Leave The Damming To Beavers: Going With The Flow In The Energy Transition

Imagine swimming home after a century away and finding the front door finally open. That's roughly what happened on the Klamath River in October 2025, when Chinook salmon reached their historic spawning grounds in Oregon for the first time in over 100 years. The reason? The largest dam removal project in US history, which saw four hydroelectric dams torn down in 2023 and 2024. It's a happy ending for the fish – but it raises an awkward question for the energy transition: if hydropower is renewable, why are we celebrating knocking it down?

The answer lies in what the dams were actually worth. Together, the four Klamath dams had 168MW of capacity – around 1.5% of electric power provider PacifiCorp's total generating capacity. The shortfall – a mere drop in the ocean – can be covered by the firm’s other plants and the wholesale market. What the dams cost, however, amounted to a raging river: the dams blocked salmon and steelhead from around 400 miles of upstream habitat.

Take the concrete away and the river bounces back. In autumn 2025, 39,860 adult Chinook salmon returned to spawn in the Klamath and its tributaries, more than double the preseason forecast. Scientists are already recording cooler water and better water quality along the river. Turns out salmon don't need a fish ladder, a hatchery or a ten-year plan – just an open door.

So where should the power come from instead?

Increasingly, the answer is the sky. According to Ember's Global Electricity Review 2026, renewables overtook coal in the global electricity mix in 2025 for the first time in a century, and solar alone met 75% of the growth in electricity demand. A solar farm or a wind turbine doesn't need to flood a valley or block a migration route to do its job – and a rooftop array doesn't need to take up land at all. That's not to say every dam should go. Large hydro plants still give grids valuable flexibility (when the sun sets and the wind drops, the grid can still rely on a reservoir).

But the greenest power plant is the one you never have to build. Before anyone pours more concrete (or bolts down more panels), there's a lot left to squeeze out of the energy assets organizations already own. Verdantix research finds that 93% of firms now have some form of on-site energy – rooftop solar, batteries, EV chargers – yet just 7% have invested in optimizing those assets dynamically against their energy use. That's a lot of kit sitting on roofs and in car parks doing a fraction of what it could.

And getting this kit to work together pays off. An International Energy Agency review of more than 300 energy management cases found average savings of 11%, mostly from low- or no-cost measures on assets firms already run. Scale that up and buildings stop being passive energy consumers and start acting like mini power stations, pooled into virtual power plants (VPPs) that sell flexibility back to the grid. The US Department of Energy estimates that tripling VPP capacity by 2030 could save $10 billion and meet 20% of peak demand – exactly the kind of on-call capacity we used to dam a river for.

The Klamath shows that a free-flowing river is worth far more than the trickle of power we wrung out of it. With cheap solar and wind power, and smarter ways to manage the energy we already produce, there's less and less reason to block a river just to keep the lights on. So let's leave the damming to the beavers – they're better at it anyway.

For more insights into how organizations can get more out of their on-site energy, check out Verdantix Market Trends: DERs Are Evolving From Assets To Orchestrated Solutions.