Category: Drought_CN En_Ren_Hydropower_CN UTAH_CN WATER_CN

Water is flowing through two of three hydropower turbines in a blockish building at the base of Flaming Gorge Dam, so I can feel the floor buzzing — vibrations pulsating through my body — as Billy Elbrock leads me past the blue-and-yellow Westinghouse generators. The warehouse-like space is adorned with an American flag, and with the 1965 logo of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

Hundreds of feet below a remote forest near Hudson Bay, Serge Abergel inspected the spinning turbines at the heart of the biggest subterranean power plant in the world, a massive facility that converts the water of the La Grande River into a current of renewable electricity strong enough to power a midsize city.

NEWS THAT LAKE Powell, a reservoir on the border of Arizona and Utah, is slowly but surely drying up has spread far and wide. Behind the 1,320-megawatt Glen Canyon Dam and power station, Lake Powell plays an important role in providing power for some 3 million customers in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.

Ocean boosters like to compare the kinetic energy stored in the sea to a ginormous oil reserve that’s never going to run dry. It doesn’t matter if the sun shines or the wind blows. The tides turn. You can set your watch to them.

During Climate Week, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced completion of a $460 million modernization and life extension effort at the New York Power Authority’s Lewiston Pump Generating Plant, and the digitization of the first of 13 hydropower turbines at the Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant.

A major California hydroelectric power plant could soon stop generating power amid worsening drought conditions. According to state water officials, the Edward Hyatt Powerplant at Lake Oroville could go offline as soon as August or September — a time frame that would coincide with a feared power crunch this summer. The plant, which opened in the late 1960s, has never been forced offline by low lake levels before.

Officials are preparing for the likelihood that California’s record breaking drought will come for its renewable energy stores. The West Coast state, which has been weathering wildfires, 126-year rainfall lows, and a historic heat dome, announced on Friday that it is preparing for a Butte County reservoir that supplies hydropower to dry up later this summer.

The Humboldt River Field Office has published the final Environmental Assessment (EA) for the Baltazor Geothermal Development Project. The project will be located approximately seven miles southwest of Denio near Baltazor Hot Springs next to NV State Highway 140, in Humboldt County, Nevada.

NORRLAND IS THE largest of Sweden’s three historical “lands”. It spans the top half of the country and is sparsely populated, the more so the farther north you go. The few people who live there have long relied for work on mining, the army and forestry. Most of Sweden’s industry is far to the south. But Norrland abounds in hydropower. Power that is cheap and—crucially—green, along with bargain land and proximity to iron ore, is sparking an improbable industrial revolution, based on hydrogen, “green” steel and batteries.

Conservationists in California and across the West are deeply skeptical of hydropower, and it’s not hard to see why. There’s a long history of government agencies damming spectacular canyons, choking off rivers, obliterating fish populations and cutting off access to Indigenous peoples. It’s a history detailed in books such as “Cadillac Desert,” and experienced by anyone who has spent time fishing, kayaking or swimming in the region’s reshaped waterways, or hiking alongside them.