Conference: How Hydro Can Get its Mojo Back

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Written by John Egan for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--At last week's HYDROVISION International 2022 conference in Denver, there was generalized agreement among speakers and attendees that hydropower has been the poor stepchild of renewable energy, shoved aside by newer and shinier renewable resources such as solar and wind.

"It's awfully hard to get energy regulators to visit a hydro facility that's been running for 30 to 40 years, compared to a ribbon-cutting for a new solar facility," said conference speaker Ian Clark, founder and chief executive of Dichotomy Power LLC (Ridgefield, Connecticut), which operates 19 hydro projects in the Northeastern U.S.

For hydro, winning its due in a decarbonizing world is unlikely to be fast or easy. But speakers at the conference offered a few suggestions about operational, technical and public relations steps the industry could take to come out of the shadows and gain a larger share of the decarbonized electricity mix.

"This is a fantastic time for the industry to put clean power on the grid, so people can electrify their lifestyles without putting more carbon into the atmosphere, Nicolle Butcher, chief operations officer at Ontario Power Generation (OPG) (Toronto, Ontario), told conference attendees Thursday morning. But she said the industry needs to better articulate the hydro value proposition. Industrial Info is tracking seven OPG projects, worth US$229.5 million. Subscribers to Industrial Info's Global Market intelligence (GMI) Power Project Database can click here for a list of detailed project reports.

In an interview at the conference, Butcher said the industry's credibility needs to be rebuilt. "Every greenfield project we have built was massively over-budget and late," she said. "We need to show we can deliver projects on time and on budget."

OPG is the provincially owned provider of about 50% of the electricity used in Ontario. It operates about 18,270 megawatts (MW) of electric generation, including 66 hydro stations with aggregate generating capacity of about 7,478 MW, she told attendees.

In her interview, she said she was not casting aspersions on the credibility of U.S. hydro operators.

There will be ample opportunity for OPG to rebuild its reputation in the coming decade, as it has scheduled about $2 billion in dam-safety upgrades, as well as another $2 billion in overhaul and refurbishment work. During her panel talk, Butcher acknowledged that performing those projects on time and on budget will be more challenging than usual, owing to a thinning of overhaul expertise and supply-chain challenges.

Another panelist at the HYDROVISION event, which was sponsored by Clarion Energy Limited (London, England), noted that the average wait-time for a new transformer had stretched to three years. Earlier reports from others in the industry said that wait-time averaged two years.

OPG's Butcher said another step the hydro industry needs to take is to embrace a broad perspective about hydro's role in the electricity mix. "We support nuclear, solar and wind," she said in an interview. "Hydro's part of the clean, dispatchable energy mix that will prevent blackouts when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow."

She said this need for energy diversity is one reason why OPG is partnering with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) (Knoxville, Tennessee) in developing a small modular nuclear generation.

Improved analytic tools demonstrating when and where hydro is a top-tier generation option is expected to be available soon from the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) (Golden, Colorado). The forthcoming analytic tool follows from a series of DOE reports released earlier this year under the title HydroWIRES.

Finally, there is the general public, who must be informed about how hydro is helping them realize their lifestyle. But rather than ramming a bunch of facts and figures down the public's throat, try going where they go and speaking about what interests them.

Speaking on a July 14 panel, Randall Stearnes, educational director of the Foundation for Water and Energy Education (Spokane, Washington), recalled a pre-COVID event his organization sponsored at T-Mobile Park, home field of the Seattle Mariners professional baseball team. The field's Jumbotron featured a video about how hydropower lit the field and cooked the hot dogs that people were eating. The group's information booth experienced high foot traffic during the game, and there was particularly high demand for pamphlets on how hydropower was supporting local fish restoration as well as local parks.

Speakers and attendees at the HYDROVISION event, which drew more than 1,700 attendees from 34 countries, also said progress was needed on other fronts, including how regional transmission organizations (RTOs) valued and priced hydropower. But hydropower representatives at the event were nothing if not optimistic: They knew they had a good story, and they were committed to telling it well.

Industrial Info Resources (IIR) is the world's leading provider of market intelligence across the upstream, midstream and downstream energy markets and all other major industrial markets. IIR's Global Market Intelligence Platform (GMI) supports our end-users across their core businesses, and helps them connect trends across multiple markets with access to real, qualified and validated project opportunities. Follow IIR on: LinkedIn.