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The albedo–climate penalty of hydropower reservoirs

Nature Energy volume 6, pages 372–377 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Hydropower emits less carbon dioxide than fossil fuels but the lower albedo of hydropower reservoirs compared to terrestrial landscapes results in a positive radiative forcing, offsetting some of the negative radiative forcing of hydroelectricity generat ion. The cumulative effect of this lower albedo has not been quantified. Here we show, by quantifying the difference in remotely sensed albedo between globally distributed hydropower reservoirs and their surrounding landscape, that 19% of all investigated hydropower plants required 40 years or more for the negative radiative forcing from the fossil fuel displacement to offset the albedo effect. The length of these break-even times depends on the specific combination of climatic and environmental constraints, power plant design characteristics and country-specific electricity carbon intensities. We conclude that future hydropower plants need to minimize the albedo penalty to make a meaningful contribution towards limiting global warming.

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Fig. 1: Latitudinal distribution of investigated parameters.
Fig. 2: Drivers of variability in break-even times.
Fig. 3: Latitudinal distribution of the CO2 avoidance to reservoir surface area ratio.

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Data availability

The data underlying this analysis are freely available from the following sources: satellite remote sensing: https://lpdaacsvc.cr.usgs.gov/appeears/api/; global shortwave radiation at 5-km resolution (BESS_Rad): http://environment.snu.ac.kr/bess_rad/; albedo change radiative kernel (CACK v.1.0): https://portal.edirepository.org/nis/mapbrowse?packageid=edi.396.1; GRanD database (v.1.01): http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/pfs/grand.html; GPPD database (v.1.1.0): http://datasets.wri.org/dataset/globalpowerplantdatabase. A complete example dataset for one selected hydropower reservoir is freely available under the following https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4432576.

Code availability

The Matlab (MathWorks) and R62 scripts used to analyse data are freely available under the following https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4432576.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially funded by the Autonomous Province Bozen-Südtirol (ALCH4 project) and grants by the Austrian National Science Fund (FWF, grant numbers P31669-B22 and I03859). This publication incorporates data from the GRanD database which is a Global Water System Project (2011). We thank F. Kitz for help with statistics in R and H. Iwata and K. Scholz for providing measured albedos for Lake Suwa and Lakes Lunz and Mondsee, respectively.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Georg Wohlfahrt & Albin Hammerle

  2. Faculty of Science and Technology, Free University of Bolzano, Bolzano/Bozen, Italy

    Enrico Tomelleri

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  1. Georg Wohlfahrt
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G.W. conceived the study. G.W., E.T. and A.H. analysed the data and wrote the manuscript together.

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Correspondence to Georg Wohlfahrt.

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Supplementary Tables 1–3, Figs. 1–11 and references.

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Wohlfahrt, G., Tomelleri, E. & Hammerle, A. The albedo–climate penalty of hydropower reservoirs. Nat Energy 6, 372–377 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-021-00784-y

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