5 Responses

1. Since hydroelectric power doesn’t add to the green house effect, it is certainly desirable but it can cause other types of environmental problems. As an example, there are problems with salmon getting up steam in the Pacific Northwest to spawn.

   In building dams you create large lakes that can take useful land away by covering it with water.

   The biggest problem is the lack of large sources of water at elevation that have not all ready been exploited.

2. “Efficiency” probably is not the word you are looking for. When we talk about the efficiency of a power plant, we are talking about a ratio. Usually it is the ratio of the useable energy out over the theoretical energy in. It might make sense to talk about whether one coal fired plant is more efficient than another coal fired plant (i.e., it can make more electricity from the same amount of coal), but it doesn’t really mean anything to compare the efficiency of a coal plant to a hydro plant.

   Imagine that you are the owner of a power company, and you want to grow the company to meet rising consumer demands. You’re trying to decide whether to build a coal fired plant or a hydro plant or maybe a nuclear plant. What’s going to matter?

   Money.

   How much will it cost to build? How much will it cost to keep it running? How much can you charge for the electricity? How long will it take to break even? (Will it EVER break even?) What are the risks that my plant will cause some kind of ecological damage for which I will later be sued?

   Sure. There are drawbacks to hydro power. The biggie is that you have to dam up a free-flowing river and inundate who knows how many square miles of land. Both the river and the land are habitats for who knows how many species. Another one is the risk of what would happen if, at some future date, your dam fails.

3. The hydro power is cheap in one sense only. Operating cost. We dont need any fuel
   But the cost of environmental damage is too much.Huge area is under water.Many people are displaced. The natural flow of river is stepped Ecology is changed..
   Load of huge reservoir has caused earth quakes in India(Koyanna Dam)
   I dont tnik water turbines are effecient.But since it dont require fuel to operate You may be thinking it is effecient.
   Consider the trees you have to cut to make the reservoir.The oxygen they produce is very costlyif you calculate! the cost.

4. One large consideration. In a word “Silt”.
   Those dams will eventually ‘silt up’, and become useless.
   As they are so very costly, and do ecological damage downstream,
   what must be evaluated is the ‘entire total cost’ of the power produced
   over the lifetime of the installation.

5. Hydroelectric power is considered to be a renewable source of energy. However, there are negative environmental consequences – disruption of rivers, potential harm to fish and other wildlife, potential loss of arable land, etc. And while the energy cost is very low (and as a consequence, the capacity factor of a typical hydro plant is fairly high), the capital cost of the civil structures (dams) can be very high.