Nice, go Alcoa.

And Alcoa just signed a contract with Quebec Hydro for low cost energy up to 2040.

Baie Comeau QC Alcoa plant production will be increased by about 25% to over 540 000 Tons/year by 2012/2014.

That should be enough for many million aluminium wheels every year.

But we can't have that non-renewable source of electricity operating, to refine Aluminum.

Don't-cha-know that falling rain, running into Rivers,and piling up behind dams, before running through electric turbo-generators is...

officially NOT RENEWABLE as decreed by eco-wackos?

But any thinking person recognizes that energy generated by gravity flow of a hydrological cycle - has to be renewable. Unless the water evaporates into space. Which it does not.

ExDemo:

Hydro electricity was declared NOT RENEWABLE by many USA States under pressure by local coal fired power plant operators.

Quebec Hydro had to use wind generated energy(considered more ecological??) to qualify for export south of the border. It is part of the accepted fair trade practices under the current Fed & States Administrations!

This type of lobbying had a positive effect and accellerated the installation of 2000 more wind turbines.

Another 20 000+ large wind turbines would be a good combination with current and future hydro electricity. Hydro, with its huge reservoirs and variable production capabilities, is ideal as a back up for interruptible power sources.

This is a bunch of cut and paste that give a feel for the methane emission from hydro
They (hopefully) describes that the cold stratified compressed methane is concentrated at the 30 Meter depth of the generating turbines.
This releases when the water is released throug the generator and leads to the claim that emissions can be significantly higher than a similar sized coal station.
however every situation is different and there are many factors affecting the final result.
There are a basket of other coniderations that contribute to Hydro being considered non - renewable including other hydrological environmental derimental effects, social implications incluing national water rights or water wars, limited potential sites. These issues all have pro's and cons so I must assume that the main factor is emissions.

New ScientistFeb 2005:
In a study to be published in Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, Fearnside estimates that in 1990 the greenhouse effect of emissions from the Curuá-Una dam in Pará, Brazil, was more than three-and-a-half times what would have been produced by generating the same amount of electricity from oil.

In effect man-made reservoirs convert carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into methane. This is significant because methane's effect on global warming is 21 times stronger than carbon dioxide's.

With the proposed IPCC guidelines, tropical countries that rely heavily on hydroelectricity, such as Brazil, could see their national greenhouse emissions inventories increased by as much as 7% (see map). Colder countries are less affected, he says, because cold conditions will be less favourable for producing greenhouse gases.

Despite a decade of research documenting the carbon emissions from man-made reservoirs, hydroelectric power still has an undeserved reputation for mitigating global warming. "I think it is important these emissions are counted," says Fearnside.

WWW.Gulfnews.:
large dams in the country are accountable for at least 19 per cent of India's global warming emissions, especially methane.

According to the study, Indian dams are large methane emitters and the total methane emissions from the country's large dams could be around 33.5 million tonnes (MT) per annum, including emissions from reservoirs (1.1 MT), spillways (13.2 MT) and the turbines of hydropower dams (19.2 MT).

While the total generation of methane from India's reservoirs is around 45.8 MT, emission of methane from all the reservoirs of the world remained 120 MT per annum, said the study conducted by Brazil's National Institute for Space Research

Other:
The methane emission from India's dams is estimated at 27.86 per cent of the methane emission from all the large dams of the world - more than the share of any other country

From the html version of the file http://philip.inpa.gov.br/publ_livres/Preprints/2006/Reply%20to%20Rosa%20et%20al-2.pdf.

photosynthesis in the reservoir itself (for example by algae, drawdown vegetation and
macrophytes) and is therefore not a net contributor to global warming.
Rosa et al. (2005) have confused the numbers in my calculation of the spillway
emission, suggesting that the methane concentration at this depth should be 3 instead of 7.5
mg/L. The methane concentration used was neither of these values, instead having an annual
average of 4 mg/L (see Figure 1 in Fearnside, 2004a). The 7.5 mg/L value refers to
concentration at the turbine depth, rather than the shallower spillway depth.
photosynthesis in the reservoir itself (for example by algae, drawdown vegetation and
macrophytes) and is therefore not a net contributor to global warming.
Rosa et al. (2005) have confused the numbers in my calculation of the spillway
emission, suggesting that the methane concentration at this depth should be 3 instead of 7.5
mg/L. The methane concentration used was neither of these values, instead having an annual
average of 4 mg/L (see Figure 1 in Fearnside, 2004a). The 7.5 mg/L value refers to
concentration at the turbine depth, rather than the shallower spillway depth.

Google automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web.
Page 1
GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS FROM
HYDROELECTRIC DAMS: REPLY TO ROSA ET AL.
Philip M. Fearnside
Department of Ecology
National Institute for Research in the Amazon

Ever since my first estimate indicating high emissions of greenhouse gases from
Amazonian dams (Fearnside, 1995), Luis Pinguelli Rosa and coworkers have effectively
made a career of trying to prove me wrong. However, the longer this debate goes on and the
more information that becomes available, the greater the impacts are found to be. The latest
attack (Rosa et al., 2005) serves to illustrate a series of misconceptions regarding the science
and brings out some of the political context that surrounds the subject in Brazil.
First, a variety of claims in the Rosa et al. (2005) letter are technically incorrect, and
would mislead readers not familiar with the details of the previous rounds of this debate.
Rosa et al. (2005) claim that I assume that the CH
4
concentration is “uniform in the reservoir
and constant for many years.” Neither assumption is made. The calculation in question (for
Tucurui) only applies this concentration to the depth of the turbines—not as a concentration
that is uniform throughout the reservoir. In fact, it is conservative in that the value is based
on a measurement at 30 m depth, and is assumed to be the same at the 34.6-m depth at the
turbine intakes, even though methane concentrations are well known to increase steadily with
depth anywhere below the thermocline.
4
is released when water that is super-saturated with methane emerges from the
turbines. Even if the value for the Henry’s Law constant were the value suggested by Rosa et