INL Assessment of Natural Stream Sites for Hydroelectric Dams in the Pacific NW Regio

[editec]

The real secret of true environmentalism is to reduce consumption.

Bingo!

 

[flacaltenn]

Why do they call them "streams"? Nobody builds a hydroelectric dam on a freaking stream. Are they afraid to use the term river? FDR (and Hoover) got away with damming up the Colorado river because nobody gave a damn back then (no pun intended). They would never get away with it today.

Actually -- that is the position of the major enviro groups on future hydro power.. They want the MAJOR hydro projects torn down, but they gladly count the CURRENT output of those generators towards their "renewable targets" because they generate the BULK of what's counted in the world as renewable. But they claim to support MICRO Hydro and look the other way at the sheer destruction and impact that would result from a wholesale run on plopping 200W generators and wires into the pristine stream beds..

LITERALLY as the pictures show -- to the scale of harvesting little bits of power from water flows as SMALL AS STREAMS...

Aint' that gorgeous???? Even Treehugger.com is REALLY REALLY bummed about this "ecologically sound source of electricity"...
Too bad the Sierra Club elites haven't thought it thru..

An example combined with a stream and a small dam...

This last one is more like what Grandma wants. And it's aesthetically better, but I wouldn't want 20 of them on that one stream... Which is what INL is doing the survey for in Idaho. To come up with an impressive number for the TOTAL POWER that could be harvested if we turned Idaho streams into muck flows..

The Greenies have lost their minds along the way.... We now have to protect the environment from their obsession about renewables..

 

[flacaltenn]

http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/small-scale-hydropowers-low-eco-impact-overrated.html

In comparison small scale hydro, which doesn't require the large dams or even dams
at all, has been touted as a good clean power source. Conservation Magazine,
however, throws some cold water on that enthusiasm, highlighting some new analysis
of the eco-impact of small-scale hydropower.Conservation sums up the work of Tasneem

Abbasi and S.A. Abbasi in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Review:

"By all reasoned assessments, the environmental problems caused by small hydro look
small in comparison to large hydro," they concede. But after walking through a
series of scenarios, they argue those advantages fade when large and small projects
are compared by "the scale of impact per kilowatt of power generated. Once this is
done, it emerges that the problems that would be caused due to widespread use of SHS
would be no less numerous, and no less serious, per kilowatt generated, than those
from centralized hydropower." Problems such as siltation and eutrophication, for
example, are likely to be common at "mini" and "micro" projects because they tend to
create small, shallow pools. And the emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases
from such muddy lagoons could rival emissions from rice paddies, they add.

There ya go... Apparently INL doesn't care about enviro impact if they get enough grant money to study doing damage to the ecology of Idaho...

 

[Grandma]

This last one is more like what Grandma wants. And it's aesthetically better, but I wouldn't want 20 of them on that one stream... Which is what INL is doing the survey for in Idaho. To come up with an impressive number for the TOTAL POWER that could be harvested if we turned Idaho streams into muck flows..

The Greenies have lost their minds along the way.... We now have to protect the environment from their obsession about renewables..

Definitely putting hundreds of them on a short waterway is wong. I'm not familiar with the NW - I'm more into northern Appalachia. There are hundreds of waterways and most of them originate on hills here - part of the generation formula involves how fast the water's moving and/or how far it drops onto the wheel.