User talk:217.16.114.210

I ask you kindly to take out the wrong upper value for CO2 emissions of hydro-power. Quoted hydro-power values refer to storage lake hydro-power only, disregarding run-of-river HP which may yield emissions much lower than those given as the minimum value in you article. The high values given for reservoirs build on a New Scientist article from 2005, which on purpose was written in a misleading way. Even this article claims high emissions only for reservoirs in the subtropical climate zone and does not refer to any other climate zones. Values mentioned in that article are not even correct for the subtropical zone, as they assume that the reservoir is built on rain-forest area only and not on any area used differently, which is untrue. The article is grossly wrong even when a reservoir is built 100% on rain-forest area, as it is the normal practice to clear-cut the wood including the roots before filling the reservoir. This adds to storage capacity and brings timber sale yields. In this case, methane emissions are negligible, as there is very little biomass rotting under anaerobic conditions below water-surface. Even if biomass would be maintained on the bottom of the lake (which is hardly ever the case), the mentioned emission would apply only for the first 3-10 ys. of plant operation, but reservoirs have a total life-span of hundreds of years and hence should be reduced by a factor of 20-50. But even when neglecting this fact the purported emission is highly exaggerated. Everybody will easily understand that the quantity of biomass growing on the area of a future lake (which could decompose to methane under anaerobic conditions) is by far smaller than the quantity of biomass required to grow and be transformed to fossil fuel during thousands of years in order to cover the same energy demand. Later research has proven that the "New Scientist" figures are at least 10 times higher than they should be (https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/wasserkraftwerke-talsperren-weniger-klimaschaedlich-als-vermutet-a-777769.html); all these methods do not include the effect of additional lakes on micro-climate and the water retention effect. Including these effects, net GHG emission values of hydropower would be further reduced.