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lsgv's avatar

What level of depletion of the water reservoirs do the energy storage numbers assume? And what would be the rate of refill? Isn’t the average seasonal refill rate a more realistic measure of the true available energy storage capacity?

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Douglas R McLain's avatar

Dams have huge environmental impacts: flooding large areas of valuable land, blocking sediment flows and fish migrations, water losses by evaporation and possible catastrophic failure. So we are removing dams, rather than building more of them.

https://www.americanrivers.org/2023/02/dam-removals-continue-across-the-u-s-in-2022/

https://youtu.be/laTIbNVDQN8?si=fdNjasywGTmA0Ap6

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

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