Consolidation and ownership trends of nonfederal hydropower generating assets, 1980–2003

Kosnik, Lea

doi:10.1016/j.eneco.2007.08.003

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 14 publications

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“…Additionally, operations of large-scale facilities have the potential to kill fish and alter short-and long-term (e.g., hourly and seasonal) flow, temperature, and sediment regimes, which collectively affect water quality, wildlife, and ecosystems (Baxter 1977, Bunn and Arthington 2002, Trussart et al 2002-issues that can be reduced and often avoided with small-scale hydro deployment, as discussed below. Nonetheless, these impacts have contributed to opposition to new construction, hindered licensing and relicensing by the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission of existing facilities, and motivated several large dam removals (Kosnik 2005, 2008, 2010a, Abbasi and Abbasi 2011, US Army Corps of Engineers 2018, US National Park Service 2018. For these and other reasons, since 2000 hydropower capacity in the United States has grown less than 2% (Johnson and Hadjerioua 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Net revenue and downstream flow impact trade-offs for a network of small-scale hydropower facilities in California

Craig

Zhao

Schneider

et al. 2019

Environ. Res. Commun.

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Deployment of small-scale hydropower, which generally ranges in capacity from 1-10 MW, may partly depend on its ability to mitigate environmental concerns while generating sufficient revenues. In this paper, we quantify net revenue and downstream flow impact trade-offs of a cascading series of 36 small-scale hydropower facilities under consideration for development in Northeast California. To do so, we develop a net-revenue-maximizing optimization model that determines hydropower operations while capturing key technical and river network constraints. We find that significantly constraining maximum discharges from each facility largely eliminates downstream flow impacts but negligibly changes the 36 facilities' combined operations and net revenues. Thus, we find a negligible trade-off between net revenues and downstream impacts in our study system, suggesting small-scale hydropower can contribute to decarbonization efforts while limiting local environmental impacts on downstream flows at little economic cost.

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