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Review of environmental metrics used across multiple sectors and geographies to evaluate the effects of hydropower development

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Revisão de métricas ambientais usadas em vários setores e geografias para avaliar os efeitos do desenvolvimento de energia hidrelétrica


Introduction

The United States of America (U.S.) has a need for renewable and sustainable energy resources that can keep pace with increasing energy demands while minimizing adverse impacts to the environment and preserving quality of life for future generations [1], [2]. Hydropower is a traditional U.S. renewable energy resource with the potential to expand [3]. However, hydropower development licensing can be a laborious, time consuming, confusing and expensive process. The opportunity exists to improve the existing hydropower license and permit approval process by enacting changes designed to increase efficiency, affordability and transparency. Increasing hydropower production in a sustainable manner will require consideration of potential benefits and tradeoffs throughout the hydropower supply chain and life cycle. In addition to technological developments, it will be necessary to achieve greater understanding of when, where, and how to measure the environmental effects of hydropower in order to effectively and transparently handle competing demands for energy, water, and land resources [4].

Licensing of hydropower facilities by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in the U.S. is largely stakeholder-driven and can be challenging because this process relies on building consensus among various stakeholders of different expertise, technical lexicons, and values. Licenses are issued for 30–50 years [5] and require negotiations between the license applicant and stakeholders such as federal, state, tribal, and municipal governments, non-governmental organizations, and more to decide how to study project impacts, what the project impacts are, and how to mitigate them through protection, mitigation, and enhancement measures that will become part of the license [6]. Decisions about how a hydropower project impacts the environment are based on a broad suite of quantitative and qualitative environmental information including information about resident biota, water quality, and timing and magnitude of river flows.

Some metrics used to assess the environmental effects of hydropower may be preferred by a particular stakeholder group, and this can add complexity to achieving consensus during FERC licensing negotiations. A single source containing a diversity of metrics from across different literature sources with different perspectives and objectives may help hydropower stakeholders to identify more mutually agreeable metrics for assessing the environmental impacts of hydropower. For example, the International Hydropower Association (IHA) has created a Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol (HSAP) intended to promote and certify more sustainable hydropower projects [7]. HSAP offers a way to assess the performance of a hydropower project across more than 20 sustainability topics that include environmental, social, technical and economic aspects, and the protocol also includes several ‘cross-cutting issues’ (e.g., climate change, human rights) which feature in multiple topics. While U.S. and Canadian hydropower industries participated in the IHA HSAP development, the protocol was not meant to overlay existing hydropower processes in the U.S. and Canada, but instead to focus on countries without established environmental statutes and robust regulatory programs. Another approach to hydropower sustainability assessment is the Low Impact Hydropower Institute (LIHI): a non-profit U.S. organization whose mission is to create a defined standard for “low impact” and incentivize river ecosystem improvements through the creation of a certification program [8], [9]. LIHI certification involves addressing a series of goal statements associated with eight cultural and environmental impact criteria. Peer-reviewed scientific literature frequently contains studies assessing environmental impacts of hydropower, but because studies in peer-reviewed scientific journals are typically narrowly focused, the metrics used in these studies may be more discipline-specific and may not be represented in sustainability protocols. Some of these studies may be associated with FERC or other hydropower licensing investigations, so the metrics used in the peer-review literature may also be represented in license documentation. However, because studies in peer-review literature may be motivated by intellectual novelty, this source of literature might also provide a very different suite of environmental metrics.

In this paper, we describe a new database of hydropower-related environmental measurements recorded by researchers across multiple scientific disciplines, locations, sustainability certification processes, and licensing efforts. We present this aggregated information about previous efforts to increase transparency and enable the development of robust indicators of environmental sustainability for this renewable energy resource [10]. Specifically, we describe (1) the body of environmental metrics uncovered during a hydropower literature review conducted across several sectors, (2) the life cycle status and physical characteristics of the hydropower facilities from which the metrics originated, and (3) the worldwide geographic distribution of the hydropower facilities from which the metrics originated. Due to the large volume of literature related to hydropower sustainability, this study focuses on the physical and ecological aspects of the potential environmental effects of hydropower.

Section snippets

Materials and methods

Before starting our literature review, we established a data collection framework to capture important attributes about the environmental metrics (Section 2.1). We then collected environmental metrics from licensing documents, low-impact and sustainable certification documents, and recent peer-reviewed literature (as detailed in Section 2.2) and recorded attributes for each identified metric within a relational Microsoft Access database for further analysis. We used this process to gain a

Results

During our review of 117 documents, we discovered 3183 unique environmental metrics recorded during a variety of studies related to dams and hydropower projects. These metrics were related to 231 dams and study locations worldwide (Fig. 1) and were unique combinations of category, measurement type, lifecycle stage, and spatial scale. Several of the studies (i.e., points in Fig. 1) considered multiple small dams. Most of the study sites were in North America (121) and Europe (53), followed by

Discussion

Examination of the 3183 environmental metrics discovered by our literature review showed that they coalesced around 45 subcategories of environmental metrics and that most of these subcategories were represented by a variety of metric types, including simple measurements, statistics, and indicators (Table 10). We view this resulting list of environmental metrics subcategories (Table 10) as a potential envelope of environmental measurements that might be used to improve efficiency in evaluating

Conclusions

Stakeholders need transparent information about the patterns and commonalities among environmental metrics previously used to assess the environmental effects of hydropower development to inform their input into future regulatory decision-making processes that may involve trade-offs between conflicting development goals. More efficient and affordable consensus building may occur if hydropower stakeholders can have information about measurable, repeatable, and broadly understandable

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under the Water Power Technologies Office. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is managed by the UT-Battelle, LLC, for DOE under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725. Nicole Samu of ORNL created Fig. 3. Thank you to our DOE sponsors, our Environmental Metrics for Hydropower Mission and Science Advisory Boards, and Kearns & West for their feedback on the analyses described in this manuscript. Special thanks to Jeff Duda of the U.S.

References (133)

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