Hydropower Resource Potential

DOE has completed a resource assessment for 49 states (no report was generated for Delaware because of scarce resources). The completed work has identified 5,677 sites in the United States with undeveloped capacity of about 30,000 MW. By comparison, today there is about 80,000 MW of hydroelectric generating plants in the United States.

Hydroelectricity is produced at about 180 federal projects and more than 2,000 other projects that are regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. Although there are substantial undeveloped resources in the United States, hydropower's share of the nation's generation is predicted to decline through 2020 to about 6% from about 10% today. The decline is due to environmental issues, regulatory complexity, and energy economics. Energy analysts expect almost no new hydropower capacity to be added through 2020.

To learn more about how much electricity hydropower could potentially generate in the United States, please see the State Resource Assessment Report.

The hydropower team is currently assessing available sites that could use low-head, low-power technology. Low-head, low-power technologies require 30 feet of head (standing water height) or less and they provide generating capacity of 1 megawatt or less. Low-head, low-power resource assessment reports are available on the Resource Assessment page.