[Retric]

Ideally you don’t build a dam.

Niagara Falls sits between Lake Erie into Lake Ontario. Which is the perfect location to use pumped hydro because all you need to build is a pipe between them and put a turbine inside the pipe. If you have excess energy pump water up from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie, and when you need power run that in reverse to generate electricity.

Move enough water and the water level on each lake will change, but 6 inches (15cm) isn’t going to change anything of note and that represents an insane amount of energy. Something like 500 GWh if I remember correctly. Unfortunately that’s literally the best case in the US, nothing else even comes close.

[mindslight]

The scenario you've described still begs the question though. It seems the only difference between traditional hydroelectricity and pumped storage is how much you disrupt the natural flow from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. The hard limit is when the Niagara Falls run dry. Anything more than that is basically spending electricity to create a treadmill for fish, which may be the environmentally responsible thing but we should be clear about that. And since fish probably cannot jump up Niagara Falls, it's probably more like spending electricity to run a really large water display for tourists and the occasional person who wants to go over in a barrel. But maybe that electricity use doesn't matter if we're getting more than we need from solar during sunny days, and just need predicable storage for nights and cloudy days.

I would think the stronger argument for pumped storage would be in a place where the high level of water did not naturally exist, and so the only way it gets up there is by pumping. But perhaps this still destroys too much of an ecosystem even if it's not a river ecosystem.

[Retric]

We let stuff migrate upriver years ago when they added a lock system back in 1829. At this point any environmental harm from connecting these lakes has already happened generations ago well before we where born. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welland_Canal

Anyway, the amount of water flowing over Niagara Falls is currently regulated hourly by treaty with excess flows above that level used to generate hydroelectricity. 100,000 cubic feet per second (2,800 m3/s) of water flowing over the falls, and during the night and off-tourist season there must be 50,000 cubic feet per second (1,400 m3/s) of water flowing over the falls. That excess is generally 50-70% of the rivers total, making the falls arguably just a really large and extremely expensive water feature used to attract tourism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Niagara_Falls_hydroele...

Adding a separate pumped hydro system really can be treated as an independent entity because we don’t just control the falls we can even turn it off when needed. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1338793/Niagara-Fal...

[mindslight]

Connecting two bodies of water for the occasional organism that wants to pass through is a distinct thing from disconnecting two bodies of water for say large numbers of fish that would otherwise swim up a river. The latter is a usual criticism of hydro power, which seems like it doesn't apply to Niagara because it's such a big waterfall.

I wasn't aware of the treaty, that makes sense.

The link about turning off the American side of the falls doesn't really support the implication that there is enough hydroelectric capacity to use up the entire flow of the river. The simplest explanation is that the flow was diverted over to the Canadian falls.

[Retric]

I assume they sent the water over the Canadian side simply due to the treaty. That said, they have excess capacity to handle blocking 1/2 the flow over Niagara Falls every night, but even doing nothing was still a non issue.

If you assume they blocked 1/2 the flow (1,400 m3/s) and didn’t use it for anything. That would still take 21 days to raise water level of Lake Erie by 1cm.