toddmedema
commented
3 months ago Some thoughts from Stephen Oyler in the Climatebase Fellowship:
Snow/rain: I’m not intimately familiar with west water rights but know they’re a huge deal. When at Westinghouse, there was a developer looking at building nuclear and one of their big selling points was securing water rights (their board had a UT legislator, I think that helped?). For snow and rain melt broadly though, there are competing interests, namely agricultural and recreation, but more to it like livelihoods, cultural and tribal considerations, and even energy needs for cooling. Note that some hydro might be pumped (and re-pumped). Best examples that come to mind: https://www.consumersenergy.com/company/electric-generation/renewables/hydroelectric/pumped-storage-hydro-electricity and https://www.dominionenergy.com/projects-and-facilities/hydroelectric-power-facilities-and-projects/bath-county-pumped-storage-station.
Right now I base it purely on local rain data, but there are two other important factors:
Would be awesome to update the availability modeling to incorporate #1 (if you're going to work on this, let me know and I can procure some additional historic weather data). It would be important to add rainfall + snowpack information in the Forecasts -> Weather chart.
Additionally, one could consider available viable hydro-electric / pumped hydro locations per-scenario. So, rather than any other type of generator that can be built in any quantity + size, hydro, you only have a few slots you can use, each with a maximum size.
TODO: Research, should we update simulation modeling of pumped hydro storage to also act like a dam, in that it gains capacity from rain and snow melt?
V2: Would be even more awesome, as follow-up work, to create a scenario in the west/mid-west, where you have to deal with the shrinking water rights situation.