That may be the whole cost of the apple, but that apple is in no way comparable to the orange of the power generated by a hydro-electric installation — not unless the electric trucks can carry as much water in a day as the pipeline to a power plant. That sounds like a lot of heavy trucks, which will require a lot of road improvements & widening & lights for night-time operation. It will also require a lot of water to transport, which (surprise!) will require impounding large volumes of water, which probably means (surprise again!) building a dam.

The idea may have some modest utility in some very particular circumstances — but it is not a serious large-scale alternative to hydro-electric power.

To start with, electric truck hydropower can be much less expensive than the alternatives.

“You just need to buy electric trucks and be able to connect them to the grid — that’s the whole cost,” he said. “But for hydropower plants you need huge dams, tunnels, turbines, and lots of other different components that have very high investment costs.”

Depending on conditions, the water-carrying electric trucks could also be deployed to generate electricity from different stages of a mountain descent, or even from different rivers on different roads. “It’s very flexible, very modular,” he said.

It’s always the same with these hecking people.

Concerning the use of water trucks to generate power: if you have water at a high elevation, why not just build a conduit running downhill and run it through a turbine? What do the trucks add, except a perpetual expense stream to replace tires, etc?