alt Hacker NewsI’m happy to be wrong about this globally, but in my neck of the woods the readily exploited hydro resources are already exploited to 90% of their capacity and have been for 100 years. Hydro is in many ways the ultimate renewable energy, but that’s been true since electrification and we’ve been using it as part of the energy mix since then. I’d love to be wrong but my understanding is that there isn’t a huge amount of untapped new hydro capacity available without having severe impacts on ecosystems
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In the last decade or so hydro generation has grown about as much as solar and wind (they all basically grow about the same amount as global nuclear generation, hydro doubling and wind and solar growing exponentially from basically zero).
So it's not going to take off like solar but it's a big chunk of relatively clean electricity production and it's often basically a byproduct of managing water supplies. It also pairs really well with renewables as even without pumps it has a degree of flex and storage.
Hydro in Norway goes very well with windmills in Denmark.
Very simplified:
Wind blows mostly in Denmark during the day, so Norway stops hydro during the day and imports electricity from Denmark's windmills.
During night the wind is mostly still in Denmark so windmills don't produce much and Denmark imports from Norway's hydro.
In this way you can stretch the capacity from hydro using windmills even though Norway isn't a good place for windmills.