for certain habitats.

We are using record amounts of coal globally.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/global-coal-power-expected-to-h...

Some hydroelectric power plants actually have greater emissions than even coal power plants, and that's ignoring that dams are much worse for the extended local ecosystems.

The dams in the Pacific Northwest have decimated the wild salmon population. Salmon are big, meat eating fish that sustain several other animals, such as the Southern Resident orcas. This population of orcas is literally being starved by us destroying the salmon population., amongst the other challenges they face due to humans, such as poisoning and toxicity.

0. But it would require giving up some creature comforts.