A North American Energy Plan for 2030: Hydro-electricity the forgotten renewable energy resource  

The Oil Drum has a post on expanding hydro-electric power in the US - A North American Energy Plan for 2030: Hydro-electricity the forgotten renewable energy resource.

While their are no shortages of plans for the US to reduce its reliance on oil imported from overseas or replace fossil fuels with renewable resources, their is little consideration of a continental plan for future economic growth in a fossil fuel constrained world.

The North American economy, including NAFTA partners Canada, US and Mexico, accounts for 25% of the worlds oil consumption and 25% of the worlds carbon dioxide emissions. Together, these three countries produce 4,800 TWh of electric power per year and share the world’s largest and most extensive electricity grid.

Presently 38% of this electricity is produced from carbon free sources (nuclear 19%, hydro 18% and wind energy 1.7%). N America has substantial oil, natural gas and coal reserves, exceptional potential solar and wind resources, a large hydro electric capacity, and unique natural hydro storage lakes that can be used for short and long term energy storage.

Conventional oil production, however, has been declining in all 3 countries and overseas imports from politically unstable regions have been increasing at a time when world oil production is near or past peak. While N American coal reserves are large, coal used for producing electricity is the major source of GHG emissions and will need to be dramatically reduced by 85-90% before 2050.

Both problems require urgent attention now, as changes will take decades to implement, and long term plans will need to involve all 3 of the NAFTA economies.

Most proposals to reduce oil imports, such as the Pickens plan, the Al Gore "RePower America plan, Lester Brown's "Plan B 3.0", Greenpeace's "Global energy[r]evolution" and the Obama-Biden plan call for gasoline and diesel fuelled cars and trucks to be replaced by vehicles, using either electricity, flex fuels or compressed natural gas (CNG).

Either directly or indirectly these plans would require >20% increase in electricity production to replace both oil based transport by electric vehicles, and to replace NG and oil used for heating with electric heat pumps, and additional increases due to increasing population and incomes. Off-setting some of these increases could be savings in electricity consumption by reducing the “electric productivity gap” (pdf), by improved insulation, and improvements in energy efficiency of appliances.

Replacing coal fired electricity would require an even larger 45% increase of today’s 556 GWa electricity production by alternative low carbon energy.

Proposals for expanding carbon free electricity production generally consider expanding nuclear, wind and solar energy, but do not emphasise expanding hydro, although hydro electricity accounts for almost half of N America’s present carbon free electricity production.

Hydro energy’s potential may be overlooked because; it is “old” renewable energy, or because like nuclear energy, some hydro electric schemes have been criticized by environmental groups, but most importantly a perception by many, that most hydro electric potential in North America has already been exploited. Hydro electricity deserves more scrutiny because;

1) North America has significant undeveloped potential,
2) the technology is well understood, although technical improvements continue to be made, especially for low head and small hydro,
3) hydro has a very high energy return on energy investment (ERoEI),
4) additional hydro can enable more wind and solar energy capacity to be absorbed by the grid,
5) hydro potential is more geographically dispersed than wind and solar, and finally,
6) the cost of developing additional hydro capacity is moderately low and has very low technical and financial risk.