Natel Energy CEO Gia Schneider discusses the environmental impact of hydropower dams and why small dams can cause as much ecological harm as large dams if poorly designed.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Schneider: A Snow-Free Sierra Nevada May Be Only a Decade Away
“And I think that the urgency around those reservoirs has increased as some of the science has become more clear that the prospect of a snow-free Sierra is something that unfortunately is probably not hundreds of years away, but is, you know, something again th…”
Insight
Schneider: Scaling hydro requires shifting from megaprojects to distributed projects
“The way in which we're going to increase capacity is, we firmly believe, A shift that moves away from just building megaprojects, and instead looks at building projects that are more distributed in nature, and, which means smaller by moving to smaller projects…”
Assertion Supported
Schneider: Natel's hydro turbine blades achieve over 99% fish safety
“And those two things basically, you know, create a turbine blade that has now been shown many times over to be greater than 99% safe for fish passage.”
Assertion Partly supported
Schneider: Hydro and gas dispatch in parallel across US power markets
“If you looked last summer in the United States, in every power market where you have hydro and you've, you pulled up the dispatch curve, the daily dispatch curve of assets in a particular ISO, what you'd see is if you have hydro and you have gas, Hydro and gas…”
Assertion Contradicted
Schneider: Aswan Dam Lost Hydropower Productivity Due to Rapid Silt Buildup
“In the Aswan example, for example, there's so much silt moving in the river, that, that, you know, a side effect of that dam is that it rapidly, unfortunately, became a lot less productive as a hydropower asset because it filled up with silt, and there wasn't …”
Opinion
Schneider: High costs restrict hydrokinetic power to niche applications
“What we've generally seen is that hydrokinetic is, makes sense in very certain specific applications, but it's been hard to get costs to the point where it's as broadly applicable as we'd love it to be.”