Five Questions on Hydropower Disruption and Renewable Energy Development

Can you give us an overview of your project on climate change and the political economy of hydropower disruption? What have you and your team found so far?

This project examines the effects of drought-induced hydropower volatility in countries where hydropower generates 40 percent of the electricity mix. These countries are experiencing significant fluctuations in energy supply as climate change causes both longer and more frequent droughts, as well as severe rainfall, which can cause floods that break dams.

Hydropower is still an asset to these countries. It produces steady, base load energy which can be stored in reservoirs and used at will. But hydropower stress is increasing over time. In the last couple years, Colombia has nearly resorted to energy rationing, which is deeply unpopular and has the potential to ignite political unrest.

Policymakers are trying to figure out how to avoid these scenarios. The project tries to understand how they are making decisions and responding to impending energy crises.

We found that after periods of hydropower stress, countries typically adopt policies to increase the generation of non-hydro renewable energy—such as solar and wind power—rather than falling back to fossil fuel use. But we’re not finding significant increases in actual renewable energy generation.

There’s an implementation gap. These countries want a cleaner energy mix, but something’s getting in the way. We’re exploring this problem empirically to come up with solutions.

What are you finding are the barriers impeding non-hydro renewable energy deployment? And how did your conference over the summer in Bogotá contribute to your team’s understanding of this implementation gap?

In Bogotá, we had conversations about the barriers renewable energy firms face in the market, the technical challenge of integrating renewables onto a grid that is predominantly based on hydropower, and social barriers that are obstructing project implementation.

We wanted to bring together voices from countries that are currently experiencing hydropower volatility, featuring a blend of both academics and policy practitioners. We collaborated with Universidad de los Andes and Universidad Nacional de Colombia, which are very well connected to both policymakers and scholars.

The conference featured speakers from high-level government agencies, including Bruno Goulart de Freitas Machado, an energy regulation specialist at the National Electric Energy Agency (ANEEL) in Brazil. He was in dialogue with Jessica Arias, deputy of energy demand at the Mining and Energy Planning Unit in Colombia (UPME). Brazil is ahead of Colombia in its renewable power trajectory because of the policies it has in place, including advanced mechanisms to incorporate renewables onto the power market. It was productive for them to discuss best practices and common challenges in Colombia and Brazil.

Simón García Orrego, advisor to the minister at the Ministry of Mines and Energy in Colombia, presented on the ministry’s strategy to empower communities to install renewable energy as a collective, which the government views as a cornerstone of Colombia’s energy transition. And Carlos Arturo Vanegas Vesga, operation coordination director at XM, the national grid operator in Colombia, presented on how his agency is dealing with the technical constraints of integrating renewables into the electricity system.

It was fruitful for these policymakers to speak with academics studying these problems at U.S., European, and regional universities. The conference presentations really spoke across the industry-academia-policy divide, and the highlight of the event was having that cross-cutting balance.

One of the big takeaways is that governments are trying to mobilize on building out wind and solar power. There are big differences in how national markets in Latin America are structured, but these countries face a lot of common barriers, the most serious of which are technical: how to maintain a green energy mix with variable renewables like wind and solar when the hydropower base load is in crisis.

But that’s not the only concern that policymakers are dealing with. For example, there are equity considerations related to distributed renewable energy generation: companies and households that can afford to invest in renewable energy can benefit from it, but those who can’t are left paying for fossil fuel alternatives that usually cost more.

The open question going forward is what to prioritize to avoid an energy crisis. You could work on empowering communities and increasing local energy access, or you could focus on grid stability or on overcoming private sector financing barriers for renewable energy projects. But we don’t yet know what will be most effective in preventing future crises.

The conference had one session on energy security, and another session on renewable energy. Do you see these two separate topics, or are they interrelated?

The two are definitely interrelated. We organized the discussion in this way because concerns around energy security relate to a macro-level perspective of hydropower volatility, security of supply, and system-wide energy planning.

Then, there’s another conversation about renewable energy and environmental justice. First, renewable energy projects are being built on Indigenous land with high wind and solar potential. There has been significant disagreement between companies and communities about project impacts and compensation.

This is a common issue across several Latin American countries, and we wanted to dedicate time to these political challenges to renewable energy project implementation, separate from the macro-level planning angle.

Could you elaborate on how Latin American countries are managing their relationships with Indigenous communities located near the sites of renewable energy projects? What sort of issues are they facing?

Most Latin American countries—including Colombia and Brazil—are signatories of the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention of 1989, also known as International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 169. The convention sets out the need for free, prior, and informed consultation with Indigenous communities, and provides a framework for how that consultation is conducted, by informing communities of the impacts of a project before asking for their consent.

That being said, every country has their own details for implementation, and that’s where things get messy. It’s a very complicated issue, and there are a large number of very diverse Indigenous communities in both Colombia and Brazil.

Colombia’s renewable energy potential is concentrated in La Guajira, where there’s an Indigenous community called the Wayuu who are very decentralized, nomadic, and inhabit a low-income region with very little infrastructure. I went there myself this year—there’s little running water and electricity outside of the cities.

The current guidelines for consultation are very general, and not specific to communities. For example, in La Guajira, if you arrive one day for a consultation, you might not encounter all the community members with a claim to the land—and you wouldn’t know because you’re only there for a day. These specific details are not necessarily incorporated into the regulatory framework.

In my own dissertation research, I also found that when corporations come in to do large-scale renewable energy projects, they don’t necessarily understand the importance of cultural context, so they just follow the legal framework. But if the framework is not specific, that can lead to friction with communities.

Slowly, the government is investing in increased field visits, spending more time in the region, and figuring out exactly what communities need. This is both in response to the region’s economic outlook—Columbian President Gustavo Petro recently declared a state of economic and social emergency in Guajira due to child deaths from malnutrition—and in response to community resistance to projects.

The government is slowly improving its understanding of the communities’ perspective. But we have yet to see any major regulatory changes. Again—it’s very complicated.

What are the next steps for your research? I understand your team is also investigating Laos and Nepal—how does what you’re finding in Latin America fit with these countries’ experiences?

One of my co-authors recently finished fieldwork in Laos, and we are integrating some of her insights.

Laos faces a lot of the same hydropower-related grid constraints as Colombia and Brazil. It’s also an interesting case because there’s a development finance angle, with a greater presence of both Western multilateral development banks and Chinese development finance.

But both Laos and Nepal are an interesting contrast to Brazil and Colombia because much of the hydropower there is relatively new—in Latin America it was built several decades ago. Latin America’s hydropower is subject to controversy because of its environmental and social impacts. It’s no longer viable to build large-scale hydropower—in Nepal, they’ve focused on smaller-scale hydropower because the World Bank doesn’t support large-scale projects anymore, partly because of the Latin American experience.

At the same time, the stories of Nepal and Laos are a little bit different because of the Chinese finance angle. It’s well documented that Chinese financiers are much more willing to accept whatever standards the local government has in place. Big hydropower projects have been developed in Laos recently, unlike in Nepal, because of the influence of Chinese development finance.

The stories of all these countries are a little bit different, in terms of historic timing and the political considerations of where they’re getting their money from. But we’re excited to see what common threads come out of this research and to develop solutions for how developing countries can deal with hydropower-related disruption while still delivering sustainable energy access to their populations.

Ishana Ratan is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley and researcher for the IGCC-funded project on institutional responses to climate change-induced hydropower shortages. Paddy Ryan is senior writer/editor at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC).

Thumbnail credit: Asian Development Bank (Flickr)