Pursuing Sustainable Hydropower: Integrated Planning at the System Level
The concept of sustainable hydropower has received a great deal of attention in recent years due to rising concerns about climate change and the hydropower industrys desire to improve its environmental and social performance. Several sustainable hydropower guidelines or frameworks have been developed, primarily directed at assessing or improving the design or operations of single hydropower dams. While project - scale improvements are important, we suggest that the greatest advances in sustainability can only be achieved at a system scale. Here we describe a system - level approach that integrates planning for hydropower, other water management sectors, and conservation of environmental and social resources. For already developed basins, such integrated planning can identify opportunities for restoring the ecological integrity of rivers with minimal reductions in power generation, or even increases in power generation. Within basins poised to undergo hydro-power development, this integrated planning approach seeks to identify an optimal spatial arrangement of dams that achieves power generation targets while maintaining important environmental and social resources. Through this process, conservation is accomplished primarily through the protection of the most valuable sub basins and reaches. In addition to providing meaningful conservation, we propose that this approach holds several benefits for hydropower proponents, including reduced controversy, risk, and operational constraints (e.g. , environmental flow requirements) for individual projects that proceed through this framework. Further, these approaches can potentially yield outcomes that approach a standard that the public is increasingly demanding from hydropower—a renewable energy source that doesnt compromise important riverine values. We provide several case studies where integrated planning has yielded these multiple benefits, and use these cases to propose a framework for hydropower that is sustainable at the system scale.
sustainable hydropower environmental flows Yangtze River
David Harrison
The Nature Conservancy, USAJeff J. Opperman
国际会议
三峡
英文
140-156
2008-10-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）