Regulators OK largest dam demolition in history to restore salmon habitat

This obviously raises the question of how much power output they could produce if you'd convert them to modern technology.

Hydroelectric generation is reliable. So reliable that New York State generates approximately 70% of its electricity from hydro.

Fashionably, the state government is planning to replace every hydro plant with wind or solar over the next 20 years.

They are a good thing for the environment, full stop.

The loss of hydro with these smaller damns is not material. Their impact on hundreds of miles of habitat is. And for those who only want to think in terms of material wealth, there's real money in restoring salmon populations.

So please don't do the hackernews reflexive contrarian thing and be all "well look at those idiots don't they see we need every bit of green hydro power that exists?" because the real analysis being doing is years worth of sophisticated measurement and modeling. You haven't somehow outsmarted that with your off the cuff observation.

Edit:

I guess I can mention a bit more without too much risk to my friend's privacy. During the years he was working as a part of this we were on vacation together at one point, and we ended up pairing on some problems he was having getting his R model working with ArcGIS. The task he was working on was modeling the changes in large herbivore populations that would result from various changes to the rivers.

There are tons of these downstream effects that depend on the river. Losing the power generation is just one concern among 100s.

So yeah, they thought very deeply about the implications and tradeoffs here.

I don’t think people who are familiar with the PNW have an understanding on how these issues have real impact day to day. The fishing has gotten worse and the attempts to help the salmon populations, like salmon ladders, is a tiny boost, if at all. And everything has a cost, including all of that infrastructure.

Put simply: The dams cost too much, provide too little, and the fish are more valuable.

This is a slam dunk no-brainer for everyone involved.

If they generated a meaningful amount of power things would be different, but they’re not even a drop in the bucket at this point.

> We’re closing coal plants and building wind farms and it all just has to add up in the end. It’s not a one-to-one

And of course this won't cover the loss of energy, so let's pretend we can do that through "energy efficiency"

>You can make up that power by the way you operate the rest of your facilities or having energy efficiency savings so your customers are using less

Tl;Dr for the energy side: Smoke and mirrors.

"Replace the lost power" is something the market will do without legislation.

The government--actually governments, since there are autonomous local, state, and federal layers in the U.S.--do play an important role in regulating and coordinating the system. But most power generation is not owned or funded by the government, and fundamentally it is not the government's responsibility to fund new generation.

If there is a forecasted shortfall in energy, that will be expressed in prices going up, which will attract investment in new generating capacity.

So, we don't need every bit of existing generation to stay online. Power plants are idled and decommissioned every year, as more efficient (and therefore less expensive) new power plants come online and soak up the demand. Hydro power plants are not immune from this.

Each decision to build new generating capacity, or take old generating capacity offline, is made on its own merits, in the context of what people know at that moment. It might seem frighteningly disorganized at first, but in the long run it is the best way to do things because of the flexibility built into the system.

Diablo Canyon has a power output of 2,256MW vs 18MW for this tiny dam. This dam is many magnitudes smaller.

The benefit of keeping the minuscule power output vs ecosystem damage and maintenance leans heavily towards removal.

Arguably you could instead of damming a river divert a portion of it upstream into a new valley for a lake, leaving the old river alone.

[1] https://www.bkw.ch/fileadmin/bt3_news/MyConvento/2021/10/06/...

There's a pretty crazy company developing this system that actually shoots fish up the damn like those pneumatic canisters bank drive throughs use (or used?). I just remember seeing a video about it but don't know anything more.

The dams simply need to be removed, starting with the ones that offer minimal value in other dimensions (electricity, water supply, navigable waters, recreation, etc...) until eventually the vast majority are gone and only a few are left to protect important infrastructure that cannot feasibly be moved.

Anyway the usual thing to do is to build dams on the sides, deepen the river, have flood plains, etc.

While I don’t see a way it’s going to reduce future flood intensity like regular low intensity fires do, but like regular fire it’s needed for a lot of the ecosystem balance to function as it used to

They need to be removed because they’re old, they won’t be replaced because there are cheaper alternatives today.