Interest in Hydro Power? |

Interest in Hydro Power?

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It seems that hydroelectric power generation – despite it’s widespread availability and near-100% duty cycle advantage over wind and solar – is the ugly stepchild of green energy. This is unfortunate; as recently as the 1940s, over HALF of the electric power generated in the United States came from hydro. That number is now around 4%, a number that is shrinking and concentrated in a few states. If you have any doubts to the wide availability of hydro-capable water resources, look no farther than the “Virtual Hydropower Prospector” from Idaho National Labs:
http://hydropower.inel.gov/prospector/r_selector.shtml

Clearly environmental and legal issues arise, but steps can be taken to minimize these. For example, I’ve designed a modular, floating 500W – 2KW micro hydro system that runs the penstock – the typically unsightly and typically ABOVE GROUND piping that connects the water intake to the turbine – completely UNDERwater, along the river bottom. The system is adaptable to a wide range of head/flow situations, and can even be installed in the path of storm surge runoffs (I see the awesome power in weather systems as another huge untapped potential!)

So… I’d like to hear from the TechBites community. Why do YOU think hydro power has been marginalized and is rarely mentioned when forms of renewable energy are discussed? One friend suggested it’s because a LOT of “micro-hydro” installations – if you YouTube them – are one-off, cobbled together beasts often built by off-grid hippies (I use the “hippy” term fondly and consider myself one!) to run hydroponic pot farms and/or meth labs.

I have several other inventions/designs in the hydro area, but would love to get some feedback from the TechBites community before I spend any more cycles on this. One idea is for a novel waterwheel/turbine that combines the kinetic and potential energy of falling water with buoyancy (chambers fill on the way down, then empty and float back toward the surface). Another is for a system of Archimedes’s Screws that use the kinetic energy (surface velocity) of a large stream / river to fill a temporary holding tank. Once the tank is sufficiently full, a valve is opened that allows the water in the tank to flow down through a conventional turbine. While such a system loses the normal, decided hydro advantage of near-100% duty cycle, it allows the 500W-2KW system described above to be used even in areas with insufficient head for conventional hydro installations. Thoughts? Comments?

Discussion started by Robert Klein , on 28 December 12:42 PM

Replies

Lee H Goldberg, 2010-01-07 14:19:45

Hi Robert- I saw your discussion when it was posted but did not have time to comment until now. Your mini/micro hydro technology is intriguing and I'd love to see you post some more details here in the form of a larger technical article. As someone who's dabbled with small wind turbines and off-grid solar, I know that micro-hydro is a more cost-effective and reliable way to generate power wherever geology and local zoning ordinances permit. I also think that mid-scale hydro (20kW-1MW) could easily undergo a revival if some cost-effective equipment became available again. I have a friend who runs a woodworking company in Vermont that's located right near an old hydro plant which used to supply a portion of the town's power until the late '40s. He's itching to put together the funding to put new equipment in the still-sturdy power plant buildings and revive the project. There must be hundreds of similar abandoned installations througout the country. Would your technology be scalable to the multi-kW level?

I even think that large Hydroelectric dams can continue to be an important part of the global energy mix - especially if some of the drawbacks inherent in most traditional technologies can be overcome. So-called "Big" Hydro" usually causes major (and often disastrous) changes to the areas both upstream and downstream from where they are constructed. Besides the obvious flooding of the beautiful, and often fertile lands that lie behind a dam, the downstream areas can be impacted negatively as the water flow pattern falls out of synch with the ecosystem that evolved around the naturally-flowing river over millions of years. Dams also tend to block the flow of nutrient-rich silt to downstream farmland. Besides denying farmlands the ability to replenish soil nutrients, the diverted silt tends to settle at the dam's headstock, eventually reducing its capacity, and in some cases, rendering the dam useless. I won't even go into the impact to wildlife and migratory fish (like salmon) that often accompany a large hydropower dam.

Despite this, dams have an important part to play - both in power generation and flood control.