[mapt]

"More than enough power"

There's no such thing anymore.

Dams are more important than they were in decades past. Existing dams are by far the easiest and cheapest source of on-demand peaking power. 10GW that you're not doing anything with, can provide load balancing for 20GW-50GW of wind and solar somewhere else. Perhaps half the country away and in a different grid entirely through the use of HVDC transmission lines.

That's not to say that the ecological consideration is nonexistent. It's not that difficult to build dams that make small sacrifices in cost and throughput to permit fish navigation. We just didn't care about that _at all_ a hundred years ago.