Greetings all,

With apologies for any cross postings, I wanted to share a stream of research 
that has been a long time in the making. We in the energy and electricity 
community of scholars often talk about wind and solar energy, and those of us 
in the energy and development community talk about the importance of biomass 
and cookstoves. However, as many of you know, hydropower is the world's biggest 
source of renewable electricity, by far, it even surpasses global generation 
from nuclear power. Hydropower is also expected to grow significantly in the 
coming decades, and many countries (Australia, China, Malaysia, the DRC) have 
announced or embarked on building mega-dams to meet increases in energy demand.

Yet, this pursuit of hydropower has its risks, and Goetz Walter, Kathleen 
Hancock, and I have been trying to more systematically expose and analyse them. 
 The most recent of these efforts is a quantitative analysis of how hydropower 
states perform on key metrics compared to other states, published this week in 
Review of International Political Economy.  An earlier paper with Kathleen was 
more qualitative, and published in International Studies Review, talked more 
about resource curse theory and small case studies. Citations for the two 
articles are here, and I am happy to share them by request (though the RIPE one 
is fully open access):


·         Hancock, K and BK Sovacool. "International Political Economy and 
Renewable Energy: Hydroelectric Power and the Resource Curse," International 
Studies Review 20(4) (December, 2018), pp. 615-632.

·         Sovacool, BK and G Walter. "Internationalizing the political economy 
of hydroelectricity: Security, development, and sustainability in hydropower 
states," Review of International Political Economy 26(1) (Winter, 2019), pp. 
49-79.

You can also see the press release for the most recent RIPE article below. 
However, we are only scratching the surface and would certainly welcome future 
research in this space.

With best wishes but also hopes that this will motivate many others to begin to 
examine hydropower too,

Benjamin

https://www.sussex.ac.uk/news/all?id=48423

No more Hoover dams: Hydropowered countries suffer higher levels of poverty, 
corruption and debt

[https://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/images/uploads/2019/04/10377.item.jpg]

Huge hydropower projects like the Hoover Dam in the US could become a relic of 
the past because of their huge financial and environmental costs

Countries relying on the world's biggest and most established source of 
renewable electricity have seen their poverty, corruption and debt levels rise 
and their economy slow at significantly greater rates than nations which use 
other energy resources over the last three decades, a major new study has found.

The study also found that hydropower states did not suffer from a hydroelectric 
resource curse and did not see an increase in internal conflict to any 
significant degree while carbon reduction benefits were realised only over time 
after the initial environmental impact of construction.

The financial benefits of major hydropower projects could also take decades to 
emerge, the study published today in The Review of International Political 
Economy<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2018.1511449> 
found.

The new study by the University of Sussex and the International School of 
Management in Germany compared the security, political governance, economic 
development and climate change performance of major hydropower states against 
oil-producing and all other countries using 30 years of World Bank data.

Lead author Professor Benjamin 
Sovacool<http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/373957>, Professor of Energy Policy 
at the Science Policy Research Unit<http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/> at the 
University of Sussex, said the era of the awe-inspiring mega hydropower 
projects such as the Hoover Dam in the US and The Three Gorges in China should 
be coming to an end in favour of smaller projects.

He added: "Even though hydropower might not bring immediate and 
all-encompassing benefits to a country, it is still a vital source of renewable 
energy."

In the most rigorous comparative study of its kind, researchers took a global 
approach that compared national portfolios of hydroelectric infrastructure 
where previous research has almost entirely focused on the impacts of 
individual dams or river basins. Additionally, whereas previous research tended 
to examine only hydropower states, this study compared hydropower countries 
with OPEC members and non-hydropower states.

The report's authors, Prof Sovacool and Dr Götz Walter, say the report should 
be food for thought for major institutions such as the World Bank, currently 
calling for substantial and global investment in hydropower as a means towards 
international development. They add it is a warning to the cheerleaders of 
major projects such as the Grand Inga Dam in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 
a $80 billion project costing twice the country's annual GDP, who promise 
speedy and far-reaching economic impact on a transformational scale.

The authors added that while hydroelectricity brought countries improved energy 
access, economic development and positive spillover effect, the championing of 
large-scale dam projects to bring about industrialization were not supported by 
the data analysis.

They also recommend that global bodies backing hydroelectric need to better 
recognize, and perhaps compensate, potential losers of their schemes. The World 
Commission on Dams estimated that about four million people were displaced 
annually by hydroelectricity construction or operation while another study 
looking at global energy accidents over 100 years found hydroelectric dams were 
responsible for less than 1% of total energy accidents but caused 94% of 
reported fatalities and $9.7 billion in damages.

Prof Sovacool said: "Our results bring into focus some of the pernicious 
trade-offs that can occur as one seeks to transition to large-scale sources of 
energy supply: bringing in jobs and generating economic activity, but also 
inviting corruption; seeking to supplant fossil-fuels (and lower carbon 
emissions), but only by increasing levels of debt, or creating new energy 
security threats."

The study found that the level of corruption in hydropower countries scored 
even higher than petro-states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Libya although 
not to a statistically significant level.

The authors recommend that smaller-scale, run-of-river designs that can operate 
without reservoirs, as deployed in Nepal, Tanzania and Sri Lanka, could be used 
more widely to limit corruption and environmental problems and increase 
developmental outcomes while still producing sufficient energy to meet demand.

Prof Walter, of the International School of Management ISM in Germany, said: 
"While it has to be kept in mind that our data analysis was correlative and 
does not automatically imply a negative causal effect of hydropower on poverty, 
corruption and debt, it is noteworthy that we found any effects at all on the 
national level, even though hydropower stands for such a small part of 
respective countries' economies. Practitioners maybe should rethink their 
underlying assumptions about how they evaluate hydropower's risk."

The researchers used country metrics and data to explore six hypotheses about 
the impact in countries with significant hydropower operations on conflict, 
poverty, economic growth, national debt, corruption and the environment.

The research team used data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme; poverty 
gap figures, GDP per capita data, total debt stocks figures, the World Bank's 
Worldwide Governance Indicators and metric greenhouse gas emissions per capita.

The data was analysed over three timeframes with data from 25 hydropower 
countries, 11 OPEC countries and 77 hydropower countries used in the first 
timeframe of 1985-1994. Thirty-three hydropower countries, 10 OPEC, and 94 
non-hydropower were analysed in timeframe 2 1995-2004 and 23 hydropower 
countries, 9 OPEC and 108 non-hydropower in timeframe 3 2005-2014.

Hydropower states are defined in this report as countries using dams for at 
least 70% of national electricity.

Hydropower is the largest source of renewable electricity around the world 
providing 16.3% of the world's electricity and 85% of its renewable power in 
2015. Hydroelectric dams are active in more than 150 countries, generating at 
least 50% of total electricity in more than 60 countries and greater than 90% 
in more than 20. Of the $11.1 trillion the world was anticipated to spend on 
energy infrastructure from 2005 to 2030, $1.9 trillion was expected to go 
exclusively to hydropower.


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