Hybrid Living

In the United States, traditional hydropower (dams) provides roughly 10% of the electricity. Traditional hydro plants, in many cases, are a century+ old with embedded technology that is far from 21st century in terms of productivity for every gallon that passes by. Thus, opportunities exist for taking existing hydropower facilities and making them more productive with the existing water resources. And, there are literally thousands of dams and spillways across the country that do not have existing electricity production. But modernization operations can cost millions and take years to go through regulatory processes to seek to minimize environmental impacts (or, in the case of old facilities, perhaps to reduce environmental impact). The hydro industry often comments that the hydro regulatory process is more difficult than nuclear power's.

Is there, however, an opportunity for getting a quick 3-7% increase at existing hydropower facilities and to put electricity production at some non-power producing dam sites with a far easier regulatory process, low per-kilowatt installation costs (with, then, near-free fuel), and do so quickly? Until yesterday, at WIREC, the options didn't really seem apparent. Now, however, my head is whirling with the possibilities.

Hyrdo Green Energy has developed a hydro-kinetic power system that can be placed in-stream for generating power, for example, along rivers without the massive installation requirements of a dam and, thus, minimal implications on the river's natural flow. Their approach got some attention a couple years ago and seemed quite Energy COOL at the time. They mount their system on a barge, lowering the turbine into the water, rather than building from the river bottom (or damning the river), and generate power from the river's current. The barge enables moving the system (as it makes sense or is required) and also provides a platform for any required maintenance. Hmm. This looked of real interest as a way to quickly establish power generation on rivers around the world at relatively low cost and in a distributed fashion.

A specific application of their technology, one that they are actively pursuing for a test program in Minnesota, seems potentially quite valuable as some Silver Dust to help change the energy equation. Rather than putting the system somewhere on a river, for example, independent of existing infrastructure, Hydro Green will be putting one of their systems in the spillway of an existing dam. What are some of the benefits of this approach?

• It is reusing a resource, gaining more power from the water that has already generated power. This is a quick "boost" to the plant's energy efficiency.
• The dam has existing infrastructure (such as transformers, power lines) that can be used to move the power 'to market'.
• Permitting processes are, as mentioned above, a real nightmare for hydro projects. As this is within a spillway, the licensing process is different, within the existing plant's "capacity," and thus lowering the cost/time for getting permitted. [Note: fast permitting isn't necessarily "good," but work through the negatives here. The only serious one (and it does matter) seems likely to be the potential impact on fish survivability for fish that have gone through the dam and are disoriented coming through the turbine. Thus, this merits better understanding and evaluation before this technology is deployed on a massive scale.]
• If it works (as promised), this is a quite fast way to increase clean power production from existing facilities with (it seems on the first blush) minimal (if any) environmental impact.