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Will melting glaciers provide hydropower in the future?



Global warming is usually remembered in a negative context. Perhaps this is not entirely true. It is believed that hydropower from the process of melting glaciers may even benefit.

According to the authors of an article recently published in the journal Nature , due to global warming that causes widespread glacier retreat, a unique opportunity may arise for the future development of hydropower.

The authors, together with ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL, investigated the hydropower potential for storing and using water in areas that will become ice-free in the near future during this century. For the approximately 185,000 sites currently covered in ice, they predict the potential for an increase in the reservoir volume and its energy generation potential.

Using a climate-based model of glacier evolution and topographic analysis, scientists estimated the theoretical maximum total reserve and hydropower potential at 875 ± 260 km3 and 1355 ± 515 terawatt hours per year.

Of course, the entire volume of this energy, according to the head of the research team Daniel Farinotti, will not be available for various reasons, but in general a part of this energy can be used.

The first-order suitability assessment, which takes into account environmental, technical and economic factors, reveals about 40% of this potential (355 ± 105 km3 and 533 ± 200 terawatt-hours per year) as suitable for implementation. According to the authors, this corresponds to approximately 13% of the current hydropower production worldwide. Based on the scenario of average climate warming, by 2050, about three quarters of the potential storage can become free from ice, and be ready for use.

And by 2050, three quarters of the potential storage capacity will be free of ice, and the storage capacity will be enough to keep about half of the annual runoff leaving the study areas. Although local impacts need to be assessed on a case-by-case basis, the results show that glacial basins can make an important contribution to national energy supplies in several countries, especially in highland Asia.

Among the countries with the greatest potential is Tajikistan, where the calculated hydropower potential can account for up to 80% of current electricity consumption, Chile (40%) and Pakistan (35%). In Canada, Iceland, Bolivia and Norway, the potential is between 10% and 25% of their current electricity consumption. For Switzerland, the study shows a potential of 10%.



View of the dams modeled in the study.



In addition to creating dams in some places where glaciers are located, a variant similar to the Norwegian one is possible, where meltwater is directed through underground tunnels to electric generators.



The study managed to map 1000 of the best facilities for placing glacial hydropower plants.

The effect of melting glaciers will have consequences for a number of conventional hydropower plants, in the form of an increase in power generation.

In mountainous regions this potential can be used only by 30%, and the rest will inevitably have to be diverted through spillways. In order to make full use of the increased flow rates, it is necessary to increase both the installed capacity of the turbine and the tank at existing hydropower plants.

Despite forecasts of an increase in hydropower capacity, an increase in water flow will be temporary. It is estimated that melting ice will lead to a plateau by 2030 and will remain constant until 2080. By 2080, the volume of glaciers will decrease so much that flows begin to decrease.

Measures to find a "middle ground" for the use of additional energy can be different. The simplest solution is to expand reservoirs and improve dams of hydroelectric power stations, and the most difficult, but more promising is to develop technologies for monitoring and controlling the state of glaciers.

Such a technology is currently called Hydronic Power.
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PS Here's an idea that will hit ecologists: using the heat generated by atomic energy to melt glaciers and using the water to produce electricity. This was proposed by an engineer from Zurich, Adolf Weber, who proposed the construction of just such a hydroelectric power station in the Jungfrau region in the heart of the Swiss Alps.

An absurd idea? Of course. But this did not prevent the Swiss government from transferring the project for study to the relevant departments and institutions. In fact, the discussion took place in 1945. Fascinated by the amount of energy released by atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, physicists and engineers sought to find peaceful uses of nuclear energy, as historian Guido Koller recalls. At the end of the consultation process, the proposal to use nuclear energy for hydropower was considered "impractical," writes Koller.

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