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Hydropower – A Green Energy? Tropical Reservoirs and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Gunkel, Günter

10.1002/clen.200900062.abs

Reservoirs are man‐made lakes that severely impact on river ecosystems, and in addition, the new lake ecosystem can be damaged by several processes. Thus, the benefits of a reservoir, including energy production and flood control, must be measured against their impact on nature. New investigations point out that shallow and tropical reservoirs have high emission rates of the greenhouse gases CO₂ and CH₄. The methane emissions contribute strongly to climate change because CH₄ has a 25 times higher global warming potential than CO₂. The pathways for its production include ebullition, diffuse emission via the water‐air interface, and degassing in turbines and downstream of the reservoir in the spillway and the initial river stretch. Greenhouse gas emissions are promoted by a eutrophic state of the reservoir, and, with higher trophic levels, anaerobic conditions occur with the emission of CH₄. This means that a qualitative and quantitative jump in greenhouse gas emissions takes place. Available data from Petit Saut, French Guinea, provides a first quantification of these pathways. A simple evaluation of the global warming potential of a reservoir can be undertaken using the energy density, the ratio of the reservoir surface and the hydropower capacity; this parameter is mainly determined by the reservoir's morphometry but not by the hydropower capacity. Energy densities of some reservoirs are given and it is clearly seen that some reservoirs have a global warming potential higher than that of coal use for energy production.