CLEAN AND GREEN: Rediscovering Hydropower. “Hydropower generation has tripled since 1949, when it produced a third of the country’s electricity—yet today it meets just 7 percent of demand. In the rush to keep up with ravenous consumption, legions of small, distributed resources have been overlooked. A Department of Energy study found 130,000 sites that could provide small-scale hydropower, some in every state. Many have the potential to produce 1 megawatt of electricity or less. That’s couch-cushion change in a world of behemoth energy projects, but it adds up—to an average of 30,000 megawatts a year. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) estimates that 2700 megawatts could be developed by 2025. That equals the power produced by three nuclear power plants or six coal-fired ones. “