I may be biased, having taken part in operations to restore some wetland along the Klamath in the past [0], but I quite look forward to seeing the river return, eventually, to a more natural state.
I say eventually because there is undoubtedly a good amount of sediment trapped behind the dams that will need to flush through the river system.[1]
Oh I know, I was part of the crew that blasted the oversized boulders in the river channel just below the dam to open the channel up wider. It was really very cool to watch! I need to go back and see it again, its been years.
I wasn't aware of Intel's practice of using their home state's natural places for code names. I shouldn't be surprised that Apple wasn't first the that game.
A place I used to work had the internal name of a release called Ulaanbaatar. AFAIK, nobody on the dev team was from Mongolia, but this sort of thing was the norm.
Recent OSX releases are all various places (High Sierra, Big Sur, Mojave, etc.)
Azure regional codenames are "Black Forest" and "Fairfax" for Germany and USGov sovereign clouds.
That was probably the most use "Ulaanbaatar" got that year. Mongolians usually shorten the capital to the initialism UB/Уб in speech and text because it's such a long word.
As I recall, they got sued by the musician's estate for using the code name, "Hendrix," so legal declared that they would henceforth only use place names as codenames to avoid the risk.
If anyone is interested in seeing how a river returns after dams are removed look into the Upper Elwha and Glines Canyon dams in Washington. The changes in the last 10 years are pretty incredible.
There are also cool videos of the dams actually being demolished.
I guess the game is to simply not let the holes be big enough to lose the barge through, and the motive power to be able to pull away from the current of the water going over (either on the barge, or maybe there was a shore winch).
It's also kind of amazing that the dam was essentially destroyed with a single guy and a single (large) jack hammer.
> It's also kind of amazing that the dam was essentially destroyed with a single guy and a single (large) jack hammer.
I was thinking the same thing. I know that being a heavy equipment operator is probably mind numbingly boring a lot of the time, but this particular job looks like it would have been incredibly satisfying.
A interesting comparison is the first dam they are taking down produces about 112 million kwh of energy a year. Which is about the same as 50MW worth of solar. One gets the feeling these dam's wouldn't be worth building today.
You are probably right, but maybe not quite for the reasons you imagine... many of the dams in the northwest run at only a tiny percentage of their possible output because increasing their productivity could have poor outcomes for fish, etc. So they have already ratcheted back much of their output as a compromise. But - we also have a lot of anti-solar, anti-wind people who try to block those projects for reasons I would call unscientific and emotional. So you can't outright replace the dams just yet either. The dams are also really good at providing a base load, as even when the wind doesn't blow that water just keeps moving.
With increasing drought and general weather variability, I wonder if they are still reliably provide a base load. For an extreme case, see Lake Powell drying up so much last year it generated little power: https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/30/us/west-drought-lake-powell-h...
Yeah, these dams are rather small in the absolute scale. Compared to one of the big guys like Grand Coulee with its production of 21 billion kwh/year, they're peanuts.
They aren't worth keeping, either. The PG&E Feather River project for example can be replaced by a cheap mid-sized PV farm. Those run-of-the-river hydroelectric projects are way too dangerous to keep around which I think is best exemplified by the fact that the Feather River project started the largest wildfire in California history. So on the one hand you have the almost negligible benefit of an unreliable, seasonal power source and on the other hand you have the extirpation of salmon and a million acres of burnt forests. I known which one I prefer.
Yeah, these made sense in 1925, when we produced just a fraction of what we produce today. But at this point maybe we should just start tearing out the ones that aren't providing any other valuable service and budget for solar & wind to replace their output.
I think so. How little power some of these old dams produce is a bit shocking by modern standards. I remember the allies during WWII went to a bunch of trouble to knock out a some dams on the Ruhr. I think one of them produced 5MW of power.
So these dams produce a round error amount of energy[1]. But the effect on the watershed is not a rounding error. And a lot of them are old which brings costs due to maintenance and engineering analysis. And that applies to the 60 year old power lines to tie these to the grid.
[1] Compare with fish. Friends mom lived in Idaho which is popular with fishermen. Some state analysis showed fish tourism generates about $1000 per fish caught.
That's a poor comparison. We can't control when we get solar power, and we can't easily store excess solar power right now. Hydropower is available on demand. Green sources of electricity like this are worth building today, because the current best alternative appears to be natural gas turbine generation.
I took a tour with the Corps of Engineers earlier this week at a dam on the Snake River. Apparently it isn't that difficult to get a tour, which I recommend to any member of the public. My politics are very progressive, but like so many issues, the dams have been reduced to sound bytes rather than comprehensive understanding.
I came away with an even greater feeling that this is a topic too complicated to just take a side, but rather the best possible outcomes happen when stakeholders work together. We need the fish, the energy, the irrigation, the flood control, and the ease of barge-based agricultural transportation. There is serious effort put into protecting wildlife (IE: fish) with very, very good outcomes. I think it's easy to assume that the pro-dam crowd is anti-environment, which couldn't be farther from the truth.
What really solidified for me this week is that these dams have a defined lifetime. Many are reaching the end of that lifetime, but the technology to replace them with something else isn't really there yet. Given the net benefit and the massive costs of replacement, it's very clear to me we are better letting them run their natural lives rather than removing prematurely. As each reaches a point where it is no longer viable, that is when and where we should consider other options.
Something I haven't seen discussed anywhere, but to me is almost obvious - these various wave generators we see in discussion for off-shore use. Is there a way that technology can be used in the Columbia, Snake, etc without the need for a dam? At the same time too often in these discussions there are other issues overlooked - like how much Washington / Oregon wheat goes down the river on barges that would otherwise be tractor trailers on the highways. Lots of problems to solve.
So do you think the anti-dam crowd is anti-environment?
No one wants to be labeled as anti-environment, but when assigning labels, I think it helps to look at the big picture. I think the anti-nuclear crowd happens to be anti-environment in practice, even if many of them are tree hugging, organic eating, blah blah blah...
I have never met someone who is anti-environment. That’s an active stance. Everyone values the natural environment differently but labeling someone as actively opposed to it betrays a deep misunderstanding of other views.
I dunno man, I've met some of these eastern washington landowners that have their heads pretty far up their own asses. At some point apathy and ignorance become malice.
Why do you need to assign an "anti-environment" label to anybody? It conveys very little useful meaning, and virtually nobody is going to assign that label to themselves so you immediately break down communication and polarize and you end up getting nowhere.
Being anti dam/nuclear/whatever doesn’t mean you have the same reasons as everyone else with that opinion. You can be anti dam because of safety concerns around failure of a specific dam. You can dislike nuclear because you dislike massive subsidies.
It’s important to address someone’s actual concerns not simply whatever you feel is easiest to attack.
The anti-nuclear movement maybe was anti-environment, in the sense that avoiding nuclear led to higher CO2 emissions, but I don't think that's true now for new nuclear construction.
We really don't need the energy - contributions from Klamath dams have been somewhat minuscule, at 163MW.
As for "serious effort protecting wildlife with good outcomes", it's worth keeping in mind that the dams are directly responsible for excessive growth of cyanobacteria. Leading to a Klamath that's seriously depleted. (No, the dams aren't the only reason, but they are a large one). The net "benefit" of the dams staying around would be a significantly damaged ecosystem. And let's be clear, they have reached the point where they are no longer viable, unless you externalize costs. PacifiCorp had the option to upgrade them to have less eco impact (salmon ladders etc), and they looked at the cost and said "nah, thanks, let's not".
As for stakeholders coming together - that's kind of what happened here. It's not like this was an overnight decision. It's been almost two decades of work by folks involved. As always, in a multi-stakeholder environment, not everybody is happy. And nobody is 100% happy.
Step back from the Klamath dams and read my comments as regarding the issue more broadly, as there are a lot more dams across the PNW being targeted for removal and/or that will reach functional obsolescence in upcoming decades. By everything I've read the Klamath dams were generally viewed by many parties as having reaching their natural end. Other dams with many decades to go are already being studied for removal (including the one I toured on the Snake), and that's where there's conflict.
I tend to agree. I consider myself an environmentalist, and I've also come to recognize that these issues can be complicated. Progress is made iteratively and sometimes gradually. While I would love to drop a hammer on the over-fishing of Pacific Salmon for example, when you meet a person who lives in Homer Alaska and lives off of their fishing and you realize that if we completely shut down fishing for a year or two, that person would be economically destroyed. That's just one person in the equation. There are many thousands more. There are ways to improve the salmon population without wiping people out or causing major havoc, but it requires people to learn a whole lot more about the issues than what can be reduced to sound bytes.
Look up the North Atlantic Cod Fishery. We failed to tell fishermen to stop fishing, and as a result the entire ecosystem collapsed and has never returned. They had to stop fishing anyway, and their way of life collapsed too.
Its a tricky reality to balance, but the fishing industry have historically always gotten this wrong. At a certain point you have to be willing to tell people that their way of life is unsustainable.
Of course, then we have to recognize that most of us live an unsustainable way of life, fishermen just happen to be living unsustainably in a shorter term than the rest of us.
Absolutely, completely agree. The fishing industry has demonstrated extensively that they can't be trusted to self-manage (North Atlantic Cod, and Pacific Salmon are great examples). The appeal of over-fishing for short term gains at the cost of long-term is just too good for them to refuse, and they will take what they can. Normalcy bias[1] (which they come by honestly as humans) will do it's thing and convince them that a little bit won't hurt, or it will never disappear, or whatever it needs to. Whatever the solution is, it will definitely include reductions in fishing allowances, and that's going to hurt for producers and consumers alike, but it still has to be done. If we don't, in 5 to 10 years they'll be changing jobs anyway cause the fish will be gone and the ecosystem devastated.
The trick isn't to avoid all suffering, that's just not possible. The trick is (IMHO) to first understand it, then minimize it. Homer Alaska guy will have to accept reduced income for at least a few years until the population rebounds. In the end, at least his business, home, and way of life aren't completely destroyed.
I don't know how we establish/create an independent and reasonable regulator to manage limits, but that's what we need to figure out. The existing entities are too corrupt and have proven that they can't be trusted. On the flip side, some environmental groups are too extreme and also not trustworthy regulators. It's a very hard and complex problem.
Your sentence can be generalized: "The appeal of [over-exploiting natural resources] for short term gains at the cost of long-term is just too good [...] to refuse". But, as with overfishing, the bill is eventually coming...
I may regret making this comparison, but bear with me here... the thinking person realizes that the terms "pro-life" and "pro-choice" are in no way an accurate reflection of two camps on that issue. In the same way, what's clear to me is that dams are not anti-salmon, despite the common political portrayal that dams == dead salmon, no dams == return of the salmon. Could the fish (not just salmon, but also lampreys, sturgeon, trout, etc...) do better without dams? Sure, possibly, but let's not overlook that these dams also employ technology to cool the water to counter climate effects. And, the rate of fish through the dams is pretty darn amazing -- 95+% will survive their up /down journey. So I'm with you - we all have to study and look at the big picture and try to reign in the various political forces that may not be acting with cool heads (on all sides of the equation).
The issue with fish ladders is not that they kill fishes, actively. The issue is that fish just don't really go back up fish ladders at dam, with the rates estimated as low as 3%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_ladder#Effectiveness
Another issue with dams and ladders for that matter is that they significantly lengthen the journey time. Additionally protected marine mammals take advantage of the backlog of these blockages and consume significantly more fish as they have no quick escape.
You say "humans can easily adapt", but some of these families have been in the fishery trade for generations and would rather give up their religion than being forced to live on land like a normie. This is absolutely not something they will willingly do.
If you've ever tried telling an Evangelical that taking this whole Jesus thing so seriously is maybe not the best idea for humanity then you know what I mean.
That’s a weird statement. The environment does easily adapt, but in ways that humans might not be able to adapt to. When we talk about ecosystems and climate and such, we talk about maintaining them for our own interests (so not shooting ourselves in the foot making a bad trade off). At the end of the day, the Earth will adapt to anything, and a few million years after humans have gone extinct, there will hardly be any trace that we ever existed.
This was very much all stakeholders coming together. The power company and the tribe that is supposed to own the land and water rights had an agreement as far back as 2008, but it required Congressional approval, Congress never voted on it, then it was repackaged as only needing agency approval, and got that, but then Trump came in with the mandate to make sure nothing Obama could possibly get credit for actually happened, so it was reversed. If they didn't need to involve the federal government, this would have happened decades ago.
> Something I haven't seen discussed anywhere, but to me is almost obvious - these various wave generators we see in discussion for off-shore use. Is there a way that technology can be used in the Columbia, Snake, etc without the need for a dam?
Yeah, my gut tells me when we get to a point where we have to either rebuild or remove a lot of these dams, we'll pursue technology like this as a happy path. Or at least that should be part of the options.
10kW to 40kW according to their spec sheet[1], so seems irrelevant as an alternative. A single one of the older dams getting replaced, the Iron Gate Dam, has a capacity of 18MW. One powers a single small farm, the other powers entire towns, heavy industry, foundries...
And to be clear, these are small, old, dams. Modern dams and turbines produce far, far more.
These turbines are meant to be used in a fleet, along a river. They take about 16 feet across per pair, so call it 20 across the normal flow of the river. They also do not block the flow, so more can be installed a little downstream, depending on the pitch of the riverbed. Assuming 5 groups per mile, 10 miles of flow of the Klamath River will give you the capacity to install 1000 of these, for a total capacity of 10 MW to 40 MW.
Saying that these are too small is like saying that solar panels are too small. The module size has nothing to do with the total generation - they're built to be manufactured and placed in bulk.
Source: I listened to the referenced podcast episode when I came out, and just looked at the spec sheet to refresh my memory.
The rosy scenario, then, is lots of these little turbines?
Won't there be separate NIMBY lawsuits about every single one of these, claims that they're unstudied and cause ecological damage, ruin the natural enjoyment of the river, etc. etc.?
In the rivers with minimal debris, with long enough stretches to place them all, with enough infra (read: cabling) to supply\gather electricity from them all to the one/two/three substation... All these while providing an efficient way to grind all the fishes.
These absolutely cannot be used in these kinds of rivers. Even their own promos only show irrigation channels. These things will chop salmon like sushi and running miles of infrastructure for them up and down a river is fantasy.
Solar is far more practical and far more dense then these things to replace a hydro dam.
> these various wave generators we see in discussion for off-shore use
When it comes to wave power, "in discussion" is the operative word. Modern pelton wheels are 95%+ effective in converting kinetic energy into mechanical energy and have been in operation for decades. They are super well understood and optimized and are deployed at scales of dozens of megawatts per unit. Total installed capacity is probably into the hundreds of gigawatts.
AFAIK, no wave power project is above 10 MW as of now and the total installed base is still tiny despite decades of research. Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wave_power_stations for example. It is a combination of the ocean being a super unfriendly environment for technology in combination with all of the wave energy extraction technologies being extremely inefficient.
Small scale hydro is pretty old. 15-20 years ago I stayed in a small inn/hotel in China in a national park on a huge mountain that got its power via a water wheel on a stream fed by melting glaciers. It was fragile, so occasionally it get pushed off, causing power to go out while the hotel staff repositioned it.
No way you’re going to make as much electricity as with conventional hydro.
Furthermore, you lose the ability to dispatch more or less electricity depending on demand, which is increasingly important in grids with a lot of wind and solar.
It may well be that the environmental costs of many dams aren’t worth it - and lots of dams produce very little or no hydroelectricity. But run of river hydro is not an easy substitute for those hydro plants that do produce significant energy.
Is anyone seriously proposing removing dams on the Colombia or Snake? Or really any dam used for irrigation?
Most of the removals seem to be on very small scale hydro projects on coastal river that produce very little power, aren’t used for irrigation and open up a lot of salmon habitat.
Yes - see the back and forth between Washington state and the Feds over the past year+. Would it happen immediately? No, but the goal has been stated and studies begun. It's even a part of the official party platform of the Washington State Democrats (much to the chagrin of those of us over here in Eastern Washington )
I suspect the Venn diagram of HN readers and Capitol Press readers (western states ag newspaper) is small, but just today there was an article in the CP talking about conflicts over the dams between various groups and the White House. Definitely an ongoing political football here in the PNW.
Fellow south east Washington resident here. This is so well said. I don't think people realize how interconnected these projects are with the whole region. Power is only one piece of the equation.
The Columbia Basin irrigation projects are a vast endeavor. The amount of food production that relies on the irrigation provided by these damns is HUGE (I work in Agtech and am regularly on many of these farms).
Multiple towns have grown over the years on the banks of these rivers. Ripping damns down would mean either some other form of flood remediation or just abandoning the towns.
And as an avid water skiier... the Columbia River is some of the best water skiing in the world (I've skiied many other spots). So there's a small deal about recreation as well. :D
That may sound like an "over my dam body" pitch. It's not meant to. It's meant to augment the parent post. You have to talk about the whole picture, not just the part you get excited about when you have big interconnected things like this.
I second going and visiting some of them. They're similar but different. Grand Coulee is a major testament to 40's large scale projects. I think Wanapum is cool because it shows that you can do a "public works" dam. And Dvorjak is pretty impressive as well, especially from a flood control/river management POV.
Not to be confused with the dams of "The Klamath Project", which is upstream of these small hydroelectric dams, and is used for irrigation. Also very controversial and pitting fish and tribes against farmers.
I'm in Montana and the river here during the spawn looks red with salmon. I don't know how many ladders they climbed, but it seems like they can work. These fish would have to have come up the Columbia river.
Somewhere up the thread, a 3% success rate was thrown out, so maybe some designs are better than others.
As zwieback said, a lot of the dams just aren't that useful, for a bunch of reasons but biggest is that they're just too small. On top of that, at least for the Washington dams I'm more familiar with, the power generation doesn't match up with need. Most of the river flow is over the winter and spring (that's when it rains/snows and then more rain and melting snow) and in the late summer when electricity use is highest the dams don't have enough water flow to be really productive. Worse yet, some of the oldest dams are even more limited because there's too much mud in their reservoirs.
Nothing insurmountable (dredge the silt, build them bigger so the reservoir lasts until the fall, etc), but it just means the most cost effective way to help the salmon is tear down a lot of these dams.
> Why aren’t we investing as much money as it takes to save the salmon but keep the dam?
This is a good question I'd like to hear more about. The fish ladder at Bonneville, for example, is fairly steep all considered. For the kind of money we have invested in the facility, would it be reasonable to invest some serious effort in making a more usable ladder?
China is replacing some of its older dams. Many were hastily built during The Great Leap Forward, with more emphasis on rapid completion than quality and safety. There were dam failures, some with huge loss of life.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadI say eventually because there is undoubtedly a good amount of sediment trapped behind the dams that will need to flush through the river system.[1]
[0] https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2007/oct/30/levees-face-bl...
[1] https://www.americanrivers.org/2023/08/sedimentation-and-dam....
Now that it's complete, there's an entirely new shoreline. It's been great to see.
A place I used to work had the internal name of a release called Ulaanbaatar. AFAIK, nobody on the dev team was from Mongolia, but this sort of thing was the norm.
Recent OSX releases are all various places (High Sierra, Big Sur, Mojave, etc.)
Azure regional codenames are "Black Forest" and "Fairfax" for Germany and USGov sovereign clouds.
...and so on.
There are also cool videos of the dams actually being demolished.
It's basically just a floating barge with an excavator chipping away at the dam a little bit every day, while water rushes past it through the damage.
It's also kind of amazing that the dam was essentially destroyed with a single guy and a single (large) jack hammer.
I was thinking the same thing. I know that being a heavy equipment operator is probably mind numbingly boring a lot of the time, but this particular job looks like it would have been incredibly satisfying.
You can still hike up to it and walk on top of the remaining dam structure, and since the washout the area has the feel of a ghost town.
I only know about this issue at all because someone linked me his talks on youtube years ago.
e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOOuGb_E86Q
So these dams produce a round error amount of energy[1]. But the effect on the watershed is not a rounding error. And a lot of them are old which brings costs due to maintenance and engineering analysis. And that applies to the 60 year old power lines to tie these to the grid.
[1] Compare with fish. Friends mom lived in Idaho which is popular with fishermen. Some state analysis showed fish tourism generates about $1000 per fish caught.
I came away with an even greater feeling that this is a topic too complicated to just take a side, but rather the best possible outcomes happen when stakeholders work together. We need the fish, the energy, the irrigation, the flood control, and the ease of barge-based agricultural transportation. There is serious effort put into protecting wildlife (IE: fish) with very, very good outcomes. I think it's easy to assume that the pro-dam crowd is anti-environment, which couldn't be farther from the truth.
What really solidified for me this week is that these dams have a defined lifetime. Many are reaching the end of that lifetime, but the technology to replace them with something else isn't really there yet. Given the net benefit and the massive costs of replacement, it's very clear to me we are better letting them run their natural lives rather than removing prematurely. As each reaches a point where it is no longer viable, that is when and where we should consider other options.
Something I haven't seen discussed anywhere, but to me is almost obvious - these various wave generators we see in discussion for off-shore use. Is there a way that technology can be used in the Columbia, Snake, etc without the need for a dam? At the same time too often in these discussions there are other issues overlooked - like how much Washington / Oregon wheat goes down the river on barges that would otherwise be tractor trailers on the highways. Lots of problems to solve.
No one wants to be labeled as anti-environment, but when assigning labels, I think it helps to look at the big picture. I think the anti-nuclear crowd happens to be anti-environment in practice, even if many of them are tree hugging, organic eating, blah blah blah...
Malice requires intent. Apathy and ignorance do not.
I see no constructive outcome of following this logically flawed line of thinking.
It’s important to address someone’s actual concerns not simply whatever you feel is easiest to attack.
As for "serious effort protecting wildlife with good outcomes", it's worth keeping in mind that the dams are directly responsible for excessive growth of cyanobacteria. Leading to a Klamath that's seriously depleted. (No, the dams aren't the only reason, but they are a large one). The net "benefit" of the dams staying around would be a significantly damaged ecosystem. And let's be clear, they have reached the point where they are no longer viable, unless you externalize costs. PacifiCorp had the option to upgrade them to have less eco impact (salmon ladders etc), and they looked at the cost and said "nah, thanks, let's not".
As for stakeholders coming together - that's kind of what happened here. It's not like this was an overnight decision. It's been almost two decades of work by folks involved. As always, in a multi-stakeholder environment, not everybody is happy. And nobody is 100% happy.
That's not huge, but it's not nothing either. Feels like enough to not simply hand wave away, especially since that's carbon-free energy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Oreg...
Enough to give up on when it doesn't make commercial sense and destroys an ecosystem, the number doesn't stand in a vacuum.
Look up the North Atlantic Cod Fishery. We failed to tell fishermen to stop fishing, and as a result the entire ecosystem collapsed and has never returned. They had to stop fishing anyway, and their way of life collapsed too.
Its a tricky reality to balance, but the fishing industry have historically always gotten this wrong. At a certain point you have to be willing to tell people that their way of life is unsustainable.
Of course, then we have to recognize that most of us live an unsustainable way of life, fishermen just happen to be living unsustainably in a shorter term than the rest of us.
The trick isn't to avoid all suffering, that's just not possible. The trick is (IMHO) to first understand it, then minimize it. Homer Alaska guy will have to accept reduced income for at least a few years until the population rebounds. In the end, at least his business, home, and way of life aren't completely destroyed.
I don't know how we establish/create an independent and reasonable regulator to manage limits, but that's what we need to figure out. The existing entities are too corrupt and have proven that they can't be trusted. On the flip side, some environmental groups are too extreme and also not trustworthy regulators. It's a very hard and complex problem.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
If you've ever tried telling an Evangelical that taking this whole Jesus thing so seriously is maybe not the best idea for humanity then you know what I mean.
There are some companies doing small scale hydro, by taking advantage of the natural flow of a river, without the use of any dam/head. Eg. see https://emrgy.com, and a volts podcast with the founder/CEO: https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-make-small-hydro-more-like#de...
And to be clear, these are small, old, dams. Modern dams and turbines produce far, far more.
[1]: https://emrgy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Emrgy-Specifica...
Saying that these are too small is like saying that solar panels are too small. The module size has nothing to do with the total generation - they're built to be manufactured and placed in bulk.
Source: I listened to the referenced podcast episode when I came out, and just looked at the spec sheet to refresh my memory.
Won't there be separate NIMBY lawsuits about every single one of these, claims that they're unstudied and cause ecological damage, ruin the natural enjoyment of the river, etc. etc.?
Solar is far more practical and far more dense then these things to replace a hydro dam.
When it comes to wave power, "in discussion" is the operative word. Modern pelton wheels are 95%+ effective in converting kinetic energy into mechanical energy and have been in operation for decades. They are super well understood and optimized and are deployed at scales of dozens of megawatts per unit. Total installed capacity is probably into the hundreds of gigawatts.
AFAIK, no wave power project is above 10 MW as of now and the total installed base is still tiny despite decades of research. Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wave_power_stations for example. It is a combination of the ocean being a super unfriendly environment for technology in combination with all of the wave energy extraction technologies being extremely inefficient.
Furthermore, you lose the ability to dispatch more or less electricity depending on demand, which is increasingly important in grids with a lot of wind and solar.
It may well be that the environmental costs of many dams aren’t worth it - and lots of dams produce very little or no hydroelectricity. But run of river hydro is not an easy substitute for those hydro plants that do produce significant energy.
Most of the removals seem to be on very small scale hydro projects on coastal river that produce very little power, aren’t used for irrigation and open up a lot of salmon habitat.
The Columbia Basin irrigation projects are a vast endeavor. The amount of food production that relies on the irrigation provided by these damns is HUGE (I work in Agtech and am regularly on many of these farms).
Multiple towns have grown over the years on the banks of these rivers. Ripping damns down would mean either some other form of flood remediation or just abandoning the towns.
And as an avid water skiier... the Columbia River is some of the best water skiing in the world (I've skiied many other spots). So there's a small deal about recreation as well. :D
That may sound like an "over my dam body" pitch. It's not meant to. It's meant to augment the parent post. You have to talk about the whole picture, not just the part you get excited about when you have big interconnected things like this.
I second going and visiting some of them. They're similar but different. Grand Coulee is a major testament to 40's large scale projects. I think Wanapum is cool because it shows that you can do a "public works" dam. And Dvorjak is pretty impressive as well, especially from a flood control/river management POV.
The PNW has something like 80% of its power coming from clean hydro. It’d be a shame to lose that.
Somewhere up the thread, a 3% success rate was thrown out, so maybe some designs are better than others.
East of the divide is the Mississippi basin so that’s a whole different story.
Salmon snagging is a thing for us and the bears.
Nothing insurmountable (dredge the silt, build them bigger so the reservoir lasts until the fall, etc), but it just means the most cost effective way to help the salmon is tear down a lot of these dams.
This is a good question I'd like to hear more about. The fish ladder at Bonneville, for example, is fairly steep all considered. For the kind of money we have invested in the facility, would it be reasonable to invest some serious effort in making a more usable ladder?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
A new dam is built alongside, then the old one dismantled.
For example, the Fengman Dam on the Songhua in N.E. China was originally built during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fengman_Dam#New_Dam
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-12/12/c_137668907.htm