Hydroelectric energy companies in certain regions around the world have been struggling more and more over the past few decades. Changing climates have caused erstwhile predictable precipitation and runoff patterns in regions across the globe to change; some wet regions have become drier, and some dry regions have become wetter.
Although some still reject the reality of climate change, scientists have continued to discover more and more evidence of how and why it is causing increasingly violent and unpredictable weather all over the world. In 2017, scientists aboard the RRS Sir David Attenborough discovered that Antarctic winds - which have been getting consistently stronger for decades - have been creating stronger warm water currents in the South Atlantic, leading to greater deep-sea water turbulence in the Antarctic. As deep-sea turbulence increases, warm water currents have been mixing with cold water currents in greater quantities than before, effectively warming Antarctic waters and causing sea levels to rise. This also affects how hot and cold air fills the atmosphere, causing droughts, cold snaps (depending on the season), and more violent storms on the surface. The results of the study were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in June of 2019.
Volatile weather patterns have been having a dramatic influence on regional climates all over the world, and it appears to be getting worse. In their 2017 report, the United States Department of Energy (DOE) wrote that air temperatures in all areas of the U.S. are expected to continue increasing over the next 20 years. This will cause snow to melt earlier than it consistently has in the past, causing shifted seasonal patterns that will change not only how much it rains, but also how much water naturally runs into lakes, rivers, and oceans; that’s bad news for hydroelectric plants, which depend on predictable precipitation patterns to generate electricity. In 2016, the Spanish utility company Iberdrola SA was able to generate record-high levels of electricity. In 2017, their productivity fell 57 percent due to weak rainfall. In Hamburg, Germany, Aquila Capital, which manages $9.4 billion for institutional investors, now commissions independent studies before investing in new dams to see if the precipitation patterns are expected to change in that region, due to prior investments that have gone badly.
It’s been happening in both hemispheres as well. In 2015, Brazil experienced the worst drought in its history, causing electricity production from hydroelectric sources - which provide 80 percent of the nation’s power - to plummet, while energy demand went up as the heat drew people to seek solace in their air conditioning units. The country ended up having to import energy from Argentina and burn more fossil fuels than usual to compensate. Similar problems have been occurring in sub-Saharan Africa, too - the governments of Zimbabwe and Zambia announced in June that they had hired the U.S.-based General Electric Company and the Chinese Power Construction Corporation to build a new $4 billion dam on the Zambezi river further upstream than existing dams, because the river has been flowing at lower and lower levels for years, causing the two countries a great deal of strain while attempting to keep up with the energy demand of their population. Currently, the river is at its lowest levels in 50 years due to consistently decreasing levels of rainfall, causing droughts and massive blackouts.
This problem has proven to be a double-edged sword. Changing precipitation patterns don’t just mean less rainfall in some places; they also mean more rainfall in others. The state of California, a longtime proponent for all types of renewable energy innovation and legislation, has experienced wildly inconsistent waterflow for years. In 2017, California experienced such a wet Winter that the Oroville Dam - which sits Northeast of San Francisco - sustained a terminal water pressure increase, causing massive floods that forced almost 200,000 people to evacuate their homes. Quebec, which relies on hydroelectricity for 36 percent of its power, has also seen rising annual precipitation rates over the past few years - in 2017, thousands of homes in the greater Montreal area flooded when water levels in nearby rivers and lakes exceeded safe thresholds. In April 2019 the city of Beauceville flooded when ice jams - which occur when rapidly rising and falling temperatures cause chunks of ice to form on the surface of rivers and lakes - formed icy “dams” that eventually burst. The resulting rising water levels on the St. Lawrence Seaway cost damage to both nearby and upstream residential areas and delays in shipping routes for nearby ports, which some estimate cost the Quebecer economy up to $1 billion.
(Originally published in Electrical Apparatus Magazine. Print only.)