hydropower

Under the umbrella of the Department of Energy’s renewable energy funding, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced last week that up to $30.6 million in stimulus funds would go into modernizing seven hydropower projects.

While $30.6 million doesn’t sound like much in the context of the $2.2 billion in renewable energy grants in all that were announced, the DOE estimates that the dam upgrades could increase generation by 187,000 megawatt-hours per year at an average cost of less than 4 cents per kWh — all without building new dams.

In addition to benefiting a handful of cities and utilities, the funding is a boon to companies with technologies, such as high-efficiency fish-friendly turbines and advanced control systems.

There are dams, and then there are bad dams.

The Three Gorges Project in China, for example, was a very bad dam, having displaced 1.2 million people. Even the Chinese government admits that it threatens “environmental catastrophe” for a range of reasons.

A quick objection to that criticism is that “there is also something to be said, environmentally, for anything that provides China with lots of electricity and isn't coal,” notes Kenneth Pomeranz, environmental historian and critic of the Three Gorges project.

Hydropower is traditionally held to be considerably less carbon-intense than coal or many other energy sources—even “emissions-free.”

But what if that’s wrong? What if dams are frequently bad dams? What if “emissions-neutral” mega-dams are actually major methane or NO2 or CO2 producers?

The World Bank has experienced what it calls a long and complex relationship with hydropower.

In the 1990s, concerns about the environment, water equity, population displacement and social justice led to protests and lawsuits around hydropower projects and a steep decline in Bank funding for hydro development that bottomed out in 1999, when the Bank put no money at all into hydropower.

Then in 2003, the Bank began funding hydropower projects again, including Bujagali in Uganda, Bumbuna in Sierra Leone, Felou in Senegal, Nam Theun 2 in Laos (above), and Rampur in India.

A recent report from a World Bank Group (WBG) team led by Senior Water Resources Specialist Daryl Fields verifies the shift: Directions in Hydropower: Scaling Up for Development describes the World Bank taking a renewed role in hydropower development and examines the challenges and opportunities hydropower presents today.

This realignment of hydropower is being driven by a number of factors, starting with estimates that the developing world has 1,333 GW of potential and unexploited hydro capacity.

Some NGOs, however, say that number, also promoted by the hydropower industry, would be much lower if negative social and economic impacts were taken into consideration. Some also don’t believe large scale hydropower is the answer for rural electrification.

Scientists at the University of Michigan are beginning the first large-scale test of a new technology that takes a common problem for oil platforms and turns it into a method for reliably generating clean electricity from ocean and river currents. They are working with the U.S. Navy to build a prototype in the Detroit River this year with the capacity to power a 20,000-square-foot building.

When word first surfaced of the VIVACE Converter (short for Vortex-Induced Vibration for Aquatic Clean Energy Converter), it sparked a flurry of pop-sci articles struggling to explain the fluid dynamics with anything remotely accessible to the public.

The concept—absorbing energy from a phenomenon called vortex-induced vibration (VIV)—has been likened to Leonardo Da Vinci’s research into “Aeolian Tones,” the infamous Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster, and the device’s own sexy aquatic biomimetics: It imitates fish. Like fish, whose muscular power alone could not propel them at the speeds they travel, the invention harnesses forces created by a disrupted current.

Previous methods for collecting energy from currents, like turbines and water mills, required an average flow of five or six knots, while most of the earth's currents are slower than three knots.

VIVACE promises to generate power from these much slower flows.

If Free Flow Power Corporation gets its way, that is.

The company claims that for $3 billion it can fertilize the Mississippi river bed with 160,000 small electric turbines and churn out 1,600 MW of clean electricity from the river’s flows.

That’s enough juice to power a million and a half homes. And it says it can do it at a price that’s competitive with fossil fuels -- maybe even by 2012.