This Technical Guidance Note was primarily prepared as a contribution to the World Bank economic and sector work—mainstreaming environmental flow requirements into water resources investments and policy reforms jointly supported by the Environment Department and the Energy, Transport and Water Department. The technical note also forms a contribution to the Bank’s hydropower investments. The main objective of the note is to serve as a guidance document as opposed to a technical manual. It has been developed to assist World Bank staff and their clients to identify ways to better incorporate the benefits associated with environmental flow protection into hydropower dam projects.Most of the material in this note will be equally applicable to hydropower dams with either multiple objectives or a single objective, but the integration of environmental flow protection into projects with multiple objectives presents some special challenges. In addition, many issues covered in this note will be applicable to other types of water infrastructure projects.
We conduct a benefit-cost analysis of a relicensing agreement for two hydroelectric dams in Michigan. The agreement changed daily conditions from peaking to run-of-river flows. We consider three categories of costs and benefits: producer costs of adapting electricity production to the new time profile of hydroelectric output; benefits of reductions in air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions; and benefits of improved recreational fishing. The best estimates suggest that the aggregate benefits are more than twice as large as the producer costs. The conceptual and empirical methods provide a template for investigating the effects of an environmental constraint on hydroelectric dams.
A report submitted to the House Resources Committee, Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, and Oceans by the Office of Technology Assessment. The focus of this report is technologies for fish passage around hydropower generation facilities and protection against entrainment and turbine mortality.Emphasis is given to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)-licensed hydropower projects where fish protection is a subject of controversy and congressional interest due to the Federal Power Act (FPA) and the Electric Consumers Protection Act (ECPA). Thus institutional issues related to FERC-relicensing are also discussed. (Major points of controversy are highlighted in box 1-1.) Federal hydropower projects,especially in the Columbia River Basin, and irrigation water diversions in the Pacific Northwest and California are included to the extent that they provide information on fish passage technologies(see table 1-1). Many of the technologies discussed are applicable to other types of dams and water diversions. In fact, there are many more obstructions to fish passage that are not covered by FERC-licensing requirements, than are(approximately 76,000 dams versus 1,825 FERC-licensed facilities) (70).