This is the fifth in a series of posts about how system-scale perspectives are vital to the planning and development of sustainable power systems, including hydropower.
Initial posts focused on risks associated with hydropower development and how system-scale planning of power systems, and of hydropower within those systems, can achieve better outcomes for communities and river ecosystems. Although improved environmental and social outcomes are crucial for achieving sustainability goals, such improvements will not necessarily drive the actions of those decision makers who have the most influence on which projects get built, including developers and investors, the focus of the previous post.
This post focuses on another key set of decision makers, government agencies – including those who plan and license energy as well as those who manage and regulate other resources, such as water quality and fisheries.
Ensuring that power systems are expanded and maintained to provide reliable electricity service capable of meeting demand over time is a primary objective for governments. However, governments have a range of other objectives, including the management and protection of natural resources, such as water and fisheries, and ensuring the rights and livelihoods of communities, including indigenous communities.
I was the lead author on a research paper published last year that examined how, compared to project-by-project decision making and development, system planning can deliver energy while promoting better environmental and social outcomes. We hypothesized that because system planning is more effective at meeting multiple objectives, it should also improve outcomes for governments that have responsibility for regulating diverse resources and providing a broad range of benefits
In the paper, we explored how power system planning that fully integrates objectives for rivers and/or other important social and environmental resources can provide direct benefits to governments by avoiding or minimizing conflicts.
The reduction of risk of conflict has two primary benefits for governments.
· First, reducing the risk of conflict over projects reduces the likelihood of delays, cost over-runs and cancellations, which avoids unexpected impacts to the power system which could negatively affect cost and system reliability.
· Second, a planning approach that seeks to balance energy objectives with other objectives can help identify options that satisfy multiple public policy goals.
To explore these two potential sources of benefit, we modeled options for power system development in Uganda, a country with an electrification rate of 26% and where hydropower provides 90% of installed capacity. The government’s projections for meeting power demand in 2045 include an increase in total grid capacity of approximately five times, with multiple large hydropower dams among the planned capacity additions.
Several of the potential hydropower dams are within national parks. Not only could dam development negatively impact wildlife and ecosystems, tourism represents an important part of Uganda’s economy, contributing approximately 8% of Gross Domestic Product and 7% of employment, with much of that tourism driven by national parks and wildlife viewing.
In 2019 the Ugandan government announced feasibility studies for a 360-MW hydropower dam on the Nile River within Murchison Falls National Park, the most visited national park in Uganda. The dam would be on Uhuru Falls and approximately 500 m from the popular tourist site of Murchison Falls.
The proposal triggered objections from conservation organizations and disagreement within the government; the approval to pursue feasibility studies has been given, then rescinded and then restarted. It is not clear whether the dam will move forward, but the proposals have highlighted that several of Uganda’s options for new hydropower come from dams within national parks, thus setting up a conflict between the governments’ objectives for power development and for protecting national parks and their value for wildlife and tourism.
To identify potential solutions for resolving this conflict, we used a power system model to compare two power system development scenarios up to 2045:
1) the “least-cost” scenario, in which the model sought to build a future low-carbon power system with the lowest cost; in this scenario, the model could choose to include new hydropower projects within national parks; and
2) a low-carbon scenario that was also low conflict because it avoided any new dams in national parks.
The least-cost scenario featured an expansion of hydropower capacity in Uganda from 1.5 GW today to 2.1 GW by 2045 and the model selected two new hydropower dams located within national parks.
In the low-conflict scenario, greater investment in solar PV and storage substituted for the 2 dams that were selected in the least-cost scenario. Both scenarios were very low in terms of carbon intensity (<0.04 kgCO2/MWh) and emissions per capita (0.01 kgCO2/ person).
Importantly, system costs for the two scenarios were nearly identical, indicating that Uganda could build a low-carbon power system by 2045 that avoids further damming within national parks for no additional cost to its people or economy. Although this was a modeling exercise, it suggests that the Ugandan government can likely avoid trading off the integrity of its national parks in order to deliver power to its people. This type of strategic planning offers the government the opportunity to identify options that avoid conflicts and perform well for multiple objectives (e.g., power expansion, climate objectives, tourism).
In addition to providing multiple benefits, a system planning approach can reduce the type of conflicts that could interfere with power system expansion through delays, cost overruns and cancellations. In the past decade, several high-profile projects have been suspended or cancelled, including Myitsone in Myanmar (6 GW; suspended after US$800 million had been invested), HidroAysén in Chile (2.75 GW; US$320 million invested), and São Luiz do Tapajós in Brazil (8 GW, US$150 million invested). For all of these, social and environmental conflicts were the primary drivers of cancellation. These kind of unexpected cancellations can impose a range of costs on developers and investors – but also on governments and economies, including through disruptions and delays for meeting power demands.
Overall, governments have much to gain by power system planning that seeks low-conflict options, including increased ability to achieve multiple objectives and reduced risk of delays and disruptions.
These past posts have explored how system planning for energy can benefit communities, ecosystems, investors, developers and governments. In the next and final post in the series, I’ll explore a range of mechanisms that can be used to implement system planning.
