SHAREe - Sustainable Hydropower to Alleviate and Reduce Environmental externalities

SHAREe

What did this initiative focus on?

The recently launched EU Green Deal reinforces the need to increase green sources of energy, to achieve net-zero greenhouse emissions in 2050. Hydropower maintains a prominent position amongst renewables, while being available to quick replace solar and wind and respond to electricity demand, thus contributing to reduce CO2 emissions.

However, hydropower comes with environmental externalities. These include downstream habitat degradation, block of migratory paths (both up and downstream), fish damage due to passage through turbines, flow reduction in downstream reservoirs, shifts in sediment dynamics, increase of greenhouse gas emissions from the reservoirs, among others.

The scope of SHAREe is to advance our knowledge on the environmental measures to improve sustainable hydropower by sharing experiences among countries and to establish a network for future projects on sustainable hydropower. Specific objectives include: - To foster cooperation between the academia in Norway and Portugal based on joint research actions having benefits for both; - To bring together expertise, best practices and ideas from both partners, promoting synergistic outputs and new ideas; - To improve personal experience, sharing and exchanging cultural backgrounds, and to create the opportunity to test ideas to a different ecological reality; - To provide opportunity careers and research experience, namely through new contacts during the project.