The (Limited) Potential for Additional Hydropower
Hydroelectric power occupies kind of an odd place in the energy system. It is clean and renewable, in a sense, but especially at large scales it is hardly without large environmental impacts. Building a big dam effectively destroys a whole river valley, after all, and we’ve seen the effects throughout much of the country over the past century. Nevertheless, once the dams are there we might as well keep using them, as long as we have sufficient water in the rivers (which at some western dams is becoming a questionable long-term prospect). There isn’t a whole lot of potential for adding additional hydroelectric capacity, however. We’ve dammed just about all the rivers we can, and the few we haven’t are generally that way for a reason. There is some potential for additional small-scale hydro, some of which wouldn’t have the same ecological problems of big dams, but that by definition doesn’t equal much power.
There is, however, a certain amount of potential for adding more turbines to existing dams to increase their capacity, and it’s interesting to see that Los Alamos County, New Mexico has just done this at Abiquiu Dam, adding a 3-MW turbine to increase the total capacity of the dam to 16.8 MW. That’s not very big as power plants go, but it’s something. And right now, we need all the renewable energy we can get.
