Tor Haakon Bakken
Background: A large number of the world’s large dams and reservoirs are built for other types of use than hydropower production, in particular in Asia and Africa. According to the statistics in the ICOLD database, being the most complete inventory of large dams and reservoirs, only 6% of the single purpose dams in Africa and 11% of the single purpose dams in Asia are used for hydropower production. While the same numbers for multi-purpose dams/reservoirs are 12% and 7%, respectively (see figures). For this reason, it might be likely that hydropower can be produced from some of this infrastructure with limited costs of installation (the dams is already built), and with limited new environmental and social impacts.
This project aims at analyzing the possibility of retrofitting some of the dams/reservoirs for hydropower production, by selecting a number of case studies in Asia or Africa. The project will investigate:
- what hydropower technology that can be feasible to use on these non-hydropower dams/reservoirs
- what the possible impacts (if any) could on the existing use of the dams/reservoirs
- identify potential barrier for global deployment of the idea (of retrofitting)
- estimate the global hydropower potential from these non-hydropower dams/reservoirs