The term “effective hydropower potential” based on sustainable development – an initial case study of the Raba river in Poland

The resources of power engineering raw materials of the Earth, such as coal, oil or gas are limited. The process of energy generation in conventional power plants is also related to emission of many pollutants to the broadly understood environment. For these reasons, the technologies are currently strongly promoted that enable obtaining energy from renewable sources, as the so-called “clean energy”. Energy of water, or to be more precise energy of rivers, is one of the types of renewable sources that are being developed both in Poland and in other countries. The quantitative assessment of the possibilities is most often restricted to presentation of theoretical, technical (in terms of technical possibility of execution) and economic potential. There is a number of additional procedural regulations in many countries that may block erection of a hydropower plant, even in the conditions when its execution would be possible technically and economically. Execution only of these installations is especially important that are consistent with sustainable development. The author thus proposes the term of “effective potential” to allow estimation of production of energy from the given river with the method closest to the real possibilities of execution of new hydropower plants in line with the sustainable development idea. The Raba river in southern Poland has been selected as the example, but the course of the analysis seems to be universal for investments in other countries where procedures may be differ significantly. The resulting “effective potential” provides the actual view on the hydropower generation capacity of the river. The author believe that this term will be accepted for common use.