How to solve our Big Dam Problem

What do you think about hydroelectric dams? Do the costs outweigh the benefits?

Sardar sarovar dam in India provided clean electricity and water security to the gujrat region which had a huge impact in agriculture sector which eventually boomed in Gujarat by the irrigation system

11:17 this looks rather ingenious to me. The floating solar panels generate electricity, don't need extra land area, and reduce evaporation. In some places in the US, reservoirs are covered with plastic balls to reduce evaporation. Solar panels seem the better solution.

Wait.. what? Deforestation is caused mainly because the construction of dams? Well .. here in Brazil is because agriculture, mining, live stocks .. everything but the construction of dams.

We erroneously named the river that the Atäturk dam sits on as the "Tigris" when it is in fact the "Euphrates". Though the dam complex does impact the Tigris too. We apologise for the mistake!

In the case of Sardar Sarovar , obviously the people got displaced , but it help get water security to people that live in the remotest of places

Ataturk Dam is not build on Tigris River but Euphrates River .Ilısu Dam build on Tigris.

Nice video, but I think the argument at the end, that we kind of need every community to be happy in the energy transition, is kind of dangerous. For example, nobody wants to live close to wind turbines, power lines or nuclear. Sure, you should listen to communities and try to benefit them with the projects, but if you take 20 years to build a transmission line, we'll never decarbonize electricity in the pace we need. You can try to just do rooftop solar and offshore wind, but then everybody will end up with a bill 2 or 3x as high...

That is really well put, hydropower is often touted as a clean, green energy source, but the environmental costs of constructing even a single dam can be enormous, with huge impacts felt across entire river ecosystems. Our crew talked to Matt Ferrell to take a closer look at some of the far-reaching consequences of hydroelectric dams and asked what can be done to develop this technology to better balance energy and conservation.

Okay there's a problem with the hydropower projects but what is the solution 😮 or any replacement of such dams or projects

The combination of hydro and floating solar is really cool. The surface of that area is unusable you can’t build anything there. So put solar panels over the big lake and use that as main power source and the water as battery a genius solution.

As a igcse student, I was about to choose hydropower and dams and some issues it creates as my topic for individual reports, but the research I could get access to was really limited as a student .As soon as I saw the thumbnail of this video I got excited and felt relief that researchers and adults are focusing on this topic thank you DW planet A for the great video

Nepal relies 99.9% on hydropower, only 2 small thermal plants and are almost shutdown

Wonder why Sardar Sarovar Dam has been singled out for so much love in this video? World bank stopped funding the dam but the people of Gujarat stepped in with funds to complete the project.

Wasn't the sardar sarovar more about irrigation project than power generation?

Too bad you didn’t mention Quebec. They’re 100% self sufficient on hydro

New dams construction should always considering whether it's benefit bigger than its environmental impact. One thing to note, that is Dams is supporting human life by letting human to control the water in order citizen to bath, drink, food irrigation, flood control, canal transport and power generation and those multipurpose dams are usually massive. Which those things are failed to be delivered in this video. Yes everything that is too big, too much are always bad for environment, and that is greedy human fault not only for dams, that is also the problem for fossil fuel which we are too rely on. I think the goals for future are not making ideas dams are bad but greedy construction are, and how we are maximizing our local environment by using it's best renewable energy sources and combining all of them with responsible fossil fuel usage.

sardhar sarovar was and still is primarily meant for irrigation. Dams already serve multiple purposes, and always have been, you can not completely ignore the primary focus on a dam to take cheap shots at a statue nearby.

closed loop pumped hydro solves this. i wish it was brought up as an alternative because hydro power is incredibly useful and we need not intermitent renewable sources. floating solar + closed loop pumped hydro is a great alternative

That´a lie that reservoirs in Brazil have fallen to half, it happened only in a drought year, now they are back to normal. Also, the new dam projects in Brazil retrieve all the trees before the inundation of the reservoir, so the methane emissions are much lower than before.