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Welcome back. Module 12 covers hydroelectric energy. This is the second of six models on renewable
energy. In this one we'll look at the engineering and the history of hydroelectric power, so let's get
started. Now that we've introduced renewables, let's talk about each one of the major categories
individually. Let's start with hydroelectric. Hydroelectric power is a function of height and volume.
The power production requires height differences. You need water to fall downhill, and you need large
volumes of water. So hydroelectric works pretty simply, but you need a geology that gives you the
height differences, and gives you the water, so it doesn't work in the middle flat deserts, for example.
But it does work in mountainous regions where you have snow melt falling downhill.
The power you get out is a function of the efficiency of the turbines. The density of the water in
kilograms per cubic meter that's flowing through. The flow rate, q, in cubic meters per second. The
gravitational constant on earth, which is a value we know. Would be different on other planets. If you
wanted to set up hydroelectric on Mars, for example. And h is the height difference between the inlet
and the outlet.
So just knowing how much water is flowing, the density of the water, the gravitational constant, the
efficiency of the turbine, as well as the height over which it's falling, you can figure out the overall power
output of the hydroelectric turbine. These turbines can be quite large. That picture on the right shows a
scaled system with a human drawn there, about a six foot tall person, presumably.
So these turbines are quite large, or as big as a room. And they are operating on a vertical axis, so they
rotate around a vertical axis with the water falling through the blades, spinning the turbine blades, which
then spin the magnets of the generators and make electricity.
So it's a pretty simple design, pretty straightforward, and pretty efficient. The power can be
approximated using this equation, which is 10 times the height in meters of the water, as well as q, the
flow rate, in cubic meters per second. And the reason we have this approximation is because the
gravitational constant is about 10. It's 9.8 meters per second squared on earth, and the density is about
1,000 kilograms per cubic meter.
Dams can be massive. They're very large in area and in power generation. The Grand Coulee Dam is
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the largest dam in the United States, at about 6.5 gigawatts on the Columbia River in the Pacific
northwest. The Hoover Dam is more famous. It's only 2 gigawatts on the Colorado River in the desert
southwest. These are huge. To give a sense of scale, that picture of the Grand Coulee Dam shows the
span, which is actually a mile across.
So this is a very large structure holding up a lot of water that falls at a high flow rate through the system,
and they generate many, many gigawatts of power, occupy many, many square miles of area. Austin's
dam, here in Texas, used to be the world's largest. Little Austin has this dam, and it was called the
Great Dam across the Colorado River and Austin, Texas, according to this cover article of Scientific
American in September, 1892.
That dam is about 16 megawatts. It barely registers on the power mix in Texas today, but at the time
was the world's largest. Here's a picture of it under construction. Those of you from Austin, Texas might
recognize this site. There's a famous Tex-Mex restaurant off to the right called Hula Hut. That's looking
across the river, looking west towards West Lake Hills.
Dams can also be very small. They are the world's largest power plants, but they can also be very small
power plants. And small power plants are advantageous, because they're easier to site, because their
ecosystem impact is smaller. They have a smaller environmental footprint, so you can take a stream
and build a dam that's just a few feet tall, collect some power out of it without disturbing the ability for
fish to move upstream, or other ecosystem damage that we can't recover from.
So this is a growing opportunity in places like the United States, where the large dams have already
been built. There's room for smaller dams to be built for hydroelectric power. One of the good parts
about dams is they serve several purposes. They're good for flood control, water storage, irrigation,
recreation, navigation, and power generation. It's not just a power play, it's all these other things as
well.
That means they can serve multiple societal functions at the same time. That's part of the good news
story about dams. And there's many other benefits. The conversion is very simple. It's a straight
conversion from mechanical energy, from potential form, potential mechanical energy to electrical
energy. So it's one conversion. It's pretty efficient. It's very reliable. It's pretty simple.
It's just water falling downhill, and gravity's still free, so we like that. It has very quick start up and turn
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off times, so you can turn the power plant on and off very quickly. And it has very low emissions during
generation, so it is a clean, reliable, robust, efficient source of power. If we look at its design, it's just a
catchment in a reservoir behind a dam, with lots of concrete to hold the water up to create this height
difference in the potential.
The water flows down what's called a penstock, spinning the turbine, which as we described, is on a
vertical axis, and then flows through to the river. There is an impact. The reservoir itself takes a lot of
area. The transmission lines take area, so that's a footprint as well, because these dams are often far
away from where the people are, so that's part of the impact. But it's a pretty simple design, and overall,
the efficiency is quite high.
Dams often have over 90% efficiency, which is much better than the other types of power plants we
discussed before. So the efficiency of a hydroelectric plant with 90% percent or better is far superior to
the efficiency of a traditional power plant, which we introduced in the thermodynamics lecture, and we'll
discuss later on in the electricity lectures as well. A typical coal fired steam plant has something like a
30% to 35% efficiency.
Wind power is about the same. The combustion turbine is a little worse, combined cycle's a little bit
better, but they're all half or a third of the efficiency of hydroelectric turbines. So falling water can be
converted into electricity with great efficiency. There are also some drawbacks. Oftentimes when dams
are built, they displace populations of people. It's usually poor people who are displaced.
We tend not to build dams in rich areas. We tend to build them in poor areas, because that's where we
can afford land to build the dam. And it's also because poor people don't have the political power to
resist it. We also have great disturbance of ecosystems that affect fish migration, and things like that.
So some dams will build salmon ladders, so fish can go upstream around the dam.
It's hard for a salmon to jump 1,000 feet over a dam, but a salmon can jump a couple feet at a time, so
if you build a salmon ladder that goes back and forth next to the dam, the fish can eventually make it to
the other side as they swim upstream. There are also fish friendly turbines going downstream. So one
of the impacts of dams is that as the fish go downstream, they get chopped by the dam.
So it's preparing them for meals ahead of time, I guess is one way to think about it. But they have fish
friendly turbines with the blade space a little bit further apart, with a slope that the fish can pass through
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without getting chopped. So that's a way to reduce the impact on the ecosystem.
These reservoirs that are used to create a high potential energy of the water elevated behind the dam
also create a greater surface area that is exposed to the sun, and therefore reduces greater
evaporation then you would have had in the run of the river. So dams usually create additional
evaporation from the lakes. In about half the national capacity in the United States, in most
industrialized countries is already built.
So there's not much capacity to build more dams, necessarily. Another drawback is that silting might
limit the lifetime by about 100 years, which raises the question about whether dams are really
renewable or sustainable. It's renewable, but are we operating in a sustainable way or not?
And even though the point of generation isn't emitting greenhouse gases of CO2, because there's no
combustion of the dam, the reservoir itself, because it's flooded, a lot of organic matter actually is a
source of greenhouse gases, like CO2 and CH4 from the decaying vegetation and organic matter that's
underneath the water.
That's difficult to quantify, and then it's not clear if you should attribute those greenhouse gas emissions
to the power generation, or to recreation or flood control of some other purpose of the dam. And then
lastly, end of life planning is usually not built into project development. So when we build a dam, we
don't always build in how we're going to take the dam down later on when the dam's life is over.
And this is a big issue. It's not clear how you bring a dam back down without a lot of dynamite, and a lot
of risk. So these are the drawbacks associated with hydroelectric power. Talking about the vast
expanses of land that are disturbed, that's one of the impacts of dams. Also, these dams collapse every
once in a while. They collapse at a time that we don't want, and it could be catastrophic.
The Johnstown floods in Pennsylvania in 1869 killed a couple thousand people. The dams in Santa
Clarita, California failed in 1928 and killed a couple hundred people. Austin's dam, that I just mentioned,
which was once the largest in the world, has failed twice. We are now at the third dam in Austin. If
you've ever been to Red Bud Isle, which is a famous dog park in Austin, that is the old dam. It fell down
and formed an island that's now a dog park.
So these dam failures are a risk that we need to deal with, and if a large dam, like the Three Gorges
Dam in China collapsed, it would kill millions of people, and they wouldn't have a chance to move. So
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there's risk with these dams. Here's a picture of Austin's dam collapsing during a flood. Major floods,
the dam, when it was built, was supposed to provide power to all sorts of things, and then it collapsed.
They built it again, it collapsed again, and finally, they got it right with the third time. Most of the
hydroelectric build out in the United States occurred between the 1930s and the 1970s. A lot of the
famous dams popped up. The first one was really Niagara Falls in 1881, then you had the Johnstown
flood, 1880s, the Great Dam in Austin, 1892. The bigger dams come along in the 1930s and later.
The effort to build dams was partly to create jobs, it was partly to resuscitate the economy. It was also
the build out infrastructure to bring power to different areas of the country. And then once World War II
kicked off, it was a part of the war effort to make electricity available for things like enriching uranium for
bombs, as well as operating aluminium smelters to get aluminum we needed for planes for the war.
So it started in the 1930s with the Great Depression, and then accelerated in the 1940s with the war,
and then kept going through the '70s as people liked the benefits of the dams, until we hit a limit the
'70s where we decided the environmental impact started to overcome the benefits, so construction
stopped in the 1970s. To get more explanation and more details on this topic, make sure you go do the
online exercises, and then I'll be sure to see you at the next lecture.
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