Antonio Dias Leite, a minister of mines and energy during the military government, thinks that run-of-river hydropower constitutes an unjustifiable waste of energy.
But before Congress legislates, ground is likely to have been broken on most of the new dams.Run-of-river hydropower has a much smaller environmental impact than big reservoirs.
A Chinese water expert from Nanjing, for instance, suggests that Tibet offers a potential 200,000MW from hydropower, while just 500MW has been harnessed.Downstream in India, environmentalists and security hawks fear that even run-of-the-river hydropower dams, which do not use large reservoirs, could disrupt the timing of water flow.
This study conducted scaled physical model tests of a run-of-river hydropower plant (RoR).
The problem of designing small run-of-river hydropower plants is very critical for the cost effectiveness of the investment.
Located in Laos territory, the present project is one of the promising run-of-river hydropower projects identified by the Mekong Secretariat in 1994.
In order to cope with these problems, this study proposes a new method to select feasible sites of small run-of-river hydropower projects by using Geographic Information System GISS) technology.
These applications include the investigation of sedimentation in shallow reservoirs, run-of-river hydropower plants, side weirs used to control bank overflow, flow fields in different spillway configurations with and without Piano Key Weir (PKW), oil spills with flexible and rigid barriers, groin fields, river confluence, and sediment flushing in reservoirs.
In the process of site selection of a small run-of-river hydropower project in Thailand, some problems are addressed as follows: the accessibility of the possible sites which are mostly located in rural and mountainous areas, the large amount of data required, and the lack of participation of the local people living nearby.
Run of the river (RoR) hydropower projects are generally considered more environmentally sustainable as compared to their reservoir based counterparts.
