Post a comment on the text below

10.2.     Overview of hydropower in Europe

During the last years several reports providing overviews of European hydropower production have been published: DG ENV hydropower report (ARCADIS & Ingenieurbüro Floecksmühle 2011); DG ENV/Ecologic (Kampa et al. 2011): Issue Paper Final) and State of the Art of Small Hydropower in EU-25. In addition, Eurostat and ENTSO-E Statistical Yearbook have statistics on hydropower production. Below is given a summary of information on hydropower production, more details can be found in the above mentioned publications.

In 2008 hydropower provided 16 % of electricity in Europe and hydropower currently provides more than 70 % of all renewable electricity (Eurelectric 2009), more than 85 % of which is produced by large hydropower plants. The share of hydropower in electricity production is generally high in the northern and Alpine countries.

The total number of hydropower stations in the EU-27 amounts to about 23000. There are about 10 times more small (P < 10 MW) than large hydropower plants (P > 10 MW). However, the electricity generation of small hydropower only amounts to 13% of the total generation of all hydropower stations. Today large hydropower plants account for 87% of the hydropower generation with only 9% of the stations (DG ENV/ARCADIS & Ingenieurbüro Floecksmühle 2011).

In absolute numbers, Germany has most hydropower plants more than 7700 of which 7300 are small plants. Austria, France, Italy and Sweden all have more than 2000 hydropower plants. The highest numbers of large hydropower plants (> 10 MW) are found in Norway (333):  Italy (304); France (281) and Sweden (206) (Kampa et al. 2011).

Source: Kampa et al. 2011