The Oil Drum: Canada

I'll let you and Pitt duke it out over the global prospects of hydro, and you and Nick can hash out the potential of wind while you're at it. For now I'm content to split the difference and disappoint both sides.

Significant hydro development may be confined to China and Canada, but I'd bet South America and Russia will put on a push as well. Regarding wind and solar, ¿Quién sabe?

All dams should be taken down now.

Salmon Advocates Say Kill Dams, Not Sea Lions* - The NewStandard
The Commission could not kill more than one percent of the sea lion population. ... with mortality rates on some rivers reaching 92 percent, according to ...
newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/4688

What's being proposed here is human feed lots
and no other creature is necessary.

Thee Yangtze, Colorado and the Nile are not making it
to the sea.

We don't have five years. Bakhtiari's WOCAP Model
is the operative one.

I note that financing these wonderous projects
is verboten here.

Reason:

We have no idea how much debt is in the World now.

Since 07/17/07 the process has begun to find out.

With the DJIA at less than 12 750 hedge funds will be carried
out feet first.

From CalculatedRisk:

That’s actually why I find those emails quoted in the indictment to be so explosive. I have spent a lot of years learning to decipher coded language about regulatory-not-exactly-improprieties-but-perhaps-areas-of-concern and other corporate-speak ways of putting it that I’m utterly blown away by the unvarnished language being used here. You just don’t accuse a major account like WaMu of out-and-out violation of safety and soundness regulation unless the conduct is egregious in the extreme, or you think it is clear that you are being lined up for bagholder duty, or both. It sure sounds to me like WaMu wanted to tell eAppraiseIT what to do, while having eAppraiseIT do the scut work plus the small matter of making all the relevant warranties in the utterly certain event it backfired. Mortgage market participants can be so amazingly short-sighted sometimes it’s hard to believe, but somebody at eAppraiseIT seems to have figured out who the sucker at the table was. No doubt they wouldn’t be on the receiving end of a civil suit from Mr. Cuomo if someone higher-up had listened to whatever internal employee called bull on this one.

Why didn’t they listen? Why doesn’t any corporation ever listen? Because the WaMu account is huge, and nobody wants to stop a gravy train. The indictment also includes snippets of emails suggesting that WaMu dangled other business relationships outside the appraisal management function in front of First American if it rolled over. Which is more or less exactly what lenders to do appraisers all the time: offer repeat business if they play ball, or being kicked off the team if they don’t.

...These days appraisers have the same pressures to play ball and absolutely none of the protections of being employees. I wonder if we haven’t gotten to that point where someone with nothing left to lose has nothing left to lose. The lenders are asking appraisers to take personal liability for inflated appraisals, while offering them no salary (protection from falling volume cycles), no benefits, no institutional legal or compliance support. Even the per-deal fee we pay has become typically paid only out of closing proceeds. (We used to pay for the appraisals up front out of an application fee, so the appraiser got paid even if the loan didn’t close. These days the appraiser often never gets paid if the loan doesn’t close because the broker has nothing to pay it with.) And guess who is the target of the Cuomo indictment? Not the lender doing the bullying. At some point these appraisers have to realize that they don’t lose much by going state’s evidence and providing the other half of those email chains. And that would mean a Very Bad No Good Rotten Day for everybody."

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2007/11/whats-wrong-with-approved-app...

Nobody wants to stop the gravy train, but too many people
are noting that the bridge ahead has been taken out
and not only are the brakes not being applied but the engineers are trying to figure out how to accelerate
the train further.

Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens

I still think it is a push, but thanks for your links. The problems we have had recently in filling reservoirs to generating capacity weighs heavy, and I think this will get progressively worse with climate change. Properly sizing a watershed for hydroelectric potential and reservoir size requires decades of flow regimes, and I think future variability will make this a tough call.

Your Canadian link states that hydro is a consequence of climate and topography, and goes on "Practically all hydroelectric-power sites in Canada that are reasonably close to load centres have been developed". The remaining potential is the far north, developed at great economic and environmental cost. I don't believe many such schemes, like the idea of reversing the flow of Quebec watersheds some years past, will make it in the future.

I don't wish to dwell on the environmental costs of large hydro, but they are considerable. The costs of China's Three Gorges is still being tabulated, and in the northwest, I wonder how long we will continue trucking or barging smolts to the ocean. (There are some new developments and ideas for free swimming passage)

Another issue inadequately addressed is reservoir silting. I am a guarded proponent of hydro, including microhydro where I see many small drops in the bucket, but skeptical in it's ability to supply significant postpeak energy.