20x20 | Finding Agreement on Hydropower and Conservation

A Woods-convened negotiation between the hydropower industry and environmental community—two factions at odds for decades—led to a breakthrough agreement in 2020. Recommendations resulting from that process guided federal lawmakers in the bipartisan U.S. infrastructure legislation, signed by President Biden in November, to invest more than $3 billion in the rehabilitation, retrofit or removal (the “3Rs”) of the more than 90,000 U.S. dams.

Parties to the agreement were motivated by two urgent challenges. To decarbonize the nation’s electricity system, they recognized the role that U.S. hydropower plays as an important low-carbon energy resource as well as a significant means to integrate variable solar and wind power into the U.S. electric grid. At the same time, the nation’s rivers, and the biodiversity and ecosystem services they sustain, are vulnerable to the compounding factors of a changing climate, habitat loss and alteration of river processes. The shared task of the diverse parties was to chart hydropower’s role in a clean energy future in a way that also supports healthy rivers. 

The agreement was the product of a Woods “Uncommon Dialogue” convening process, which brings together multi-sector stakeholders and experts to address significant environmental challenges. Uncommon Dialogues, a part of Woods work since the institute’s founding, allow leaders from different sectors to explore potential solutions in a neutral setting with facilitation by Stanford experts. The dialogue that catalyzed the 2020 agreement—“Hydropower: Climate Solution and Conservation Challenge”– was led by Woods Senior Research Scholar Dan Reicher, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Energy, Director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives at Google, board member of American Rivers and the American Council on Renewable Energy, and a director at the Climate Adaptive Infrastructure Fund.

Reicher brought his contacts in the conservation and renewable energy world together at Stanford in March 2018 to begin the two-and-a-half-year negotiation. Working in conjunction with Stanford’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, where Reicher was the founding executive director, and the Energy Futures Initiative, led by former U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, Reicher assembled participants from industry, government, NGOs and academia to envision how to best increase the ability of U.S. dams to provide clean energy and electricity storage while improving dam safety and the environmental quality of the nation’s rivers. 

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The agreement was built around the “3Rs” of the nation’s 90,000+ dams: rehabilitate some for safety; retrofit some for power production and to cut their environmental impact; and remove some for conservation and dam safety. The parties were compelled by some important facts: only about 2½ percent of U.S. dams generate electricity and powering a number of non-powered dams can add significantly to the nation’s low-carbon electricity; 90% of today’s U.S. electricity storage is provided by “pumped-storage hydropower” and more is being developed; and the 3Rs can be implemented on a “basin-scale”, as demonstrated on Maine’s Penobscot River in Maine, where between 2006 and 2016 multiple dams were removed, retrofitted and rehabilitated resulting in the return of key fish species, safer operations, and with no reduction in electricity generation and improved relations among NGOs, native tribes and power companies. 

Following the October 2020 agreement, signatories invited other key stakeholders, including tribal governments and state officials, to join the collaboration, and to address implementation priorities, decision-making, timetables, and resources. One key opportunity reflected newly-elected President Biden’s commitment to securing major new funding for U.S infrastructure. Realizing the potential this represented for U.S. dams—a core piece of the nation’s infrastructure—the parties went back to the table. In April 2021 they reached a second agreement which laid out the $63 billion needed to substantially address the 3Rs of the nation’s 90,000-plus dams. 

Participants who joined the effort represented a diverse range of organizations, companies, tribes, government agencies and universities, notably including the National Hydropower Association, on behalf of U.S. hydropower companies, and American Rivers, the Nature Conservancy, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the World Wildlife Fund, on behalf of the U.S. environmental community.

Learn more about Uncommon Dialogues and other Woods Centers, Programs and Initiatives.

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