Hydro has always been the reliable standby for renewable energy, but does it have a future? Will there be more big dams, or more power out of existing dams? Will small hydro on rivers or streams amount to anything? How about marine energy? I get into all this with the head of the DOE's Water Power Technologies Office.
I was very sorry that you did not give your guest any questions about removal of the Lower Snake River dams, which have turned the mighty Columbia into a series of overheated ponds. That fact is what is driving extinct the NW Chinook salmon. Those salmon are the primary food of the Salish Sea Southern Resident Orca pods. I’m a pretty typical emotionally constipated old guy but I regularly get to the verge of weeping when I think about those magnificent creatures being starved to death and extirpated so that Lewiston Idaho can call itself a sea port. I think we should name a couple of the matriarch orcas “Patty” and “Maria” and call one of the older males “Jay” and we can report on their daily starvation and the pronounced doming that happens when they lose so much weight that their skulls show through their flesh, which is happening as we speak.
Yeah, since apparently the billions spent on fish "ladders" and other mitigation has failed the salmon has failed, we should be planning to tear a bunch of these down. If we are in a climate "emergency" we need to replace that power with wind and solar and storage IMHO. Others might say set nuclear Idaho free or something. As far as renewables, is the NW just too tender and sensitive to expand wind and solar and pumped hydro?
I don't know about "too tender and sensitive." Solar is going up faster than I can keep track of here in central WA. Would love to get some pumped hydro on the books, but some stakeholders are understandably gun-shy about the unintended consequences of flooding new reservoirs. Our completely asinine "water rights" system certainly doesn't help matters.
in central WA, there is one large existing solar farm and a couple modest ones, with three large ones in a single area east of Yakima. Maybe SEIA is behind. Maybe there are lots of community solar arrays that are smaller than their 1 MW (7 - 10 acres) minimum for "major."
All new pumped hydro I know about is off-river, closed loop, or at least the upper "reservoir" is off-river with the lower reservoir existing. For the project called "green colonialism," affecting "sacred land," the upper and lower reservoirs are 100 acres each. And it would store 1200 MW for 10 hours. Many of the impacts cited are "during construction," which is the case for a lot of projects, with greatly reduced ongoing operational impacts into the far future. Or maybe we'll get cheap super-batteries that render PHES overpriced and obsolete.
SEIA must be lagging. We've had 3 modest size solar farms completed in Ellensburg, 3 more that are approved and slated for construction near Yakima, and I believe 5 others are in late-stage approval.
Yakima likes to claim to have 300 sunny days a year, so they really need to lean in on the solar. Would love to see someone start putting panels on the mega fruit and hop warehouses.
As for PHES, I'm all in and don't need convincing, but I also recognize that we have a long history of F*ing up the region's hydrology/ecology in the name of progress and it's a high hurdle for some.
OK, I'll buy all that. I live not far from the upper Colorado River, so not far from other major examples of that f'ing up. Colorado's two existing PHES systems seem to be good examples of reasonable (to me) impacts and probably infinite lifetimes, compared to some even modest size dams directly on local rivers and tributaries, particularly those with "Muddy" in their names.
One thing I've been wondering about is whether there is much scope in the USA for existing hydropower plants to be reconfigured to better match a VRE-dominated grid.
In Australia, the Tasmanian state government (for the uninitiated, yes, Tasmania is indeed a real place, a large island separated from the Australian mainland by the 150-odd mile wide Bass Strait) is heavily pushing a concept they're calling "Battery of the Nation". Tasmania may be an island, but it's connected to the main Australian east coast energy grid via an undersea connector, and a second one is planned to be built in the next few years. A number of wind projects are in the planning stages, along with modifications to their existing hydro plants to increase their peak power output.
It wasn't clear from the interview - is there much of that already going on, or in the planning stages, in the USA?
Our hydropower system is already used to hold back and release in response to VRE. The EIA's hourly grid monitor of California's main operator shows hydropower varying consistently between 2500 MW during sunny days (12,000 MW solar now) and and 5000 MW at night during the past week. I don't know if many plans are afoot to increase the variation. I stayed in a riverside cabin above Fresno years ago and already many signs were needed to warn the tourists that the river flow and level would rise rapidly when the upstream dam turbines opened up. Significant impacts from both flows way up and way down.
I was very sorry that you did not give your guest any questions about removal of the Lower Snake River dams, which have turned the mighty Columbia into a series of overheated ponds. That fact is what is driving extinct the NW Chinook salmon. Those salmon are the primary food of the Salish Sea Southern Resident Orca pods. I’m a pretty typical emotionally constipated old guy but I regularly get to the verge of weeping when I think about those magnificent creatures being starved to death and extirpated so that Lewiston Idaho can call itself a sea port. I think we should name a couple of the matriarch orcas “Patty” and “Maria” and call one of the older males “Jay” and we can report on their daily starvation and the pronounced doming that happens when they lose so much weight that their skulls show through their flesh, which is happening as we speak.
Yeah, since apparently the billions spent on fish "ladders" and other mitigation has failed the salmon has failed, we should be planning to tear a bunch of these down. If we are in a climate "emergency" we need to replace that power with wind and solar and storage IMHO. Others might say set nuclear Idaho free or something. As far as renewables, is the NW just too tender and sensitive to expand wind and solar and pumped hydro?
https://www.hcn.org/issues/53.12/north-wind-energy-wind-turbines-proposed-near-a-japanese-american-incarceration-camp-prompt-outrage
https://www.hcn.org/issues/55.3/indigenous-affairs-green-colonialism-is-flooding-the-pacific-northwest
In the last month, the Idaho House and Senate have voted unanimously for the "no-build" option for Lava Ridge, the wind farm in that first link.
I don't know about "too tender and sensitive." Solar is going up faster than I can keep track of here in central WA. Would love to get some pumped hydro on the books, but some stakeholders are understandably gun-shy about the unintended consequences of flooding new reservoirs. Our completely asinine "water rights" system certainly doesn't help matters.
According to the map at https://www.seia.org/research-resources/major-solar-projects-list
in central WA, there is one large existing solar farm and a couple modest ones, with three large ones in a single area east of Yakima. Maybe SEIA is behind. Maybe there are lots of community solar arrays that are smaller than their 1 MW (7 - 10 acres) minimum for "major."
All new pumped hydro I know about is off-river, closed loop, or at least the upper "reservoir" is off-river with the lower reservoir existing. For the project called "green colonialism," affecting "sacred land," the upper and lower reservoirs are 100 acres each. And it would store 1200 MW for 10 hours. Many of the impacts cited are "during construction," which is the case for a lot of projects, with greatly reduced ongoing operational impacts into the far future. Or maybe we'll get cheap super-batteries that render PHES overpriced and obsolete.
SEIA must be lagging. We've had 3 modest size solar farms completed in Ellensburg, 3 more that are approved and slated for construction near Yakima, and I believe 5 others are in late-stage approval.
Yakima likes to claim to have 300 sunny days a year, so they really need to lean in on the solar. Would love to see someone start putting panels on the mega fruit and hop warehouses.
As for PHES, I'm all in and don't need convincing, but I also recognize that we have a long history of F*ing up the region's hydrology/ecology in the name of progress and it's a high hurdle for some.
OK, I'll buy all that. I live not far from the upper Colorado River, so not far from other major examples of that f'ing up. Colorado's two existing PHES systems seem to be good examples of reasonable (to me) impacts and probably infinite lifetimes, compared to some even modest size dams directly on local rivers and tributaries, particularly those with "Muddy" in their names.
I’ve been meaning to post on each of the last few episodes to ask if you planned to cover hydro. So, thank you.
Watching the film Damnation definitely opened my eyes to it being more nuanced than I had imagined.
Good interview as usual!
One thing I've been wondering about is whether there is much scope in the USA for existing hydropower plants to be reconfigured to better match a VRE-dominated grid.
In Australia, the Tasmanian state government (for the uninitiated, yes, Tasmania is indeed a real place, a large island separated from the Australian mainland by the 150-odd mile wide Bass Strait) is heavily pushing a concept they're calling "Battery of the Nation". Tasmania may be an island, but it's connected to the main Australian east coast energy grid via an undersea connector, and a second one is planned to be built in the next few years. A number of wind projects are in the planning stages, along with modifications to their existing hydro plants to increase their peak power output.
It wasn't clear from the interview - is there much of that already going on, or in the planning stages, in the USA?
Our hydropower system is already used to hold back and release in response to VRE. The EIA's hourly grid monitor of California's main operator shows hydropower varying consistently between 2500 MW during sunny days (12,000 MW solar now) and and 5000 MW at night during the past week. I don't know if many plans are afoot to increase the variation. I stayed in a riverside cabin above Fresno years ago and already many signs were needed to warn the tourists that the river flow and level would rise rapidly when the upstream dam turbines opened up. Significant impacts from both flows way up and way down.
Garson would make a great repeat guest!