A synthesis of environmental and recreational mitigation requirements at hydropower projects in the United States

Abstract

Environmental mitigation plays an important role in the environmentally sustainable development of 2 hydropower resources. However, comprehensive data on mitigation required by the Federal Energy 3 Regulatory Commission (FERC) at United States (US) hydropower projects is lacking. Therefore, our 4 objective was to create a comprehensive database of mitigation required at non-federal hydropower 5 projects and provide a synthesis of available mitigation data. Mitigation data was collated for over 300 6 plants licensed or relicensed from 1998 through 2013. We observed that the majority of FERC mitigation 7 requirements deal with either hydrologic flows or recreation and that hydropower plants in the Pacific 8 Northwest had the highest number of requirements. Our data indicate opportunities exist to further 9 explore hydropower mitigation in the areas of environmental flows, fish passage, and water quality. 10 Connecting these data with ecological outcomes, actual flow data, and larger landscape level information 11 will be necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of mitigation and ultimately inform regulators, managers, 12 and planners.

Predicting environmental mitigation requirements for hydropower projects through the integration of biophysical and socio-political geographies

“…Six broad categories (Tier 1) of mitigation (biodiversity, fish passage, habitat, hydrology, recreation, and water quality) and 20 subcategories (Tier 2) were used to classify specific mitigation types in the hierarchical database. A full list of each of the mitigation types catalogued in the database and the percent of times each was required, including each of the 132 Tier 3 categories, is presented in Appendix A. Descriptions of each of the Tier 3 categories are provided in Appendix A of Schramm et al (2016). Predictive models were built only if a mitigation type was required for at least 5% (Rickbeil et al, 2014) of the plants in the mitigation database.…”

“…A database of environmental mitigation requirements was compiled for FERC licenses issued from 1998 through September 2015 (Schramm et al, 2016). Since our goal is prediction of future mitigation requirements, the manual review of licenses was limited to those issued from 1998 through 2015 with an assumption that more recently issued licenses would better reflect future mitigation requirements.…”

“…While each hydropower project is unique, recommend development of common approaches and principles for designing ecological and social compensation mechanisms for hydropower development. The authors of this manuscript recently developed a database of environmental mitigation requirements in FERC licenses (Schramm et al, 2016) that presents new opportunities for analyzing past environmental mitigation requirements and predicting future mitigation requirements.…”

Integrating Economic and Ecological Benchmarking for a Sustainable Development of Hydropower

“…This case presents a trade-off between global benefits in the form of low-carbon energy and local costs in the form of potential harmful ecological effects. In addition to biomass production of benthic algae as a proxy, we have to consider further ecosystem functions, such as linkage with terrestrial ecosystems and also recreational issues, which can be influenced by the aesthetic effects of WLF [53].…”

The Small-Scale Hydropower Plants in Sites of Environmental Value: An Italian Case Study

“…There are many studies confirming the economic advantages of installing hydropower plants, as will be highlighted in the following paragraphs, which aim to examine the ecological sustainability of such interventions on the environmental ecosystem, as well as to evaluate the impact on it [6][7][8][9]. However, there is not a unique way of determining the level of compatibility of these plants in sites of high environmental value.…”