What's going on with hydropower?
In this episode, Jennifer Garson of the Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office discusses the state of hydropower in the US and where the industry is headed.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
For decades, hydropower has been most common source of renewable electricity in the world. (In the US, it was passed by wind a few years ago.) Pumped hydro — large hydropower facilities in which water is pumped up and run down hill to store energy — remains the most common form of energy storage, both in the US and in the world.
Even as the vast majority of media attention in the clean-energy world goes to wind and solar power, hydropower continues churning away in the background, generating and storing vast amounts of renewable energy.
Hydro has a long and storied past, but does it have a future? What's going on with hydropower these days? Is there any prospect of building new dams or of finding more power in existing dams? What's going on with small hydropower, on rivers, streams, and reservoirs? And is ocean energy ever going to be a real thing?
I've taken hydropower for granted for a long time, so I decided it was finally time to dig into these questions. To do so, I contacted Jennifer Garson, head of the Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO). The WPTO oversees a sprawling network of prizes and grants meant to encourage hydro and marine energy projects. I talked with Garson about the future of large dams in the US, the promise of small-scale hydro for local communities, and the uncertain future of marine energy.
Alright, with no further ado, Jennifer Garson, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Jennifer Garson
Thank you so much for having me.
David Roberts
Alright, so we normally normally here on Volts, we do the sort of deep dive into one thing. But this here we're going to attempt something slightly different, which is a broad overview of a fairly large category, larger than I think I appreciated before I started digging around and just try to get a sort of global sense of where it's at. Because I know that from my experience in clean energy, I've sort of, like, had hydro in the back of my head as kind of this steady presence, a little bit like nuclear, like a steady presence in the background, but not something where anything kind of dynamic or new is happening. And I think you probably disagree with that.
So let's get into it. So just to start with, what are the technologies encompassed by the terms "hydro" and "marine energy" that your office covers? What is the remit?
Jennifer Garson
Yeah, so glad you asked that. And it is, sort of, just by nature of our office as we're structured that, we have two very interesting, but two very different types of water power technologies. So the first that you mentioned is hydropower. Hydropower really has been delivering power for the last 100 plus years. It's both the conventional hydropower, so very large behind the reservoir, big dams that people usually envision when they're thinking about hydro. We also have smaller non-powered dams that we power with hydropower. We also have run-of-river systems that actually have diversions in addition to dams, where you actually have water flowing to the side of the river. And then we also are thinking about hydropower. Even in conduits and canals, how do you use existing water infrastructure to provide power, whether it's for water treatment or irrigation, a whole number of different ways that you could use existing infrastructure for water power.
Jennifer Garson
On the other side of the portfolio, we have marine renewable energy. So while hydropower is probably the oldest form of renewable power — although potentially, arguably wind is too — marine renewable energy is the most nascent form of renewable energy. And that's really looking out to the power of the o
