Recent small hydropower development in the United States has been concentrated on the powering of unpowered water resource infrastructure such as non-powered dams and irrigation canals.
Projects
Increasing our confidence in climate projections for high-latitude regions of the world will require a coordinated set of investigations that target improved process understanding and model representation of important ecosystem-climate feedbacks. The Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments (NGEE Arctic) seeks to address this challenge by quantifying the physical, chemical, and biological behavior of terrestrial ecosystems in Alaska.
An experiment to assess the response of northern peatland ecosystems to increases in temperature and exposures to elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
The Climate Change Science Institute (CCSI) integrates climate science activities across Oak Ridge National Laboratory, bringing together approximately 130 scientists in the areas of (i) earth system modeling, (ii) data integration, dissemination, and informatics, (iii) terrestrial ecosystem and carbon cycle science, and (iv) climate impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability science.
To enable a predictive understanding of mercury cycling in stream systems both locally and globally, the Biogeochemical Transformations at Critical Interfaces Scientific Focus Area (SFA) led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is providing foundational insight on exchange and feedback processes occurring at critical interfaces that control mercury fate and transformation.
Intake pipes, or penstock, for a hydropower plant. The penstock delivers water from a reservoir or river to hydro turbines inside the plant’s power station.
Although hydropower offers significant potential for renewable electricity generation and storage, characterization of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from hydropower reservoirs is inconsistent and incomplete, leading to highly variable emission estimates that have ranged from 0.14% to 6.6% of global GHG emissions. This uncertainty can pose an obstacle to widespread adoption of these water power resources.
ORNL scientists are exploring the belowground processes in urban areas that influence carbon cycling to better understand how the natural and built environments interact and affect the large populations of people who reside there.