Stuff You Should Know - How Hydropower Works

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

Humans have been stealing energy from flowing water for at least two thousand years. It wasn’t until the advent of electricity that things really got cookin’. All we need to do now is to work out the harmful environmental impacts of this green energy. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there and Jerry's here too, somewhere, not just in spirit, but like digitally, virtually. She's like Johnny

Depp in Transcendence. No, that's Keanu. Oh, Pirates of the Caribbean? Yes, it's what Jerry's like. I've been singing Judas Priest all day because of this. Instead of Turbo Lover, I'm singing Hydro Power. Oh, that's pretty cool, man. Can you give us a little couple of verses? I'm your Hydro Power. And I failed to mention I'm wearing my Leathers. Okay, just a leather vest and no shirt underneath and nothing else but boots. Some buttless chaps. It's awesome. Really, is there any need to make any other kind of chaps? I mean, I think they usually don't have a butt, right? You're just expected to wear something underneath. Maybe that's what it is. Well, then the whole thing, just calling them buttless chaps

is superfluous. Yeah, it's redundant, right? Yeah. So, since we started talking about buttless chaps, since we coined a new term, buttless chaps, I think we're the first people to ever use those two words together. Yeah, people usually say the A word. Right, exactly. We're clearly talking about hydropower, not just hydroelectric power, friends, hydropower. There's a lot of energy in that they're water and we humans have gotten pretty clever at figuring out how to extract it. Yeah, and this is something that we used to use a lot more of in this country up until about the mid-20th century. We were using lots of hydropower and it peaked in about 1960. Yeah. Now we're down to just about 6% of our power being created through the

use of water, but there's still a lot of hydropower plants in the US, about 2400. The US has a bunch, but we're also tearing them down along with Europe at a rate of about like one per week, these dams, right? Yeah, and we're removing dams, demolishing them faster than we're building them these days, which puts hydropower, specifically hydroelectric power in a really weird place in its history. But from all the research that I've done, I don't think it's going anywhere. What I think is going on is that it's at like this fork in the road and it's trying to figure out what the best way to go is to be sustainable and be as green as everybody likes to think it is, even though spoiler alert, it's actually not that green. Is everyone just standing

around looking at each other going, oh. Kind of. What do you want to do? You say something, yeah. It's like trying to figure out a restaurant as a group. Oh, God, that's the worst. Do you remember that? The best thing to do is to have a millennial friend or two in your group because they usually are really good about tackling that stuff. Oh, I thought you were going to say they're usually really bossy. No, but whenever it's like a sketch fest or something where there's just a bunch of disparate people, I usually try and get a millennial in the group decision making so I can just go, I'm an old Gen Xer. I'm happy to go anywhere. Got you. Get on your Yelp or get out your Michelin Guide or whatever you did to do these days. Yeah, they all carry that paperback Michelin Guide

with them. The Penguin Classics version of it. Right. So hydropower around the world though is pretty popular. Some places more than others. I think Paraguay, they are far and away the leader if you're talking about anywhere because they're up to 100%. That's incredible. Norway, no surprise. They're at about 95 along with Nepal and Tajikistan. And I wanted to ask you this. You have in here that China, Brazil and the US lead major countries and the US is down to 6%. So the top three, I assume we're third at 6%. Yeah, which just goes to show how much energy we put out. Only 6% of it is hydro and yet we are the third in line of hydroelectric production in the world. Is China one or two? One, I believe, and then Brazil. So Brazil is 67% and then it goes down to 6%.

Yeah, isn't that crazy? Yeah, it's a big drop. Yeah, but I mean, that just goes to show we produce a lot, a lot of electricity and it's just some of it is from hydro, which really boggles the mind that at one point, like you were saying, a third of our power came from hydroelectric production plants. It's just crazy, you know? Yeah, I think it's down to about 16% worldwide, right? Yes. That was as of four or five years ago. Yeah, and then that actually represents a really precipitous drop. I think in the mid 2000s, the aughts, it was at like 24%. And it dropped down to 16% within maybe 10 years or less. And the reason for that is not necessarily that people have stopped producing as much hydropower. They've stopped building as many new projects around the

world and have started opting instead, unfortunately, for what's called thermal, which is usually using a fossil fuel like coal, oil, natural gas to heat some water, to produce steam, to make a turbine spin, to run a generator, basically. And it's just cheaper. It's much more understandable. There's a lot of drawbacks to it, but it just requires far less of an investment up front than building a traditional hydroelectric plant. Yeah, and we'll detail all those pros and cons later. But if you wonder why people look to water to begin with, you need to only look at water. Stand beside any river, especially one that's got some rapids. When you see those rapids funneling through a small channel, it gets pretty intense, you know, some serious force going through there. And at

some point, someone said, maybe we can harness that. We're not exactly sure who the first people were, but of course, some people think the Chinese, the Han dynasty, they're always a good bet for leading the way. Maybe the Persians, or maybe they actually do have writings from the third century BCE from Philo of Byzantium. May he made a great doe, by the way. He did. He was also the guy who first named the seven wonders of the ancient world. Was his doe one of them? He's like, you got to try. It's the flaky. It's so good and flaky. But yeah, there's, I think, a description of a water wheel from old Philo. Yeah, from 2,300 or so years ago. So yeah, we figured out that you can put water to work. We've known for a long time. It was using water as

basically a way to produce mechanical energy, not electricity. Just put a pin in that because we're going to get to it in like 35 seconds. But first, we used water to push water wheels, like those charming things you see in like a Thomas Kincaid painting. It's one of my favorite things. They're really wonderful. I love them. They're about as coin as anything ever has been in the history of the world. There's just something so tranquil about it. I've always loved them. When I was a kid, I remember going to Stone Mountain Park and they had the old griss mill there. And I think I even kind of understood the purpose and just how I think its simplicity always really just hit me right in the feels. It's one of those things, Chuck, that it is a

very simple idea, but it was like a homerun right out of the gate. Basically, what we do to produce hydroelectricity is almost an unchanged version of the water wheel. Yeah, I mean, it's got fancier over the years. And we've talked about this with any type of power show that we've done, whether it was nuclear power, I feel like we've done a lot of these. It all comes down to producing that mechanical energy to spin something, to spin a turbine. Yeah, so you spin this water wheel or turbine as we'll see, and it spins on an axis. Well, if you insert an axle into that axis, it'll spin the axle. And you can attach all sorts of cool stuff to that axle to make them spin too. Like you can insert more wheels and have them pressed down on stone as they rotate. So you

can grind things or put a turn. Yeah, you can mill flower, you can grind paper or wood and to pulp and make paper. You can change the direction of the rotation to like up and down. So now all of a sudden you have pistons that can pump bellows or pump water or do all sorts of cool stuff. So that was a huge, huge advancement in the history of the world. And that's how things stayed for a couple thousand years, basically, until the 19th century. When we started to develop electricity, somebody said very quickly, oh, you know what? Actually, we could apply that agile water wheel idea to this electrical generation. And that's exactly what they did. And actually the first guy, the first hydroelectric power provided power to a lamp at a house called

so great, called the Craigside. I like lamp. Yeah, you love lamp. I love lamp. It's in a town called Rothbury in Northumberland. And if I mispronounce Northumberland, I am not to blame on that. You cannot spell a word Northumberland and expect anyone to pronounce it any other way. I'm trying to decipher how it's really probably pronounced. Like probably Christershire or something. Yeah, or like Nothrumbland or something like that. I just inserted a B. So, however you pronounce it, a guy named William Armstrong, he was like this amazing inventor who powered basically his whole house using water power. But one of the things he did was generate electricity too. That's right. And then Grand Rapids, Grand Rapids,

Michigan, said, you know what? I'm going to one up you there because we have a hydro generator at the Wolverine chair company factory. And we have 16 street lights that we want to power. And I imagine all the criminals in town were like, oh, it's so much harder to commit crime with light at night now. I know, especially. I did drop crime a little bit. I would guess so. I mean, I'm sure they had like, I'm sure, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure they had like the gas lights already, but the electric. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I love those gas lights. I think, Chuck, so we, you know, we talked a lot about hydroelectric power in our Hoover Dam two-parter, if I remember correctly. Yes. But I think we also might have talked about it in our

electric chair episode, but I feel like we may have misspoken and said that either Buffalo, New York, or Niagara Falls, New York was the first city to use hydroelectric power to power its street lights. And that's just not true. It's actually Grand Rapids, Michigan. Yeah, they were a few years later. I love how, you know, I picture like the sketch version of this is two engineers with the Niagara Falls behind them reading a newspaper going, hey, he says he had Grand Rapids. So he's in water to make light. If only we had such a means to do so. And Niagara Falls behind him is just like, look at me. Yeah. So that was just an excellent 19th century sketch that you just made, by the way. That's when Sketch was at its best.

So I don't know. I would say the 70s, 70 sketches would be, they're pretty tough to contain with. By the way, I watched that John Belushi documentary last night. Oh yeah. Very good. And it's amazing when you look at the speaking of 70 sketch to look at these archival photos of the like house parties and apartment hangs. Oh my God. Where it's like Belushi and Bill Murray and Harold Ramos and Lorraine Newman. And I mean, just like all the comedy heroes just sitting around like drinking and smoking weed. Not that I endorsed that thing, but I'd like to be at that party. Yeah, man. I mean, like I love seeing pictures like that for that same reason. Imagine how funny that party was. It probably pretty great. Either that or else I'd just be like,

I'd just be too nervous and socially anxious to talk to anybody and wouldn't have a good time at all. Well, the first since we're on the sidetrack, the first kind of really famous hang I had like that was I think one of my first Max Funcons when I was sitting in a room with basically the original upright citizens brigade songs, Amy Poehler and Andy Richter and Andy Daly and all these comedy heroes. And I just I was so afraid to even speak. But I was saying jokes in my head. And then two times I said a joke in my head and Andy Richter said one of them and another, I think it was Matt Walsh said another, that was basically my joke. And I was like, I'm going to start talking. Nice. And I did. And you did. Did you get applause?

No, but they didn't all turn around and look at me and go, who's this guy? Like I thought they would. It's like, oh, we're all just people. And did they make you an honorary member of the upright citizens brigade? No. Did you get a t-shirt? I did get a t-shirt. Okay, good. I stole a t-shirt. That's good. Should we take a break? I think we should take a break. All right, we need to get back on track and we're going to take a break and talk about the types of modern hydropower right after this. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do,

you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to

podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck. So like you said a minute ago that flowing water has a lot of energy to it. I found a couple of stats that I've just got to share with everybody. Okay? Let's hear it. Water flowing at four miles an hour. Just four miles an hour. It is very slow. Like you yawn basically when you see that. It's like a walking pace.

It can move a five foot diameter boulder. Okay? Okay. That seems big. Seven miles per hour. It has the same force as an EF5 tornado. And water flowing at 25 miles per hour has a pressure equivalent of wind that's blowing at 790 miles per hour, faster than the speed of sound. So there's a tremendous amount of kinetic energy in flowing water. And we have figured out over time how to maximize that. Like you said, the water wheel design is basically like what we're working with still today, but we've refined it so much that now we're producing these amazing turbines that spin super fast and they're designed to direct water in just the right way or water is supposed to go around them just the right way or drop on

them or shoot from the side and slosh around like it's on a slip and slide or something. And we've come up with a lot of turbine designs basically, I guess is what I'm trying to say that have really improved on the water wheel. Yeah, those bulb types are pretty cool. Those are watertight. And it's basically an aerodynamic chamber that's going to, you know, I talked earlier about when that water channel narrows, how much more forceful it gets. And that's what they do in this case. They focus and narrow the water column and then put it to the turbine, obviously at a much higher rate. Right. And I think that is an example of an axial flow where the flow of the water is parallel to the spin of the turbine. Or no, maybe that'd be

radial. I can't remember. But basically there's axial, radial and mixed and most things are mixed and a really good example of a mixed turbine is the most widely used one called the Francis turbine, which was invented by a guy named James Francis back in the 19th century. And it's fan blades basically are adjusted so that the water spills down from above onto it. But as it hits it, the fan blades direct it downward into the side. So the water ends up actually sloshing around parallel to the spin of the turbine and spinning it real good. Spins it real good. Good old Francis. If you're talking about hydroelectricity these days, you're going to spin that turbine, the axle is going to spin the turbine. And it's attached to a

set of super powerful magnets that are turning inside a copper coil. And that movement of the magnets is going to knock those electrons loose and get those electrons flowing. And then all of a sudden those electrons flowing through the copper is a current, it's electrical current. And then they pressurized that into a really densely packed AC current that's really slow moving. And we talked about the invention of AC current how that means you can just take it really, really far away and still use it without losing a lot of energy, which is great because you can dump it into the electrical grid and say you were once water, now you are electricity. Yeah, which is pretty cool. Like a lot of our power actually started out as flowing water. I'd

love that idea. Me too. But it goes to show like we really haven't changed that water wheel design very much. Instead of a grinding wheel or a bellows, we now just have some magnets that are attached to the turbine and they spin around inside of that coil. And that's that. I mean like it's, I know we talked about it in our episode on electricity, but I'm still to this day amazed that that's, it's just so primitive, but it works. So if it ain't broke, don't fix it basically is the big motto of the electrical production industry. And donkey's the world over, said thank you. Because now I don't have to be hooked to a thing and walk in a circle all day long. Unless they're making mezcal as we talked about in our book. You gotta use the traditional donkey.

That's right. I hope they're well taken care of. I am sure they are. If you, yeah, if you have a donkey that makes mezcal for you, I'll bet you treat it really nice. So there are four main categories of hydroelectric power plants these days. The first one, the impoundment is the one you kind of think of when you think of like the Hoover Dam. This water is impounded. They stop that flow. It's impounded in a big reservoir. They release it through these gates, through these tunnels called pin stocks that we talked a lot about in the Hoover Dam episode. And it's going to just, you know, they're using gravity basically to make water fall and gain all this, turn all that potential energy into whatever the other kind of energy is that's kinetic energy. Yeah. Yeah.

And so impoundment schemes make use of what's called the hydraulic head, which is basically the height of the drop from say the gates where the water enters the pin stock to the point where that water hits the turbine. And the higher the head, the higher the drop, the more energy you can get out of the water, the faster it makes the turbine spin. So that's why dams are just so damn high and tall because they have a really high hydraulic head. And you can just get a lot more electricity, a lot more kinetic energy out of that falling water. But as we'll see, that's actually kind of a problem. The fact that the high head hydropower is basically the state of the art. We need to advance past that just a little taste, a little foreshadowing right there.

That's right. Then you've got, I think of my favorite one, which is diversion or the run of river hydropower, which is this is using water that's already flowing. You got a river that's flowing and someone came along and said, Hey, this river's got some good action. Why don't we just divert some of this and channel it off to the side and create some electricity that way. And then just let that water dump back in and do its thing on downstream. Yeah. And so some of them do just divert some of the river to produce electrical power. Some like just stick a whole plant in the river. But the key here is, is that they're not, like you said, they're not like trying to keep the water blocked up behind a dam. But there's still probably

a drop because again, this hydraulic head is basically the key to hydroelectric power generation right now. I think the conduit, which is a subtype of the diversion conduit or canal is pretty neat too. Because basically they use these water pipes that may be part of a big irrigation system or some other kind of water project. We might as well stick a turbine in that thing because we're diverting that water through a pipe anyway. Right. So it might as well just capture some of the energy as it's passing by. I think that's a spectacular idea. So that's like you got impoundment diversion and then another type is called pump storage. And pump storage is very much like impoundment. There's like an upper reservoir and penstocks and you let the water

flow through past the turbine and you generate electricity. But unlike impoundment where when the water exits, it just goes downstream and keeps flowing and is like, what the hell just happened? You actually capture the water. I have to say, I've said damn in hell in this episode and I, I'm really pushing the envelope. If you ask me, I feel like Bart Simpson. Well, you said dam high. I took it to mean D-A-M high literally. But yeah, you're in trouble for saying. Thank you. Thank you. So in pump storage, rather than letting the water just exit and flow down river, there's a lower reservoir too that captures the water and keeps it from flowing out. And then that's what you do. You let the water flow from upper to lower during peak electricity

hours or peak demand so you can produce electricity. And then when it's not peak demand, people don't need as much electricity, you can use some of that electricity that you've generated to pump the water from the lower reservoir back up to the upper reservoir, which is pretty awesome. It makes it basically like a rechargeable battery. It's pretty cool. We spend a lot of time on lakes in Clare here in Georgia and the dam is very close to where we are. There's two dams, one at the north end, one at the south end and we go to the north end one. And it's just fun to go up there and watch when it's going through. It's, I guess, when they're releasing the most water because it's just crazy. Like the water in front of it is really choppy, but it's not going in any

sort of pattern. It's just, you'll see a big swirling pool to your right. Then another one in front of you and like jet skis and boats are kind of like trying to fight against the current to get close and then get pushed back. It's really, I mean, I was about to say violent, but it's just, but it's not loud, so it doesn't seem violent, but it's churning that water up and I think fish because the birds go crazy when this is going on. Man, yeah. It sounds like utter chaos. It is, but it's quiet chaos. Oh, is it quiet? To me in my head, it sounded like really loud and washy and everything. No, it's not really washy. You just see the water churning and moving and it's pretty cool. Why is it that if there's a chance to do something dumb, somebody on a jet

ski is going to try it? Yeah. Have you ever noticed? Yeah, jet ski. I don't know. Jet ski people are they're different. They're certain breed. They got a little bit of daredevil in them, I guess. They do. I mean, some of those things are crazy. They go like 80 miles an hour. That's not safe. No, it's not. One of the other last things about pump storage, Chuck, is that they've figured out and I think I feel like we've talked about this before I mentioned it, that a really good thing to do with a pump storage hydroelectric plant is to actually use excess energy from wind and solar that say you can't store anywhere. You use that to pump the water back up to the upper reservoir and it's basically like, again, recharging a battery using wind or solar so you could conceivably

power your whole pump storage hydroelectric plant using nothing but renewable resources. That's amazing. Yeah, I like that stuff. I love ecology almost as much as earth science because it ties into it so much. You're kind of cousins. For sure. Then finally, you have marine hydrokinetics which we talked about. Do you remember the name of the episode? Can oceans power the world from 2011? That's right. That is using ocean currents and waves and tidal currents. I wondered if any of the Great Lakes could produce enough of a current to be useful or is it only ocean? No, I think anywhere that has any kind of wave action, tidal action, or currents you could totally make use of it. Apparently, there's tides and currents in the Great Lakes. I had no idea,

but I remember somebody saying that recently. I just remember learning that when I saw Ferris Bueller in high school and there's that scene by what's the Great Lake there in Chicago? Is that Lake Michigan? I think it's Superior. Superior? Oh boy, we're getting crushed right now. Let's just name them all. It could be Erie, maybe Huron, Ontario, one of those. Not Ontario, but I just remember seeing that scene by the lake and all those waves and stuff and I was like, wait a minute, I thought they're in Chicago. Where the heck are they? And someone said, no, that's a Great Lake and it can look like the ocean like that. I mean, now I remember, I recall back to my boyhood when I would play in the lake and I guess

there would be waves, but it never occurred to me that they just shouldn't be there and that they were freaks of nature. What lake did you go to? Erie. Okay. You sure about that? I'm positive. Okay. I'm Catawba Island. So with the marine hydrokinetics they can, and you should go back and listen to that episode, it's really good, but one type is if they build it, you know, a plant right along the shore there and it's got that turbine at the top and seawater flows in and out and they use that wave action and the tidal movement coming and going to run that turbine, spinning that turbine. It all goes back to spinning that wheel. Yep. I actually saw there was a University of Florida study that said Florida alone could

probably produce 10 gigawatts of electricity from marine hydrokinetic schemes alone and which is pretty substantial because all of the hydroelectric output in the entire United States right now is 13 gigawatts. So that'd be a pretty big addition actually if they could figure out how to do it. You know, I thought of another musician from Gainesville, Florida the other day when I was listening to them, Stephen Stills. I can't believe I forgot Stephen Stills. Steve Stills? Well, Stevie Stills is from Gainesville. Which yeah, he's one of my favorites too. Out of all of the Crosby Stills in Nash people or just in general? Well, yeah, I think out of all of, I mean Neil Young is the king obviously, but Stephen Stills

was in Buffalo Springfield with Neil Young and he also had this great band that did a one-off record band called Manassas that was awesome. Oh, okay. Well, what about out of Emerson, Lincoln Palmer? I mean, if you're not a lake man then I don't know what you're doing in life. What about Bachman Turner overdrive? You got to go with overdrive. Okay. Yeah, totally. Overdrive was, he was awesome. Sure. You want to take a second break yet? I think so. I think that is our new cue and I get really off track. We just stop the show and then pick up again with the topic. Yeah, new cue. All right, we'll be right back everybody. We got to sort ourselves out.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you,

it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so if you're not just starry eyed over hydropower right now, you clearly haven't been paying attention to this episode. We're mad at you. Hydropower is amazing. It uses

water as fuel and water is a renewable resource. We're never going to run out of it, thanks to the hydrologic cycle, which replenishes the earth's water all the time. The fact that rivers flow thanks to the force of gravity and the rains swell, their flow. And it happens seasonally. Every season, you can kind of set your watch by it. It's pretty amazing stuff. And then the other fact that when we run this water, when we build hydroelectric plants on rivers and things like that, when we use it as fuel, it doesn't exhaust the water. The water just loses a little bit of its kinetic energy for a second. But when it flows out the other side, it regains it rather quickly. It doesn't need to be replenished. It's not wasted. You just stole

a little bit of its kinetic energy and used it for something else. And the river was like, whatever, I got it right back. So it's a pretty amazing green source of energy. You can understand why people have been so kooky for a while. Plus, it doesn't expend any greenhouse gases in its production, right? Yeah. If you hate greenhouse gases, then you love hydroelectric power because along with solar, nuclear and wind, it has no emissions. And we've talked about nuclear. There are some problems there. And, you know, wind and solar is great, too. There's nothing that's perfect. There is a byproduct by producing solar panels and wind turbines. And, you know, there's ecological impacts with any type of energy production. It's all about just making

efforts to minimize those as much as possible. Right. The other thing about hydroelectric power is that it's just simpler. When we're talking about thermal, there's a couple of extra additional steps, which is like loading the fuel, lighting the fuel, basically burning to create steam to spin the turbine. This is just water passing by that spins the turbine. So because there's fewer steps and there's fewer machinery or less machinery involved, it's a simpler technology, which means that ultimately, especially if you look at the lifespan of a hydroelectric plant, over time, it's much more cost effective than a thermal power plant, for sure. It's just, again, it costs a lot more upfront to build one. But when they build them, they usually build them

to last usually decades longer than a thermal power plant, too. Yeah. And then if you're in the business of creating power, you kind of love hydroelectric power because it's instantaneous. If demand goes up, you can just spin that turbine faster and allow more water to flow through. If, you know, sometimes it goes dormant and you turn it off, but if you need power, just get it going again. And it's not like it takes, it doesn't have to heat up or anything. You're like producing power and electricity the minute that things start spinning. Yeah. Actually, there's measurements of the ramp up time. And for some kinds of hydroelectric power, it's less than a minute, about 30 seconds from zero to producing all the power. You're

like it's peak out power output. Other kinds are five minutes. So I saw anywhere from 30 seconds to five minutes ramp up time for things like coal and oil, it can take half a day to a couple of days from starting from scratch to full power. So that's a huge, huge bonus if you're an energy producer, you know? Yeah. So, you know, we've kind of put a pin in the problems. And like I said a second ago, there is no type of power production that is perfect. Everything's going to have some sort of impact on the environment. And in a case of hydroelectric power, there are a few ways. And it's funny, you know, it sounds so great, but then when you start kind of reading through these things, it's, you know, some of the air is let out of the balloon

a little bit. Yeah. But we have to cover this stuff. When you're going to build a big reservoir for a dam, there's going to be a lot of impact on the environment. Everything above that used to be shoreline and dry or maybe even marshy or forest land is going to be an aquatic ecosystem pretty quickly within about a year. And there's a lot of plants and animals and insects and reptiles and fish and birds that live in that area. And some of them can adapt. Some of them move along and find a new home. And sadly, some of them die out and they don't have a chance to relocate or adapt. Yeah. Anytime they build a big dam project, you're probably going to find within a year or two or a handful reports of entire species that had gone extinct because of that dam project.

And a lot of people have kind of woken up over the last few decades, especially as the world has become much more environmentally conscious since the 70s. And said, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is a big deal here actually. And hydropower, I think, has kind of gotten away with trading on it. Murder? Yeah. Special murder, interspecial murder. But hydro has gotten away by trading on its kind of green reputation. And finally, people started calling it out and saying like, this is not acceptable. We have to figure out a better way. And that's kind of what I was referring to. We're not just kind of like that is almost entirely what I was referring to where hydro, and we'll talk about the future in a second, but it's at this point where it's like, how can we

do this so that, because this is an amazing green renewable energy source, but it's also having devastating environmental impact. So we've got to figure this out so we can keep doing this, but we've got to do it without wiping out entire species every time we build a new dam. Yeah, totally. The other thing that can happen beyond the animals, I did mention plants, but all that above water vegetation up there is going to be flooded. And that those plants lived in certain kinds of conditions that wasn't a lake bottom basically. And it's going to decompose, it's going to release methane and CO2 into the atmosphere during those drought periods when that reservoir evaporates. And then you've got all the downstream problems too, stuff that was

instead of flooding these downstream ecosystems, it's kind of like the opposite of what's going on up top. They're going to dry up and all that nutrient rich silt that's deposited downstream as the river flows is blocked by the dams. And that's going to build up in the reservoir, causing problems for the dam itself and nutrient depletion downstream. So it's kind of messing up both sides. Yeah. And so even for aquatic animals, it's a pretty big problem. Just building a dam is an obstacle for the fish that used to live there. So fish that used to swim upstream past where that dam is now located to its breeding grounds and spawning grounds, they have a problem. They have a big problem getting around. And the hydro industry has looked into all sorts of

different ways to help these fish get around more easily. So there's fish diversion channels, there's fish ladders, basically a system of locks that the fish are meant to climb. You know, I think we talked about in the Hoover Dam episode that there's like fish air drops, trucking fish, fish cannons, all sorts of weird stuff. None of them, none of them hold a candle to an unobstructed reach of a river. Like that's what you want. So that's another challenge that's facing the hydroelectric production industry is basically anything we do is going to negatively impact the fish population. So that's a big challenge for them as well. A unobstructed river though is not nearly as fun as a fish cannon.

No, I don't know about for the fish, but for jet skiers hanging out watching them get shot upstream. I think we did research into fish cannons and they're okay, right? Yeah, but I mean, it's got to scare the... Sure, yeah, I know. I don't know. I'm sure some of them do. The fish equivalent of jet skiers probably love being shot out of a can. Come on, bro, send me through again. There are also humans that live in communities that live near where these dams are built and they will get, what's it called, when you have to force someone out of a place? Displaced?

Yeah, but the actual... Moved along? No, what do you call it though when the government steps in and say, hey, we got to move your house because we're going to build a school. Eminent domain? Yes. Okay. Well, they will come through and say, I'm sorry, community, but we're going to build a dam here. You're going to leave. Here's some money maybe to help you out with this, but you don't have a

choice. We're going to flood. And in fact, all the lakes in Georgia are manmade, power-producing lakes. And there were once communities in some of these places and there are stories of cars and houses at the bottoms of some of these lakes. Yeah, which just creeps filled the me, man. I love looking at pictures of that kind of stuff and thinking about it, but I've told you before being in any of the Georgia lakes, I always am like, what is beneath me right now? It's awesome. It's thrilling, but terrifying at the same time. Like being on a jet ski. Uh-huh. And that's without even counting the catfish that are the scariest creatures on the island. That's right. Or the gar. Good Lord.

Man, I saw a gar last summer that I had never seen one in person before. It looks pretty historic. It really does. Yeah, they're very scary looking and they'll eat absolutely anything. You can have a gar problem real quick. So the people that have been displaced, I think the World Commission on Dams did a study and they estimated in the year 2000 that Dams had physically displaced between 40 and 80 million people all around the world. Yeah, that's so many people. I mean, it's just like you said, like, sorry, you have to move. You don't, like this is, this is going to be underwater, you know, very soon. And then when you build the dam, even once you settle, resettle the people

who used to live in what's now a reservoir, the people downstream are under constant threat of the dam failing. Sure. When that happens and it happens, whole towns get flooded out, lots of people can die, millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of damage is done. So, and it's not like, it's not like that's just a remote possibility. Right. Apparently, as of 2015, the American Society for Civil Engineers identified 15,600 dams just in the United States that posed the highest hazard potential, the most critical for failure. 15,000 dams right now are really menacing, like a guy in a jet ski circling you, that level of menacing. Yeah. And I think there was that one too many times. No, I think, was that three or four?

That was like seven. Yeah. Well, I was about to say three is a magic number. So maybe six is twice as good. But yeah, seven's too much. Okay. I think there are about 90,000 dams in the US. So that's 15,000 of those 90,000 are high hazard. Yeah. And you know, when you hear about government and politics, you'll often hear talk of like, Hey, the one thing we can agree on, we got to get together on his infrastructure. This is what they're talking about. Roads and bridges and stuff like that. But part of it is dams. And like, you know, one of the ideas of moving forward is let's get in there. Let's, I think only 2,400 of the 90,000 dams in the US even produce electricity. Right. So one of the ideas is let's get in there. Let's shore these things up. Let's take as many

of them as possible that aren't producing electricity since they're already there anyway, and retrofit them to produce electricity and they'll be safer and actually be doing something other than just being a dam. Yeah. Which I mean, it's like, that's just the lowest hanging fruit you can think of right there. It's like these dams already had their environmental impact decades ago. So it's not as bad as, you know, you might as well like put them to good use. And it's certainly preferable to building another dam to generate power. It's like, what are you even doing? Like don't do that. Wait until all of the dams that need shoring up anyway are producing electrical power. Then maybe we can look into more dam projects. Apparently,

that is not how the industry goes. Like I said, they kind of seem to have traded on their, you know, green energy image, but they're an energy sector. They're part of the energy sector and they do things, they don't like things like government regulation and they don't like things like, you know, tribes or local governments having a say in their licensing and all that stuff. So they lobby against that kind of thing. They're, you know, they're corporations. So it's a real problem in the industry that right now they seem to be largely in favor of pressing back against environmental regulations or regulations that lessen the industry's impact rather than saying, yeah, you know, like we really need to, we really need to figure out how to do this the right way.

They're just trying to squeeze as many nickels as they can out before they're forced to do it the right way. Yeah, this one in Turkey sounds like a real nasty one. They're building on the Tigris. It's going to flood 90 miles of the river plus 150 miles of tributaries, big time damage to the ecosystems there. And we're talking ancient archaeological sites that are going to be wiped out, people displaced. And a lot of people in the international community have said, hey, Turkey, why don't you think about some different ways to do this? And Turkey said, no, this is what we're doing. We're going to push forward with this. We have another one on the Euphrates that is reduced water flow to Iraq to itself by 80%. It's caused a loss

of 61,000 acres of arable land every year. It's just such an astounding figure. It's like, how is there any land left, you know? Yeah. So there are fortunately a lot of people in the industry who are like the writings on the wall, like this is just too good of an energy source to stop, but it's having too big of an environmental impact to just keep going forward in this direction. So they're trying to find ways to make it better. One of the inventions that I saw is called Moveable Hep hydroelectric power plant. It's movable. Not that you just move it wherever you want, like whenever you want, but the actual like plant itself can move up or down, basically, casters. That's good. It moves up and down depending on how high or low the river is,

which is good because, you know, seasonally river height, which has a huge impact on the amount of energy it has, you know, ebbs and flows basically. So if you can lower, you know, your power plant in the water further when the water's low or raise it when it's high, you can also make it easier for fish to go around, above, or under unobstructed, which is a huge, huge bonus too. Yeah, there's another couple of technologies that are very cool. One called a VLH or ULH, very low head or ultra low head facilities. We talked about the head as being, you know, that volume of water plus the amount of drop. And basically they just don't need that much of a drop, much less of an environmental footprint, doesn't require some

big large dam or a big concrete span to create that huge drop. The fish can take that drop, which is, you know, a big deal. Right. And then these low velocity turbines. I really like this idea. It's basically saying, hey, why don't we just concentrate on, or one of the things we can concentrate on is making our turbines just super efficient and they don't have to spin at 90 RPMs. They don't have to spin very fast at all. So you can produce, you know, maybe the same amount of electricity without the need for those high pressure pinstocks. Right. So the fish can just swim right through. They're moving that slowly. I think from what I saw, the reason why everybody's not just going to the low velocity turbines is because it's way cheaper to buy and install and

operate high speed turbines. But the fact that people are thinking about this stuff and that they're coming up with new designs and they're proving that these things can work. And we're also simultaneously, you know, publishing studies about the huge environmental impact that this green energy has. I think that those two things combined are going to kind of pick hydro back up and brush it off and actually make it green, you know, in the near future. I hope so. I mean, sometimes you got to, I know it's antithetical to capitalism and ringing every last penny out of your company, but sometimes you got to bite the bullet a little bit, invest a little bit more in something that's better for the world down the line and

still make gobs of money. Exactly. Nicely put, Chuck. Thank you. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I don't either, man. So that's hydropower. Look for another supplement edition of hydropower, probably somewhere down the line. And in the meantime, until then, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this a little statistical analysis from a listener. And this is a little frightening to see how long it takes to listen to our catalog. Oh boy. Happy New Year to each of you. A huge thanks for what you guys do. To me, as to many other fans, your podcast never fails to bring a good laugh when I'm down, take my mind off studies when I'm feeling stressed, or to pique my interest on a fascinating topic

when I'm a little bored. I listen every day, which means many repeats, and I still never struggle to find an episode to keep me interested. As you may be aware, at the end of the year, Spotify gives a nice wrap up on individual listening habits. I listened to over 110,000 minutes on Spotify music and podcasts combined. And the year 2020, I listened to over 500 episodes of stuff you should know. Wow. At an accumulated 24,256 minutes. Wow. My biggest streak, wow, was 29 episodes in one day. Wow. Anthony even says, wow. I want to add, I'm not often the type of person to fall asleep listening to you all, but which would account for a lot of playtime. So this is like daytime listening. It sounds like you'd have to be on speed that day to listen

to 29 episodes in one day. No, Anthony's not on speed. You all have helped me through some of the hardest times as well as shared in some of the greatest times, all without even knowing it, especially this year with COVID and a very stressful semester at law school. You truly helped this make this year the best it could be. I hope you had a relaxing holiday and a great start to the new year. Ciao. Anthony si pro anno. PS, I love speed. No, hate speed. You just love stuff you should know. That's great, Anthony. Good luck with law school too. I actually saw a couple of people who topped his total minutes. I think somebody tweeted, because you can tweet that really easily or post it. I saw one and I'm sorry I don't know what their name is, but they had like 55,000

minutes listening to stuff you should know last year. And that nuts man. So hats off to everybody who listens to us in general, but also if you listen to us that much, we really appreciate you and hopefully we never annoy you. Like hopefully one day it never just clicks and you're like, I can never listen to these guys again. I've heard too much. So be careful out there, I guess, is what I'm trying to say everybody. Be careful. If you want to get in touch with us like Anthony did, we love hearing from our friends. That means you. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast. iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever

you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.