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Visualizing The World’s Largest Hydroelectric Dams

December 3, 2022

Visualizing The World’s Largest Hydroelectric Dams

Did you know that hydroelectricity is the world’s biggest source of renewable energy? According to recent figures from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), it represents 40% of total capacity, ahead of solar (28%) and wind (27%).

This type of energy is generated by hydroelectric power stations, which are essentially large dams that use the water flow to spin a turbine. They can also serve secondary functions such as flow monitoring and flood control.

To help you learn more about hydropower, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu has visualized the five largest hydroelectric dams in the world, ranked by their maximum output.

Overview of the Data

The following table lists key information about the five dams shown in this graphic, as of 2021. Installed capacity is the maximum amount of power that a plant can generate under full load.

 

At the top of the list is China’s Three Gorges Dam, which opened in 2003. It has an installed capacity of 22.5 gigawatts (GW), which is close to double the second-place Itaipu Dam.

 

In terms of annual output, the Itaipu Dam actually produces about the same amount of electricity. This is because the Parana River has a low seasonal variance, meaning the flow rate changes very little throughout the year. On the other hand, the Yangtze River has a significant drop in flow for several months of the year.

For a point of comparison, here is the installed capacity of the world’s three largest solar power plants, also as of 2021:

  • Bhadla Solar Park, India: 2.2 GW
  • Hainan Solar Park, China: 2.2 GW
  • Pavagada Solar Park, India: 2.1 GW

Compared to our largest dams, solar plants have a much lower installed capacity. However, in terms of cost (cents per kilowatt-hour), the two are actually quite even.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Dammed Good Question about the Green New Deal

November 3, 2019

Dammed Good Question about the Green New Deal

Hydroelectric power from dams might be the thorniest question that proponents of the Green New Deal (GND) have to grapple with. Providing more energy than solar and wind combined, dams could well become the backup for energy if it proves impossible to get off of fossil fuels fast enough. 

An August 2019 forum on the GND included representatives from the Sunrise Movement, Renew Missouri and three of us in the Green Party. Rev. Elston McCowan asked, “What does the Green New Deal say about rivers and dams?” I said “That’s a dammed good question” and went into some of the issues below. Howie Hawkins and Dario Hunter, both candidates for the Green Party presidential nomination, told of their participation in local efforts to block dam construction. But trying to defeat a single dam begs the question of what policy a political organization has toward them. [1]

GND proposals from the Democratic Party, like those of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ignore both nuclear power and dams. Yet dams have ominous implications for the world’s rivers. 

Rivers and lakes are an integral part of human existence, with virtually all major inland cities being located next to one of them. They provide water for drinking, bathing, food, and medicine. Their sustenance is not just for humans but for untold numbers of tiny organisms, insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals. Rivers integrate plant and animal life forms and connect human communities to each other. 

As capitalism grew, rivers transported huge quantities of lumber from clear cuts, oil from under the ground and coal ripped from mountains. Rivers have been used for trash disposal, as if carrying it somewhere else would make it vanish.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Dam(n) Big Fracking Problem

December 23, 2017

A Dam(n) Big Fracking Problem

Regulators left behind as industry built dozens of unauthorized dams — many at risk of failure.

FrackingDamWarningSign.jpg
The province’s Environmental Assessment Office has ordered Progress Energy to drain almost all water from this seven-storey dam, built without required approvals. The company is now seeking a retroactive exemption from the assessment process. Photo by Ben Parfitt.

More than half of 48 dams that oil and gas companies built in recent years without first obtaining the proper permits had serious structural problems that could have caused many to fail.

And now, the BC Oil and Gas Commission, which appeared to be asleep at the switch in allowing the unlicensed dams to be built in the first place, is frantically trying to figure out what to do about them after the fact.

Information about the unprecedented, unregulated dam-building spree is contained in a raft of documents that the commission released in response to freedom of information requests filed by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

The documents obtained by the CCPA, along with other materials recently posted on the OGC’s website, reveal that 28 of at least 48 unlicensed dams on Crown (meaning public) lands had significant structural flaws or other problems belatedly identified by commission staff.

All the dams were built to trap fresh water used by energy companies drilling and fracking for gas in northeast B.C. In some fracking operations in the region, companies are pressure-pumping the equivalent of 64 Olympic-size swimming pools of water underground to break open gas-bearing rock formations, triggering earthquakes in the process.

The OGC paved the way for the construction of the dams by granting companies numerous permits under the Land Act to use public lands to “store water.”

But in approving the applications, commission personnel failed to ask basic, critical questions: How did companies intend to store the water? In tanks? In pits? Behind dams?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The world’s forests will collapse if we don’t learn to say ‘no’

February 5, 2016

The world’s forests will collapse if we don’t learn to say ‘no’

An alarming new study has shown that the world’s forests are not only disappearing rapidly, but that areas of “core forest” — remote interior areas critical for disturbance-sensitive wildlife and ecological processes — are vanishing even faster.

Core forests are disappearing because a tsunami of new roads, dams, power lines, pipelines and other infrastructure is rapidly slicing into the world’s last wild places, opening them up like a flayed fish to deforestation, fragmentation, poaching and other destructive activities.

Most vulnerable of all are forests in the tropics. These forests sustain the planet’s most biologically rich and environmentally important habitats.

The collapse of the world’s forests isn’t going to stop until we start to say “no” to environmentally destructive projects.

Damn the dams

Those who criticise new infrastructure projects are often accused of opposing direly needed economic development, or — if they hail from industrial nations — of being hypocrites.

But when one begins to look in detail at the proposed projects, an intriguing pattern appears: Many are either poorly justified or will have far greater costs than benefits.

For example, in a recent essay in the journal Science, Amazon expert Philip Fearnside argues that many of the 330-odd hydroelectric dams planned or under construction in the Amazon will be more trouble than they’re worth.

Construction of the São Manoel Dam in the Brazilian Amazon. International Rivers/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

Many of these dams will have huge environmental impacts, argues Fearnside, and will dramatically increase forest loss in remote regions.

This happens both because the Amazon is quite flat, requiring large areas of forest to be flooded, and because dams and their power lines require road networks that open up the forest to other human impacts. For instance, the 12 dams planned for Brazil’s Tapajós River are expected to increase Amazon deforestation by almost 1 million hectares.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Undamming Rivers: A Chance For New Clean Energy Source

August 7, 2015

Undamming Rivers: A Chance For New Clean Energy Source

Many hydroelectric dams produce modest amounts of power yet do enormous damage to rivers and fish populations. Why not take down these aging structures, build solar farms in the drained reservoirs, and restore the natural ecology of the rivers?

Hydroelectric power is often touted as clean energy, but this claim is true only in the narrow sense of not causing air pollution. In many places, such as the U.S. East Coast, hydroelectric dams have damaged the ecological integrity of nearly every major river and have decimated runs of migratory fish.

This need not continue. Our rivers can be liberated from their concrete shackles, while also continuing to produce electricity at the site of former hydropower dams. How might that occur? A confluence of factors — the aging of many dams, the advent of industrial-scale alternative energy

Conowingo Dam

American Rivers
If Maryland’s Conowingo Dam were removed, large-scale solar projects could be built on the site of its drained 9,000-acre reservoir.

sources, and increasing recognition of the failure of traditional engineering approaches to sustain migratory fish populations — raises fresh possibilities for large rivers to continue to help provide power and, simultaneously, to have their biological legacies restored.

The answer may lie in “sharing” our dammed rivers, and the concept is straightforward. Remove aging hydroelectric dams, many of which produce relatively small amounts of electricity and are soon up for relicensing. When waters recede, rivers will occupy only part of the newly exposed reservoir bottoms. Let’s use these as a home for utility-scale solar and wind power installations, and let’s employ the existing power line infrastructure to the dams to connect the new solar and wind power facilities to the grid. This vision both keeps the electricity flowing from these former hydropower sites, while helping to resurrect once-abundant fish runs, as has recently happened in Maine. 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Brazilian Judge Sides With Tribe Over Land Threatened by Dams | Environment News Service

November 10, 2014

Brazilian Judge Sides With Tribe Over Land Threatened by Dams | Environment News Service.

BRASILIA, Brazil, November 6, 2014 (ENS) – In a struggle between a Brazilian indigenous tribe and the federal government over two dams that would flood lands claimed by the tribe, a federal judge has ruled that the government must immediately publish its report delineating the tribe’s territory that has been withheld for more than a year.

Last week, in response to a lawsuit filed by the Federal Public Prosecutors’ Office, federal judge Rafael Leite Paulo issued a ruling that requires FUNAI, the federal agency responsible for indigenous people, to publish its report within 15 days and determine the final decision on demarcation of the Sawre Muybu territory.

In October 2013, after completing 12 years of field studies, FUNAI completed a technical report confirming the status of Sawre Muybu as the Munduruku people’s traditional indigenous territory.

Tapajós River

But under pressure from the administration of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, FUNAI and the Ministry of Justice have refused to officially publish the report, stalling demarcation.

The court ruled, “The process is stopped without a valid basis, but only by invoking a generic and empty claim prioritization of the regions Center-South, Southeast and Northeast, and so, the rights of indigenous peoples would be perpetually postponed…”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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