Hydro-power: Watt’s the Current Situation?
Humans’ use of hydro-power began with the invention of the
waterwheel, which have been used in Europe for
the last 2000 years. (Paish 2002).
Modern hydro-power traces its roots to France as the first hydro-turbine
was developed by Benoît Fourneyron in 1820 and towards the end of the 19th
century, plans for wide scale use of hydro-power were being developed. The
hydro-power industry then boomed in the early 1900s as Europe and America began
to build dams and stations very quickly. However, as of 2011, the UK only
produced approximately 1.5% of its total power from hydro-electricity (UK Government 2013).
What has caused the collapse of British hydro-power?
The rise of fossil fuels
went a long way in thwarting the development of large scale hydro-power. Figure
1 (DECC 2009)
shows the electricity generation by fuel type in the UK from 1950 to 2008. Hydro was the
second largest contributor to our nation’s electricity supply in 1950 (albeit
still dwarfed by coal). After this, we see asynchronous rises in oil, gas and
nuclear but a steady decline in hydro-power’s contribution. Nuclear energy was
on the rise due to the vast amount of research carried out during the Second
World War and fossil fuels were inexpensive at the time. Hydro-power simply
couldn’t keep up with the vast reserves of fossil fuels that were available
very cheaply throughout the latter half of the 1900s or the growing nuclear
industry, thus it fell away.
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| Figure 1 - Electricity Generation by Fuel Type in the U.K. from 1950 to 2008 |
Despite hydro-power being a renewable and low-carbon energy
source, it has the ability to adversely affect the environment. Dams involved
in large scale hydro-stations can be huge. Reservoirs created by dams have the
ability to alter river ecosystems upstream and downstream. These alterations
are a product of anthropogenic changes to variables such as river flow and
water quality (Boon 1988).
The largest artificial reservoir in the UK is the Kielder dam in
Northumberland, which holds 200 billion litres of water. The waters affected by
the Kielder dam are home to many species of fish such as brown trout and
salmonids. Many of whose life-cycles are synchronised to seasonal variation in
river flow. It has been found that water pulsed out of the dam may upset the
life cycle of some species as it is of an unnaturally short-term variation (Gibbins et al. 2001).
So, it would seem that hydro-power has been held back due to
our preference for other fuel sources and also its own environmental
constraints, but what does the future hold?
Small scale projects such as run-of-river schemes seem to be
the way to go for hydro-power. These usually involve the use of a small weir
and no water storage and therefore do not pose some of the larger threats to
wildlife as big projects such as Kielder. Personal hydro-power projects are
included in the UK
government’s feed-in tariff (see December solar energy post for details) and this
seems to be how our government views the future of hydro-power, at a small
scale.
The government has stated that the UK has a
potential 850 to 1550 megawatts left to exploit, this would account for 1-2% of
our energy production (UK Government 2013).
In my eyes, hydro-power is moving in the right direction and I feel that on a
large scale, we should continue to develop technologies such as wind and
nuclear.
