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Comment by not_kurt_godel | Hacker News Reader

I did some quick napkin math on the net economic benefit, including carbon pollution and local economic benefit, of 3 scenarios:

1. Keep dam: -$2M to -$10M

2. Dam removal with 5 MW capacity replaced/absorbed by natural gas plants (no solar/wind/BESS): -$28.3M to -$249.8M, depending on whether you use the EPA's $190/tCO2 cost of damage or $1000/tCO2 DAC remediation.

3. Dam removal with 5 MW solar/wind/BESS replacement: -$3.5 to -$25M

In other words, removing the dam without equivalent solar/wind/BESS immediately in place is a net negative for society (and even then, keeping the dam might be neutral or still better).

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> net negative for society

You did not calculate the impact on the salmon population since dams were added to the Kennebec since 1837. Both the impact on the salmon themselves as well as all of the other animals and people who relied on that salmon fishery.

It's certainly a lot larger than the benefits of the dams in my calculation.

What do you calculate it as?

I would flip the question on its head and ask why the response to uncertainty is to default to an assumption of zero. Environmental benefits are notoriously hard to calculate and it's unfair to weaponize that difficulty as if it confirms the default assumption should be zero. I also don't think the calculation needs to hinge on one-for-one timed tradeoffs in the form of "this windmill exists to replace power from that dam" or assume that backfill is 100% fossil fueled, given that solar is now arguably the most rapidly deployed form of new generation.

It's not that the cost never matters but I think if the cost is really just $25MM for a transformatively beneficial environmental impact that has equivalent no alternative, in exchange for scaling back a fungible resource, is a no-brainer.

In reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50146584:

Ok, I found a study estimating a net willingness to pay per citizen for this type of ecological restoration at ~$72.31/per person/year. If we assume 100,000 people derive this level of benefit over a 30-year time horizon (same as I used for the previous numbers) that yields $21,693,000 which brings the removal WITH immediate solar/wind/BESS replacement scenario on par or marginally better than keeping the dam as is.

But even then, I believe that is being overly generous to the dam removal because electricity demand has been rising steeply recently and is projected to continue doing so. Until we are meeting 100% of current and future demand with new renewable energy, every existing carbon-neutral source that gets removed is creating a gap in future demand that will be partially filled by new fossil fuel generation and therefore incurring many of the same associated negative societal costs.

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