Datasets

Fish passage facilities are used to mitigate impacts of hydropower dams to migratory fish in rivers, but information on the location, types, and characteristics of this infrastructure is incomplete at a national scale. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) partnered with fish passage engineers and hydropower experts from the US Fish and Wildlife Service […]

This dataset provides a comprehensive inventory of environmental mitigation measures required by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) licensed hydropower facilities from 497 licenses that were issued from 1998 to 2025. These licenses constitute 478 of the 1006 FERC projects that were active in September 2026 (when this dataset was last updated). 19,113 mentions of environmental […]

This dataset contains geo-referenced information on fish passage facility existence, type, and direction at hydropower developments across the conterminous United States (CONUS) presented in the ORNL Hydropower Fish Passage Webmap. It was developed through collaborative partnerships with fish passage engineers and biologists at both the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the National Marine […]

This dataset contains 1,261 hydropower facilities with associated Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) relicensing metrics. Anticipated FERC license renewal dates are summarized by river reach for observing areas of opportunities for basin-wide collaboration on environmental mitigations. Identifying rivers and basins with facilities that have similar anticipated Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) relicensing dates may be […]

This dataset compiles data on the costs of environmental mitigations related to fish exclusion for 35 hydropower projects based on documents obtained from the U.S Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Data for all measures and their associated project-specific information, including installed and hydraulic capacities, were manually extracted from environmental impact statements and/or environmental assessment (EIS/EA) […]

Understanding how flexibility in environmental requirements can facilitate co-optimization of hydropower production outcomes and environmental outcomes is critical for future grid decision-making and operations as renewable energy resources increase. The environmental and power system outcomes connectivity linkage maps presented here provide a framework for conceptually and quantitatively linking power system outcomes to environmental outcomes through […]

This dataset provides timeline dates, lengths, project characteristics, license characteristics, and costs of hydropower licensing and relicensing for 107 randomly selected hydropower projects that have been issued licenses since 1 October 2005 as shown in the figure above. This dataset includes information on licensing timelines including the licensing milestones shown in the bottom panel and […]

This dataset summarized the back-and-forth of study submittals and issuances for seven licensed hydropower projects presented as case studies in Aldrovandi et al. (2021), leveraging information from six of the seven case study projects documented in Pracheil et al. (2019). This information was mined from documents containing information on environmental studies conducted for US federal […]

The FERC Licensing Environmental Study Determination Letter Dataset was mined from Study Determination Letters of the 23 hydropower projects using the Integrative Licensing Process presented in the Regulatory Timeline and Cost Dataset used in Levine et al. (2021). While Levine et al. (2021) presents regressions between numbers of disputed, rejected, and required studies and FERC […]