America’s hydropower systems are in hot water — but the federal government may soon unclog a stream of funding to help them out.
By Katherine Krawczyk, Canary Media
We’ve been using water to generate electricity in the U.S. since the 1880s, expanding from projects harvesting Niagara Falls for power to a whole network of systems that span the rivers of the West. America’s dams have since become a reliable, round-the-clock source of clean energy, generating nearly 6% of the nation’s power in 2025 even as drought in the West limited many projects’ capacity.
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That long history is exactly why hydroelectricity is now in trouble. Hundreds of dams across the U.S. representing nearly 16 GW of capacity will have to be relicensed by the federal government in the coming years, as Alexander C. Kaufman previously reported for Canary Media. But the average dam in the U.S. is 65 years old, and many were built without the infrastructure they’d need to be licensed today, like passages for fish and other wildlife. Many operators will have to choose between spending millions of dollars on infrastructure upgrades or simply shutting down — and some are already choosing the latter.
