Hydropower: a greenhouse gas culprit?

Hydropower plants have long been a byword for clean energy. But researchers warn that tropical reservoirs might release more greenhouse gases than fossil-fuel power stations.

Philip Fearnside, a conservation biologist at the National Institute for Research in the Amazon in Manaus, Brazil, has shown that in the first ten years of operation, a typical reservoir will emit four times as much carbon as a fossil-fuel station.
SciDev