Executive Summary
Hydroelectric power is Washington’s main source of energy. It is widely considered a green energy as it does not produce carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. The dams that are created to house the turbines however, do have negative ecological consequences. These negative impacts are especially felt by the pacific salmon, whose numbers have been decreasingly rapidly since the settlement of the northwest. These salmon are a keystone species, meaning that they play a vital role in the ecology of the area, and without them the food chain would be drastically different. Are the damages that these hydropower dams cause worth the renewable energy that they produce? In determining whether a dam’s negative effects outweigh their positive energy contributions one must do a case by case study. While some dams may be too ecologically damaging to be worth their produced energy, others are efficient enough, and produce electricity for a large enough population, to be worth the damage they cause.
