Hydropower, the politically-incorrect renewable, gets ignored or shortchanged in most discussions of renewable energy technologies in the U.S. Yet hydro, the oldest of the renewables, is still the dominant source of renewable generation in the nation.
According to the Energy Information Administration, in 2018, hydro supplied 7% of U.S. electric generation. That compares to wind (6.6%), solar (1.6%), and 2.1% for all the rest. The conventional wisdom holds that U.S. solar capacity has been tapped out, as all the large dam opportunities were exhausted long ago. The images most hold of hydro power are the massive structures and impoundment such as Hoover Dam and the Columbia River system dams.
A new analysis from the Institute for Energy Research, a conservative Houston think tank, says hydro’s potential in the U.S. is understated and not well understood. The report – “A Review of the Impacts of Government on Hydroelectric Power Generation and Development” – argues, “Government regulations are the primary barrier to the development of new hydropower capacity.
The study by IER political scientist Paige Lambermont suggests that when it comes to modern hydropower development in the U.S., small is beautiful. She writes, “The United States has more than 80,000 dams but only about 2,400 of them generate power. In a report for the Department of Energy (DOE) prepared by Oak 2 Ridge National Lab (ORNL), it was estimated that there are approximately 12 GW of capacity available at United States non-powered dams (NPDs), and that the top 100 sites alone could generate 8 GW if developed. That is considerable generating capacity for which the greatest cost to development, dam construction, has already occurred.” Most of those dams “are small hydropower sites, those under 10 MW, with 2,446 MW untapped across 54,191 possible sites.”
On top of that are the “countless pipes, canals, and other fixtures that could also be retrofitted to generate power, as no national study of all water conduits has been conducted. Current small hydropower capacity in the United States comes from 1,640 plants that combined generate about 3,670 MW.”
Hydro, notes Lambermont, has long been a boon to the U.S. The large dams of the 20th century not only provided copious, low-cost electricity, but irrigation that turned much of the desert West into productive farm land. Federal policy encouraged large hydro projects, including having the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers build and run many.
But dams in the 1960s, particularly opposition to new dams on rivers in scenic wilderness areas, also gave birth to the modern environmental movement, driven largely by the late David Browder of the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. For an exceptional look at this period, see John McPhee’s 1971 “Encounters with the Archdruid.”
Since then, hydro has often been reviled, more often ignored as a positive renewable generating technology with manageable environmental impacts. That’s despite the technology’s positive attributes, including the ability to run as base load or dispatch power when needed, unlike wind and solar, and its ability to provide realistic electricity storage in pumped-storage facilities.
What’s holding back new hydro development?
According to Lambermont’s analysis, here are some of today’s show stoppers.
* “State Renewable Portfolio Standards often do not give hydropower the same treatment as wind, solar, and other energy technologies.”
* “There are non-regulatory barriers to hydropower development, these include high cost-benefit to developing some sites, risk aversion of water managers to use their infrastructure for anything other than water delivery, the lack of mass produced or easily replicable systems, and construction costs.”
* “Federal tax policy does not treat hydropower as favorably as wind and solar.”
Lambermont concludes, “Over hydropower’s history, government policy has both encouraged its development, through direct construction, grants, and tax credits, and discouraged it through complicated regulatory processes that reduce the cost-benefit ratio of investment.”
— Kennedy Maize