The Power of the Dammed

Illustration for the story at Ecomagination. Artist: Travis Barteaux

Did you know that only three percent of dams in the United States create electricity? What a waste. I heard this factoid a few months ago and was curious if anyone was trying to capture all that unused power. Yesterday a story I wrote on the subject was published at Ecomagination:

The Power of the Dammed: How Small Hydro Could Rescue America’s Dumb Dams

As I follow the sustainability and clean energy beat, I am repeatedly dismayed by how wasteful our industrial economy is  — and encouraged that creative solutions are emerging to capture that waste.

In the course of reporting this story, I discovered that a new suite of businesses and technologies are coming into existence in order to capture the power of water that falls…a short distance. It is a niche that the hydropower industry has traditionally overlooked as it focused on giant, gigawatt-scale, river-blocking dams.  Collectively the field is known as small hydro or low-head hydro (to indicate the drop is not that great).

I wrote mostly about retrofitting dams, but the field of small hydro hopes to wring clean electricity from all sorts of falling water: wastewater treatment plants, viaducts, even drainage pipes. How cool is that?

For this story, I took the liberty of coining two terms that, as far as Google tells me, aren’t in circulation: Dumb dam and smart dam.

A dumb dam is one that just holds water (for navigation, irrigation, drinking water, flood control, etc.) and misses the opportunity to produce electricity.

A smart dam is a multitasker that produces power while also serving some other valuable purpose.

While almost no projects are actually producing electricity yet, hopefully many of them will come online in 2013 and 2014. Let’s hear it for smart dams.