Late in my career (circa 2010, Obama) I wrote an EIS for a rail project in a western state. The project proponent wanted to build a 40-mile rail spur to interconnect to the national system so that mined coal could be more efficiently moved into the market. The project was "clean," environmentally speaking - no significant impacts to biological, cultural, or historic resources, and would have "removed" 70 heavy-haul trucks from local highways. That action would have reduced maintenance costs for local governments, improved highway safety, and reduced emissions (which wasn't a "thing" then).
In a meeting between the project proponent (a local government), the lead agency, and the EPA, the EPA rep said, point blank, "the EPA will oppose any project that makes it easier to produce coal." That moment was a key in my decision to retire after 40 years in consulting.
The EPA's regs today are not surprising to me; as a federal agency, they have acted more as activists than regulators, and has done more to obfuscate progress and innovation than any political party could have imagined.
We had one in 2016. "Drain the swamp" was the mantra. Unfortunately, all he could get done was to change the water.
I agree with your "capture" philosophy, though you shouldn't under estimate the influence of the Sierra Club. "Brown shirts" disguised in the cloak of green virtuisms.
This is an outstanding presentation Isaac! Thank you for sharing. BTW, I loved working at Dairyland Power's Genoa and Madgett Stations (1980's & 1990's) and I was aware of the small Allis-Chalmers reactor near the Genoa plant. Your presentation is excellent but what caught my attention was reference to Dairyland. My closing comment. The largest problem I see with the destructive energy policies of Biden and the Democrats is, that we who understand energy and electricity generation are a small minority of the voting population. One of the finest points of your presentation is, it is understandable to some of the 97% of the public that otherwise has a low energy I/Q. I will be sharing to my friends and I hope many others do the same. Thank you for all you do!
Why couldn’t these places build mid merit gas or peakers? The EPA regs don’t cover those at all and they could meet the capacity shortfalls you flagged.
Our modeling looked at the grids models by EPA in its regulatory impact analysis to claim that the rules maintain resource adequacy and would not impact grid reliability. These are the agency capacity assumptions pitted against real world historical wind, solar, and demand data. In theory, building a bunch of plants operating below EPAs regulated threshold would be the easiest way to comply with the rules, but it would also not reduce emissions as much as the agency claims.
I think that’s a fair play. My base case is that the gas gets built rather than an outcome
where margins get tight enough that we have regular blackouts.
In some ways your analysis is generous by not including load growth and other stochastic uncertainties- actual raw energy needs would actually hit the CF limit. If it’s just for peaking then new gas plants won’t even close imo.
I should clarify one thing. We upwardly adjusted hourly demand based on EPA’s load growth forecast but applied this to the historical hourly load shape. We upwardly adjusted the wind and solar capacity factors to meet EPA’s assumptions, too, which is another way we sought to give the agency the benefit of the doubt.
Isaac, the EPA has shown a complete environmental bias, at least since Gina McCarthy and her Clean Power Plan. Even today, Janet McCabe remains second in command. As I have been lobbying on Wash DC since 2002, I have watched the EPA transform itself into semi-secret and intergovernmental lobbyists themselves. Then, there is this arrogance of theirs and their political maneuvering.
Even DOE says we can keep the 300 remaining coal plants working for the next 100 years BUT we should convert them to burn Uranium instead of coal. Trivial to do. JFK's team had it all figured out but we never upgraded to the Apollo Era nuclear tech. Can't do it with a wet reactor, like a light water reactor. It has water touching the fuel, which means an accidental steam explosion could happen, and so it needs a containment building... (which doesn't even work as demonstrated demolished at Fukushima Daiichi.)
But the MSR or other high temp advanced reactors are much smaller and hot enough to run the tubines in a coal plant. Keep labor and utility execs happy. Don't build a new grid.
See TerraPraxis for details on coal to nuclear conversions.
Unfortunately China is in the lead and has already started coal to nuclear conversion, and MSR reactors are operating.
I believe that the EPA-by extension the government-had taken the reliability factor into account. The reason is because the undermining of the electrical grid-even though grid stability technically does not fall under the EPA, it does fall under cost which all regulations must account for-will actually allow for greater power garbing by federal agency by making the grid less reliable. Look at the DOE land grab to hasten renewable transmission projects. If you were to look at the map, you will fine the a large swaths of targeted land is in Red farming & Oil producing states. The regulation takes half of OK, with less recourse and completely usurp the states.
Hmmm... 60+ years ago the advertisements for Commonwealth Edison in Illinois proclaimed "Too Cheap to Meter" for electricity fed into the Grid from the nuclear reactors being brought on line. I was born in Illinois, lived there for most of the first 67 years of my life until it was impossible to find full-time employment after the company I'd worked for for 15 years failed after the Recession of 2008.
I recall our ComEd electric bill was roughly $80 - 90 avg. / month for the 1,400 square foot home we lived in.
So we moved to Wisconsin.
Xcel is our electricity provider. 1,600 sq. ft. home's monthly bills are half again what less KwH cost us in Illinois.
Not that I want to relocate! LIfestyle is less stressful here, I can talk to my neighbors here.
Genoa plant's history. Windmills seem to be growing more common down in the SW regions near Platteville and Dodgeville. But the wind doesn't blow all the time so those turbines are often idle or throttled down when the wind blows too hard.
Acres are being covered with solar panels (I wonder what the effect of the 1/2" hail we just experienced here might have had on those nearby?) but only work when A) the sun is shining and B) when they're free of snow and dirt. Xcel wants a subscription for us to take advantage of the purported cost benefit of solar-powered electricity they feed into the grid, for an additional $25-30 / month over the cost per KwH used.
Some of my neighbors drive hybrid vehicles, others prefer full electric. Are those drivers paying a fair price for the connection that gives them the freedom to avoid ICE-vehicle transport? Paying registration fees that offset the infrastructure wear and tear on the roads we all drive upon that's caused by their heavier vehicles?
I recall a major expansion of the power plant near Racine a few years ago. Vast trackage laid down to accommodate the trains hauling coal to power the generation of juice to feed the SE corner of WI. What was the ratepayers' share of the costs for that overhaul? Is that plant still in operation? Had to be state-of-the-art as it took a couple of years' work to complete. Has that plant been closes because coal is no longer a viable source of electrical generation?
Natural gas has become the conversion fuel of choice when coal plants are 'reconfigured'. There are ample reserves in the US to provide energy for decades yet liquified natural gas is being exported to quench the demands of countries outside our borders. And it generates far fewer levels of CO2 besides, so why are we selling it overseas instead of keeping it here in the US to power our economy?
It's time to disband the EPA. It's outlived it's otherwise dubious value since it's inception. We need to ensure a reliable and economical supply-side for generating electricity here in the USA.
Everybody in Washington, including you, is on the same side: oil and gas. The EPA policy of targeting coal plants is to replace them with methane. Nuclear power has always been the only power source that oil and gas allowed. This idea of a small nuclear plant in every city and town is a very bad idea. Water power (running)like Norway is the answer.
You have brought up hydro as your ideal electricity solution on past Energy Bad Boy posts. I suspect there is very little if anything that could be said that would convince you that that hydro is not a broadly workable solution in the United States. Others not familiar with hydro may be more open to arguments to the contrary.
The continental United States has three separate physical electric grids, the Eastern Interconnect, the Western Interconnect, and the Texas Interconnect. Electric generators within each of the three interconnects operate synchronously (AC current). The interconnects have a few small DC circuits that allow very small amounts of electricity to flow between the interconnects, but for all practical purposes, they are islands. Electricity produced in New York, Wisconsin, or Florida (for example) is not available to California. Electricity will never flow between these interconnects without major changes to all three physical grids.
Each of the interconnects is further divided into sub grids that are responsible for generating and delivering power to their local constituents. These sub grids are things like Midwest System Interconnect (MISO), ISO New England, PJM, Southwest Power Pool, etc. Power produced within one of these sub grids can be exported (or imported) by/to other ISO/RTOs or non-ISO/RTOs within the same physical grid. Imports and exports generally represent small amount of electricity as the ISO/RTOs are largely responsible for making their own power. In the case of Minnesota, where I live, we are part of MISO. MISO has 15 states that are either wholly or partly part of MISO. Minnesota is completely within MISO, as is a tiny tiny piece of Texas.
When you go to the MISO’s web site ( https://www.misoenergy.org/ ) you will see that hydro generation is lumped in with “Other”, where other includes Reservoir Hydro, Pumped Storage Hydro, Diesel, Demand Response Resources, External Asynchronous Resources and a varied assortment of solid waste, garbage and wood pulp burners. The total generation for “Other” is 1.9%, with Hydro being tiny. States such as Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, and North Dakota, which are primarily within MISO produce no hydro. States such as Louisiana, Michigan, and Minnesota create about 1% of their electricity from hydro. Only Arkansas has any substantial Hydro at 7%
To go from1% or less hydro within MISO to any substantial amount of hydro, would probably be impossible. What you are unknowingly proposing is that MISO get most of its electricity via imports from other RTOs within the Easter Interconnect. That is not going to happen.
There are three primary types of hydro with different characteristics:
Traditional Dams with Reservoirs
Reservoir dams are generally large and can operate to some degree as either an ongoing electricity source, or a battery. If the reservoir behind the dam continuously gets enough water from rain and snow melt, and if there are no other considerations (which there always are), then it would be possible to produce some amount of electricity continuously. The dam would look like a traditional power plant. Most likely, some of the electricity would be produced periodically based upon electricity demand and the amount of water available for power generation behind the dam. In this case, the dam would look more like a battery. The amount of water behind the dam is the battery size. If you drain the reservoir, the battery is dead.
Pumped Hydro
Pumped hydro involves two pools of water. A pool of water such as a lake at a lower elevation, and a pool of water at a higher elevation. Water is pumped from the lower elevation to the upper elevation. That takes electricity. Most pumped hydro will be power negative meaning it takes more power to pump the water to the higher elevation than you get back from releasing the water to the lower elevation. Pumped hydro is a battery. The amount of water pumped to the top reservoir is the size of the battery.
Run-of-the-River Hydro (ROR)
ROR hydro does not backup water like dams but rather depends upon a constant somewhat natural flow of water through the hydro facility. It cannot be considered firm power as it depends upon the uncontrolled flow of water down a particular river. The level of water in individual rivers is, as you might guess, is affected by changing weather and long-term climate. ROR is best sited in locations where the flow of water is constant vs. sites that have periods of time with low flow and periods of time with high flow. This is because sites that are designed to handle low flow are not able to easily handle times with much higher flow.
The most commonly understand hydro in the U.S. are dams. The following data comes from this site: USA Facts How many dams does America have?
It says the less 3% of the nation’s dams are used for hydro power. According to this site dams are used for a variety of reasons.
Recreation: 29,977
Flood Risk Reduction: 15,276
Other: 10,232
Fire Protection, Stock, or Small Fishpond: 10,157
Irrigation: 7,602
Water Supply: 5,151
Fish and Wildlife Pond: 3,281
Hydroelectric: 2,133
Approximately 65% of the dams are privately owned, 31% are owned by US governments at different levels and only 4% belong to public utility companies and tribal governments.
There are several problems with the solution you propose to make significantly more use of water in the U.S. for electricity production. Many of the best sites for power dams are already in use. We don’t have another Colorado river system just waiting for a dam. Most existing dams are for other, often conflicting, purposes. Many of the dams are too small to be of practical use for hydroelectricity. Would it make sense to try and put a hydro facility at a fishpond? We may have more “water resources” than Norway, but that does not mean they are suitable for hydro dams.
Construction of water dams may affect the migration and movement of aquatic organisms, hinder their reproduction, and in some extreme cases, drive some species to become extinct. Also, as most of the hydroelectric projects are physically large in size and will result in the flooding of massive areas within a river valley. That land has other possible uses and may be privately owned. Repeated flooding and drying of plant material can also produce methane which is a greenhouse gas.
Assuming we had sufficient excess energy to more broadly deploy pumped storage hydro, how many sites, blue sky, would even be possible? ( https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81277.pdf ). This pro-hydro study identified 6,586,156 possible lower reservoirs and 2,150,184 possible upper reservoirs within the continental U.S. Seems large. They then exclude sites for a variety of reasons including wetland protection, urban areas, critical animal habitat, etc. and determined the number of possible sites to be 11,769. This is a 99% reduction (The upper reservoir is the limiting factor.) These sites of course have other uses and flooding large amounts of land to produce a water battery, is not likely to happen without significant local opposition. The real number will be much less.
Lastly, the United States is not Norway. Norway gets 98% of its energy from renewable resources, and most of that (92%) is from hydro. The U.S. gets about 6% of its electricity from hydro. We are not going to become Norway. Norway has steep valleys and rivers in abundance and heavy concentrated rainfall in the west of the country leading to high levels of running water in rivers and waterfalls, it would be harder to design a country of such size with a greater hydro capacity. Your flawed thinking that because Norway can depend on hydro, we can depend on hydro, could be extended to solar in the United States. Because Arizona is a great place for solar, northern Maine should be a great place for solar. The conditions are different, and the results will not be the same.
Hydro has its own set of problems the most obvious of which is, there are only so many rivers to dam. It is unrealistic to assume hydro can be a substantial part of the energy mix for a broad cross section of the country. In terms of oil and gas being necessary along with nuclear, it's the only tenable way to address the rapidly growing demand for electric. Spinning windmills and miles of solar panel wouldn't address the needs of yesterday's grid. The rapidly expanding current need makes renewables a poor quality joke- massive data warehouses (I live an hour from the ones in northern VA that have exploded into reality in the last 5+ years) that will continue popping up, electric car chargers, government demanded heat pumps and all electric appliances will destroy the pretend world that is being created by ideologues and frightened bureaucrats. It's all a game of Wack a Mole with the moles breeding every time you hit one. This is to say nothing of the ecological warfare of vastly expanded mining of lithium, cobalt, rubidium, lutecium, selenium, tellurium, gallium, and on and on for photovoltaics and batteries. Our world is going to fall apart because greens want to power it with hope and swagger.
The biggest industrial accidents in history have been hydro.
California might have lost 200,000 people recently when we lucked out and the Oroville dam didn't break-- but as an engineer I count wrong but lucky as failure. Ukraine is suffering huge losses due to a dam attack. And we all hope those rumors of Tofu Cement in China aren't true..... Nuclear cannot plausibly kill anywhere near as many people as hydro or coal. Coal plants kill 100/year on purpose, when they are operating nominally, in the west. That's murder. When Chernobyl killed somewhere between 60 and 19,000 people... that was an accident. If Chernobyl was instead built as coal plant making the same energy - it would have killed at least 5 times more people than the nuclear plant with the worst accident ever.
We are talking about the build up of our negative field to a point we will end life on earth. Actually, Boeck forecasted 2026, and we now have for the first time ever on earth in this 21 century, those ominous red sprites. I am talking running water batteries like Switzerland, not dams. Norway mines oil, but it runs its country 96 percent on water.
Nicely done, sirs. Thank you.
Late in my career (circa 2010, Obama) I wrote an EIS for a rail project in a western state. The project proponent wanted to build a 40-mile rail spur to interconnect to the national system so that mined coal could be more efficiently moved into the market. The project was "clean," environmentally speaking - no significant impacts to biological, cultural, or historic resources, and would have "removed" 70 heavy-haul trucks from local highways. That action would have reduced maintenance costs for local governments, improved highway safety, and reduced emissions (which wasn't a "thing" then).
In a meeting between the project proponent (a local government), the lead agency, and the EPA, the EPA rep said, point blank, "the EPA will oppose any project that makes it easier to produce coal." That moment was a key in my decision to retire after 40 years in consulting.
The EPA's regs today are not surprising to me; as a federal agency, they have acted more as activists than regulators, and has done more to obfuscate progress and innovation than any political party could have imagined.
Yup. Totally agree.
Well, given that the EPA is as captured by NRDC as the SEC is captured by Goldman Sachs, it's not surprising. It's catastrophic, but not surprising.
I would love to see a campaign promise to kick all the NGO apparatchiks out of government bureaucracy.
We had one in 2016. "Drain the swamp" was the mantra. Unfortunately, all he could get done was to change the water.
I agree with your "capture" philosophy, though you shouldn't under estimate the influence of the Sierra Club. "Brown shirts" disguised in the cloak of green virtuisms.
This is an outstanding presentation Isaac! Thank you for sharing. BTW, I loved working at Dairyland Power's Genoa and Madgett Stations (1980's & 1990's) and I was aware of the small Allis-Chalmers reactor near the Genoa plant. Your presentation is excellent but what caught my attention was reference to Dairyland. My closing comment. The largest problem I see with the destructive energy policies of Biden and the Democrats is, that we who understand energy and electricity generation are a small minority of the voting population. One of the finest points of your presentation is, it is understandable to some of the 97% of the public that otherwise has a low energy I/Q. I will be sharing to my friends and I hope many others do the same. Thank you for all you do!
Thanks Dick!
Keep on rocking in the real world!
Love your stuff!! Now, turning that question around. Do you and/or Mitch own a generator?
I don’t because they’re spendy
🤣 They're not expensive, they're priceless. Costco usually stocks a tri-fuel portable for under a grand.
Well that sounds like it’s worth looking into
Excited to check out the speech and that Wisconsin comedian
Why couldn’t these places build mid merit gas or peakers? The EPA regs don’t cover those at all and they could meet the capacity shortfalls you flagged.
Our modeling looked at the grids models by EPA in its regulatory impact analysis to claim that the rules maintain resource adequacy and would not impact grid reliability. These are the agency capacity assumptions pitted against real world historical wind, solar, and demand data. In theory, building a bunch of plants operating below EPAs regulated threshold would be the easiest way to comply with the rules, but it would also not reduce emissions as much as the agency claims.
I think that’s a fair play. My base case is that the gas gets built rather than an outcome
where margins get tight enough that we have regular blackouts.
In some ways your analysis is generous by not including load growth and other stochastic uncertainties- actual raw energy needs would actually hit the CF limit. If it’s just for peaking then new gas plants won’t even close imo.
I should clarify one thing. We upwardly adjusted hourly demand based on EPA’s load growth forecast but applied this to the historical hourly load shape. We upwardly adjusted the wind and solar capacity factors to meet EPA’s assumptions, too, which is another way we sought to give the agency the benefit of the doubt.
Isaac, the EPA has shown a complete environmental bias, at least since Gina McCarthy and her Clean Power Plan. Even today, Janet McCabe remains second in command. As I have been lobbying on Wash DC since 2002, I have watched the EPA transform itself into semi-secret and intergovernmental lobbyists themselves. Then, there is this arrogance of theirs and their political maneuvering.
Even DOE says we can keep the 300 remaining coal plants working for the next 100 years BUT we should convert them to burn Uranium instead of coal. Trivial to do. JFK's team had it all figured out but we never upgraded to the Apollo Era nuclear tech. Can't do it with a wet reactor, like a light water reactor. It has water touching the fuel, which means an accidental steam explosion could happen, and so it needs a containment building... (which doesn't even work as demonstrated demolished at Fukushima Daiichi.)
But the MSR or other high temp advanced reactors are much smaller and hot enough to run the tubines in a coal plant. Keep labor and utility execs happy. Don't build a new grid.
See TerraPraxis for details on coal to nuclear conversions.
Unfortunately China is in the lead and has already started coal to nuclear conversion, and MSR reactors are operating.
I believe that the EPA-by extension the government-had taken the reliability factor into account. The reason is because the undermining of the electrical grid-even though grid stability technically does not fall under the EPA, it does fall under cost which all regulations must account for-will actually allow for greater power garbing by federal agency by making the grid less reliable. Look at the DOE land grab to hasten renewable transmission projects. If you were to look at the map, you will fine the a large swaths of targeted land is in Red farming & Oil producing states. The regulation takes half of OK, with less recourse and completely usurp the states.
Hmmm... 60+ years ago the advertisements for Commonwealth Edison in Illinois proclaimed "Too Cheap to Meter" for electricity fed into the Grid from the nuclear reactors being brought on line. I was born in Illinois, lived there for most of the first 67 years of my life until it was impossible to find full-time employment after the company I'd worked for for 15 years failed after the Recession of 2008.
I recall our ComEd electric bill was roughly $80 - 90 avg. / month for the 1,400 square foot home we lived in.
So we moved to Wisconsin.
Xcel is our electricity provider. 1,600 sq. ft. home's monthly bills are half again what less KwH cost us in Illinois.
Not that I want to relocate! LIfestyle is less stressful here, I can talk to my neighbors here.
Genoa plant's history. Windmills seem to be growing more common down in the SW regions near Platteville and Dodgeville. But the wind doesn't blow all the time so those turbines are often idle or throttled down when the wind blows too hard.
Acres are being covered with solar panels (I wonder what the effect of the 1/2" hail we just experienced here might have had on those nearby?) but only work when A) the sun is shining and B) when they're free of snow and dirt. Xcel wants a subscription for us to take advantage of the purported cost benefit of solar-powered electricity they feed into the grid, for an additional $25-30 / month over the cost per KwH used.
Some of my neighbors drive hybrid vehicles, others prefer full electric. Are those drivers paying a fair price for the connection that gives them the freedom to avoid ICE-vehicle transport? Paying registration fees that offset the infrastructure wear and tear on the roads we all drive upon that's caused by their heavier vehicles?
I recall a major expansion of the power plant near Racine a few years ago. Vast trackage laid down to accommodate the trains hauling coal to power the generation of juice to feed the SE corner of WI. What was the ratepayers' share of the costs for that overhaul? Is that plant still in operation? Had to be state-of-the-art as it took a couple of years' work to complete. Has that plant been closes because coal is no longer a viable source of electrical generation?
Natural gas has become the conversion fuel of choice when coal plants are 'reconfigured'. There are ample reserves in the US to provide energy for decades yet liquified natural gas is being exported to quench the demands of countries outside our borders. And it generates far fewer levels of CO2 besides, so why are we selling it overseas instead of keeping it here in the US to power our economy?
It's time to disband the EPA. It's outlived it's otherwise dubious value since it's inception. We need to ensure a reliable and economical supply-side for generating electricity here in the USA.
Everybody in Washington, including you, is on the same side: oil and gas. The EPA policy of targeting coal plants is to replace them with methane. Nuclear power has always been the only power source that oil and gas allowed. This idea of a small nuclear plant in every city and town is a very bad idea. Water power (running)like Norway is the answer.
If hydro was going to work everywhere we’d already be doing it
You have brought up hydro as your ideal electricity solution on past Energy Bad Boy posts. I suspect there is very little if anything that could be said that would convince you that that hydro is not a broadly workable solution in the United States. Others not familiar with hydro may be more open to arguments to the contrary.
The continental United States has three separate physical electric grids, the Eastern Interconnect, the Western Interconnect, and the Texas Interconnect. Electric generators within each of the three interconnects operate synchronously (AC current). The interconnects have a few small DC circuits that allow very small amounts of electricity to flow between the interconnects, but for all practical purposes, they are islands. Electricity produced in New York, Wisconsin, or Florida (for example) is not available to California. Electricity will never flow between these interconnects without major changes to all three physical grids.
Each of the interconnects is further divided into sub grids that are responsible for generating and delivering power to their local constituents. These sub grids are things like Midwest System Interconnect (MISO), ISO New England, PJM, Southwest Power Pool, etc. Power produced within one of these sub grids can be exported (or imported) by/to other ISO/RTOs or non-ISO/RTOs within the same physical grid. Imports and exports generally represent small amount of electricity as the ISO/RTOs are largely responsible for making their own power. In the case of Minnesota, where I live, we are part of MISO. MISO has 15 states that are either wholly or partly part of MISO. Minnesota is completely within MISO, as is a tiny tiny piece of Texas.
When you go to the MISO’s web site ( https://www.misoenergy.org/ ) you will see that hydro generation is lumped in with “Other”, where other includes Reservoir Hydro, Pumped Storage Hydro, Diesel, Demand Response Resources, External Asynchronous Resources and a varied assortment of solid waste, garbage and wood pulp burners. The total generation for “Other” is 1.9%, with Hydro being tiny. States such as Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, and North Dakota, which are primarily within MISO produce no hydro. States such as Louisiana, Michigan, and Minnesota create about 1% of their electricity from hydro. Only Arkansas has any substantial Hydro at 7%
(See: https://www.hydro.org/map/hydro/existing-hydropower/ ).
To go from1% or less hydro within MISO to any substantial amount of hydro, would probably be impossible. What you are unknowingly proposing is that MISO get most of its electricity via imports from other RTOs within the Easter Interconnect. That is not going to happen.
There are three primary types of hydro with different characteristics:
Traditional Dams with Reservoirs
Reservoir dams are generally large and can operate to some degree as either an ongoing electricity source, or a battery. If the reservoir behind the dam continuously gets enough water from rain and snow melt, and if there are no other considerations (which there always are), then it would be possible to produce some amount of electricity continuously. The dam would look like a traditional power plant. Most likely, some of the electricity would be produced periodically based upon electricity demand and the amount of water available for power generation behind the dam. In this case, the dam would look more like a battery. The amount of water behind the dam is the battery size. If you drain the reservoir, the battery is dead.
Pumped Hydro
Pumped hydro involves two pools of water. A pool of water such as a lake at a lower elevation, and a pool of water at a higher elevation. Water is pumped from the lower elevation to the upper elevation. That takes electricity. Most pumped hydro will be power negative meaning it takes more power to pump the water to the higher elevation than you get back from releasing the water to the lower elevation. Pumped hydro is a battery. The amount of water pumped to the top reservoir is the size of the battery.
Run-of-the-River Hydro (ROR)
ROR hydro does not backup water like dams but rather depends upon a constant somewhat natural flow of water through the hydro facility. It cannot be considered firm power as it depends upon the uncontrolled flow of water down a particular river. The level of water in individual rivers is, as you might guess, is affected by changing weather and long-term climate. ROR is best sited in locations where the flow of water is constant vs. sites that have periods of time with low flow and periods of time with high flow. This is because sites that are designed to handle low flow are not able to easily handle times with much higher flow.
The most commonly understand hydro in the U.S. are dams. The following data comes from this site: USA Facts How many dams does America have?
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-dams-does-america-have/
It says the less 3% of the nation’s dams are used for hydro power. According to this site dams are used for a variety of reasons.
Recreation: 29,977
Flood Risk Reduction: 15,276
Other: 10,232
Fire Protection, Stock, or Small Fishpond: 10,157
Irrigation: 7,602
Water Supply: 5,151
Fish and Wildlife Pond: 3,281
Hydroelectric: 2,133
Approximately 65% of the dams are privately owned, 31% are owned by US governments at different levels and only 4% belong to public utility companies and tribal governments.
There are several problems with the solution you propose to make significantly more use of water in the U.S. for electricity production. Many of the best sites for power dams are already in use. We don’t have another Colorado river system just waiting for a dam. Most existing dams are for other, often conflicting, purposes. Many of the dams are too small to be of practical use for hydroelectricity. Would it make sense to try and put a hydro facility at a fishpond? We may have more “water resources” than Norway, but that does not mean they are suitable for hydro dams.
Construction of water dams may affect the migration and movement of aquatic organisms, hinder their reproduction, and in some extreme cases, drive some species to become extinct. Also, as most of the hydroelectric projects are physically large in size and will result in the flooding of massive areas within a river valley. That land has other possible uses and may be privately owned. Repeated flooding and drying of plant material can also produce methane which is a greenhouse gas.
Assuming we had sufficient excess energy to more broadly deploy pumped storage hydro, how many sites, blue sky, would even be possible? ( https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81277.pdf ). This pro-hydro study identified 6,586,156 possible lower reservoirs and 2,150,184 possible upper reservoirs within the continental U.S. Seems large. They then exclude sites for a variety of reasons including wetland protection, urban areas, critical animal habitat, etc. and determined the number of possible sites to be 11,769. This is a 99% reduction (The upper reservoir is the limiting factor.) These sites of course have other uses and flooding large amounts of land to produce a water battery, is not likely to happen without significant local opposition. The real number will be much less.
Lastly, the United States is not Norway. Norway gets 98% of its energy from renewable resources, and most of that (92%) is from hydro. The U.S. gets about 6% of its electricity from hydro. We are not going to become Norway. Norway has steep valleys and rivers in abundance and heavy concentrated rainfall in the west of the country leading to high levels of running water in rivers and waterfalls, it would be harder to design a country of such size with a greater hydro capacity. Your flawed thinking that because Norway can depend on hydro, we can depend on hydro, could be extended to solar in the United States. Because Arizona is a great place for solar, northern Maine should be a great place for solar. The conditions are different, and the results will not be the same.
Hydro has its own set of problems the most obvious of which is, there are only so many rivers to dam. It is unrealistic to assume hydro can be a substantial part of the energy mix for a broad cross section of the country. In terms of oil and gas being necessary along with nuclear, it's the only tenable way to address the rapidly growing demand for electric. Spinning windmills and miles of solar panel wouldn't address the needs of yesterday's grid. The rapidly expanding current need makes renewables a poor quality joke- massive data warehouses (I live an hour from the ones in northern VA that have exploded into reality in the last 5+ years) that will continue popping up, electric car chargers, government demanded heat pumps and all electric appliances will destroy the pretend world that is being created by ideologues and frightened bureaucrats. It's all a game of Wack a Mole with the moles breeding every time you hit one. This is to say nothing of the ecological warfare of vastly expanded mining of lithium, cobalt, rubidium, lutecium, selenium, tellurium, gallium, and on and on for photovoltaics and batteries. Our world is going to fall apart because greens want to power it with hope and swagger.
The biggest industrial accidents in history have been hydro.
California might have lost 200,000 people recently when we lucked out and the Oroville dam didn't break-- but as an engineer I count wrong but lucky as failure. Ukraine is suffering huge losses due to a dam attack. And we all hope those rumors of Tofu Cement in China aren't true..... Nuclear cannot plausibly kill anywhere near as many people as hydro or coal. Coal plants kill 100/year on purpose, when they are operating nominally, in the west. That's murder. When Chernobyl killed somewhere between 60 and 19,000 people... that was an accident. If Chernobyl was instead built as coal plant making the same energy - it would have killed at least 5 times more people than the nuclear plant with the worst accident ever.
We are talking about the build up of our negative field to a point we will end life on earth. Actually, Boeck forecasted 2026, and we now have for the first time ever on earth in this 21 century, those ominous red sprites. I am talking running water batteries like Switzerland, not dams. Norway mines oil, but it runs its country 96 percent on water.
https://www.dw.com/en/swiss-water-battery-boosts-europes-energy-storage-plans/a-63923662