Integrating Economic and Ecological Benchmarking for a Sustainable Development of Hydropower

Philipp Emanuel Hirsch, Moritz Schillinger, Katharina Appoloni, Patricia Burkhardt-Holm and Hannes Weigt
Additional contact information
Philipp Emanuel Hirsch: Program Man-Society-Environment, University of Basel, Vesalgasse 1, Basel Ch-4051, Switzerland
Moritz Schillinger: Research Centre for Sustainable Energy and Water Supply (FoNEW), University of Basel, Basel Ch-4051, Switzerland
Katharina Appoloni: Program Man-Society-Environment, University of Basel, Vesalgasse 1, Basel Ch-4051, Switzerland
Patricia Burkhardt-Holm: Program Man-Society-Environment, University of Basel, Vesalgasse 1, Basel Ch-4051, Switzerland

Sustainability, 2016, vol. 8, issue 9, 1-20

Abstract: Hydropower reservoirs play an increasingly important role for the global electricity supply. Reservoirs are anthropogenically-dominated ecosystems because hydropower operations induce artificial water level fluctuations (WLF) that exceed natural fluctuations in frequency and amplitude. These WLF have detrimental ecological effects, which can be quantified as losses to ecosystem primary production due to lake bottoms that fall dry. To allow for a sustainable development of hydropower, these “ecological costs” of WLF need to be weighed against the “economic benefits” of hydropower that can balance and store intermittent renewable energy. We designed an economic hydropower operation model to derive WLF in large and small reservoirs for three different future energy market scenarios and quantified the according losses in ecosystem primary production in semi-natural outdoor experiments. Our results show that variations in market conditions affect WLF differently in small and large hydropower reservoirs and that increasing price volatility magnified WLF and reduced primary production. Our model allows an assessment of the trade-off between the objectives of preserving environmental resources and economic development, which lies at the core of emerging sustainability issues.

Keywords: sustainable development goals; primary production; littoral zone; water level fluctuations; volatile renewable energies; energy transition; ecosystem function (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/9/875/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/9/875/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:8:y:2016:i:9:p:875-:d:77048

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().