NHA Public Affairs Packet

NHA Board Meeting, January 26-27, 2011

Table of Contents

This packet contains NHA press releases as well as a representative sampling of articles related to conventional hydropower, pumped storage, and hydrokinetic technologies that have appeared in the press since the last board meeting. NHA press releases appear first followed by articles in chronological order.

NHA Press Releases

Extension of renewable energy incentive promotes clean energy development and job growth

NHA now accepting scholarship applications

News Articles

Oct. 13 Renewable Energy World (Pages 1-2) Conventional NHA/Member Cited Oct. 13 The Citizen of Laconia, NH (Pg. 3-5) Conventional NHA Members Cited Oct. 14 OPB News, WA/OR (Pg. 6) Conventional NHA Cited Oct. 14 Sustainable Business Oregon, OR (Pg. 7-9) Small Hydro NHA Member Cited Oct. 15 New York Times Greenwire (Pg. 10-14) Pumped Stor. NHA/Members Cited Oct. 20 Renewable Energy World (Pg. 15-17) Conventional NHA Members Cited Oct. 24 Washington Post (Pg. 18-21) Renewables NHA Members Cited Oct. 26 WNED, Buffalo/Toronto (Pg. 22-23) Conventional NHA Member Cited Nov. 1 POWER-GEN (Pg. 24-33) Small Hydro NHA/Members Cited Nov. 8 OPB News, WA/OR (Pg. 34-35) Small Hydro NHA/Members Cited Nov. 10 Solar Home & Bus. Journal (Pg. 36-37) Conventional NHA Member Cited Nov. 17 The Maine Campus, ME (Pg. 38-39) Hydrokinetics NHA Member Cited Nov. 22 HydroWorld (Pg. 40-41) All NHA/Members Cited Nov. 22 Hartford Business Journal, CT (Pg. 42-45) Conventional NHA Member Cited Nov. 25 The Seattle Times, WA (Pg. 46-49) Marine/Tidal NHA Members Cited Dec. 7 Bloomberg (Pg. 50-55) All NHA Members Cited Dec. 23 News Tribune, WA (Pg. 56-57) Conventional Jan. 3 Hydro Review (Pg. 58-60) All NHA/Members Cited Jan. 6 Renewable Energy World (61-62) Conduit Jan. 11 Columbia Basin Herald, WA (63-65) All NHA/Member Cited Jan. 11 ABC News (66-67) All STATEMENT 25 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. ∙ Suite 450 ∙ Washington, D.C., 20001∙202/682-1700∙ www.hydro.org Contact: Kristen Nelson 301/654-2003 ∙ [email protected]

For Immediate Release

Extension of renewable energy incentive promotes clean energy development and job growth

Washington, D.C. (December 17, 2010) – The following is the statement of National Hydropower Association Executive Director Linda Church Ciocci on the passage of a one-year extension of the Section 1603 grants in lieu of tax credit program in the tax bill compromise:

“NHA applauds the House and Senate for approving an extension of the Section 1603 program this week. Incentives for hydropower and other renewable energy development are critical for our country to expand generation of clean energy resources and promote the local economic benefits and job creation opportunities associated with these projects.”

“NHA looks forward to working with the 112th Congress next year on additional growth policies that were not included in the bill, such as the 48C renewable energy manufacturers investment tax credit, the clean renewable energy bonds (CREBs) program, and other important incentives to drive deployment for conventional hydropower, pumped storage and marine and hydrokinetic resources.”

PRESS RELEASE 25 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. ∙ Suite 450 ∙ Washington, D.C., 20001∙202/682-1700∙ www.hydro.org

For Immediate Release

NHA now accepting scholarship applications

Washington, DC (January 10, 2011) –The National Hydropower Association is pleased to announce that it is now taking applications for the 2011 NHA Past Presidents' Legacy Scholarship. The $2,000 scholarship goes to promising young people who demonstrate the academic skills and commitment to help create the next generation of the hydropower industry.

Details:

Who: Full-time juniors, seniors, or grad students with a 3.0 on a 4.0 scale (or equivalent) undergraduate or graduate course of study at an accredited four-year college or university -- or -- students with an equivalent GPA at an accredited vocational technical school or program.

Applicant must be pursuing a program of study that is related to the hydropower industry: Engineering, sciences (biology, fisheries, and hydrology), communications, or environmental studies.

Application: Available at http://www.hydro.org/2011%20Past%20Presidents%20Scholarship%20App.pdf

Deadline: February 15, 2011

Presentation: At the NHA Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., in April 2011

Send application to: The National Hydropower Association Past Presidents’ Legacy Scholarship Program Scholarship Management Services One Scholarship Way Saint Peter, MN 56082

Background:

NHA created the Past Presidents' Legacy Scholarship in 2008 to encourage students to consider becoming part of the U.S. hydropower industry. The growing industry has professionals in many different fields, including engineering, IT, biology, environmental sciences, forestry, hydrology, animal sciences, management, financial services, communications, and other areas. Many companies also offer high-paying skilled labor and technical positions.

Last year's winner, Namratha Gudemaranahalli, a junior at West Virginia University, is pursuing a degree in Biology.

Contributions from NHA, the Hydro Research Foundation, organizations throughout the industry, and individual givers fund the NHA Past Presidents' Legacy Scholarship. We encourage everyone who supports the future of clean, renewable, affordable energy to join us in making tax-deductible contributions.

Please send contributions to: Ms. Pat Halter Scholarship America One Scholarship Way St. Peter, MN 56082

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The Power of Rehab: Squeezing More Power From Our Hydroelectric Plants October 13, 2010

At some point, that car you’re driving will need a little restoration work.

After some machining work and a few replacement parts, it will run a little smoother, get better gas mileage and go from a rumble to a purr. With the right retooling and equipment, you’ll get a lot more miles and production out of it.

With greater significance, the same is true for hydroelectric plants.

Many of the hydroelectric plants in North America are more than 50 years old and are in need of rehabilitation. They represent a phenomenal opportunity to increase the production of renewable energy amid deep concern about climate change.

Consider this: A simple rehabilitation can increase a hydroelectric plant’s power output by as much as a third.

“We can get 20 to 30 percent more power just from modern hydraulics, new runners, new wicket gates and sometimes a modification of the draft tube,” Mark Garner, president and chief executive officer of Voith Hydro, said in an interview. “It really makes a difference.”

There are about 2,400 hydropower plants in the U.S. Upgrading those plants with modern technologies could add a significant amount of hydropower capacity to the nation’s power portfolio without building a single dam.

“There’s a huge market to further modernize the existing fleet” of hydropower plants, Garner said.

A strong national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) and other policy initiatives, including a production tax credit equal to the credit received by other renewable energy producers, would help trigger these enhancements. Right now, incremental hydropower receives a production tax credit of 1 cent per kWh while producers of solar and wind power receive 2 cents per kWh.

Not providing tax credit parity to hydropower, the largest and most reliable form of renewable power, is a crime against common sense and a major flaw in any national energy plan.

Meanwhile, several lawmakers, led by Sens. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and Sam Brownback, R- Kan., have introduced a bill that would require utilities to get 15 percent of their power from renewable resources such as hydro by 2021. The bipartisan group of senators said a national RES is a crucial issue and should be brought to the Senate floor as a stand-alone measure.

A national RES will “create tens of thousands of jobs, while expanding clean, reliable hydropower in every state,” said Linda Church Ciocci, executive director of the National Hydropower Association. “Passing a national RES is crucial to creating jobs and building America’s clean energy resources.”

To learn more about hydropower’s potential for boosting capacity and creating jobs in the U.S., be sure to read the October issue of Hydro Review magazine.

Russell Ray is senior associate editor of Hydro Review magazine. Russell has 11 years experience as an energy journalist, covering the oil and gas industry in Oklahoma and the growth of solar and nuclear power in Florida. He served eight years as the energy reporter for the Tulsa World. He held the same position at the Tampa Tribune for two and a half years before joining Hydro Review in 2009. http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2010/10/the-power-of-rehab

The Citizen of Laconia

Article published Oct 13, 2010 Energy project unveiled; impact called 'staggering' Franklin:

State and local officials announced Tuesday that Franklin has been chosen as the site for a large-scale power system facility associated with the construction of a major high- tension transmission line bringing renewable hydropower from Quebec to New England.

The investment in the city of Franklin was put at $250 million, and Gov. John Lynch said the project would create 1,200 jobs in New Hampshire, and pump about $1 billion into the state's economy.

Franklin Mayor Ken Merrifield said that the "green energy" project, called Northern Pass, along with Public Service of New Hampshire and Hydro-Quebec have formed a partnership that will bring 1,200 megawatts of renewable hydroelectric power into New England, which will include the construction of transmission lines and a new convertor station built in the Franklin.

At 1,200 megawatts, the power line would potentially carry enough electricity to power as many as 1 million homes, according to some calculations.

"They are going to make an investment in the city that is staggering," Merrifield told the crowd which had gathered at City Hall to hear details of plan which until Tuesday had been a closely guarded secret. "We will realize new revenue to the city in the order of millions of dollars from a direct line convertor station that will being green power down to New England from Canada."

"This is an exciting night for Franklin and New Hampshire," said Lynch. "As governor, my top priority is getting people back to work and creating good paying jobs."

Gary Long, president of PSNH, that the project is the largest renewable energy project in New England.

"We're talking about a project that will have at least forty years of service in the region," he said.

Long explained that the project is designed to help meet the needs of carbon emissions reduction goals in New Hampshire and the region through increased use of renewable energy resources.

"This project is very significant to the region and New England and that's one of the reasons why we're doing it," he said. "This will provide a lot of benefits."

He explained that through a partnership between the Northern Pass Transmission LLC, a New Hampshire company established by Northeast Utilities, PSNH, NSTAR and HQ Hydro Renewable Energy, the Northern Pass will deliver the competitively priced low- carbon power from Hydro Quebec's hydroelectric facilities located in Quebec. "It is one more initiative we have undertaken to address the challenge of significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions in a manner that makes economic sense," said Long, adding that the project will provide low-carbon energy and help meet the goals of New Hampshire's Climate Action Plan and the requirements of Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

"It's a win-win for customers here in New Hampshire as well as the rest of New England," he said.

Merrifield said that the positive effects on the city will be "substantial."

"The effects in terms of city tax revenue and potential for other economic developments are just staggering, and I for one, am very excited for the opportunity," he said.

Gov. Lynch agreed, saying that the project will add tens of millions of dollars to the Franklin property tax base and significantly increase New Hampshire's supply of renewable energy.

"We need to continue to have New Hampshire lead the nation out of this recession," he said.

But, according to the Northern Pass Project director Anne Bartosewicz, there is a lot of work to do and power might not begin to flow across the lines for another five years.

"The line from the U.S.-Canada border to Franklin is 140 miles long," she said, adding that a goal is to minimize impact to social and natural resources during construction. She said Franklin was chosen because it is a "crossroads for electric transmission in New Hampshire."

"We have a lot of work to do, but we have been collecting data," she said. "The permitting of the project is long and complicated and because it crosses the Canadian border, it does require the Department of Energy to issue a permit."

She added that she hopes an initial application will be filed with the DOE within "the next several days."

Bartosewicz said that the permitting process will take over two years, but in 2012 she said she hopes all the permits will be obtained and construction on the facility can start.

Although PSNH owns land in Franklin, Bartosewicz did not indicate any particular sites for construction.

"We encourage your participation in the DOE scoping meetings to ensure that the city of Franklin's perspective is considered," she said.

Merrifield said that the current assessed value of the city is approximately $563 million and the new facility will cost $250 million or more, which will represent an increase of 44 percent in the city's taxable value.

"It will give us the fiscal capacity to do a lot of things we're wanted to do for a long time but did not have the financial ability to do so," he said.

Along with the announcement, Merrifield said he has created a new advisory committee titled the "Revenue Enhancement Commission," which will begin in-depth discussions on the potential benefits for Franklin, including tax relief for residents and businesses, increase education support, capital improvements, and innovative business incentives.

"I want to make the very best decisions about the new future that we face," he said.

Bartosewicz said that the next steps in the project will include a detailed environmental impact statement that will be prepared, and the project will need to meet all necessary federal and state permitting requirements for the proposed transmission line and converter terminal.

She said the process will include numerous opportunities for public input and the project status will be updated regularly on their website www.northernpass.us. She said the public can also call them at 1-800-286-7305.

Merrifield said an online section devoted to the project will be linked on the Franklin City's website at www.franklinnh.org

OPB NEWS Even As Dams Are Coming Down Some Want More Hydropower

Rob Manning | October 14, 2010 | Portland, OR

A day after Washington state officials gave the go-ahead to embark on one of the biggest dam removals in history, the region’s electricity planners heard a pitch to expand hydro-power.

Pacificorp’s Condit Dam on Washington’s White Salmon River could come down in a year, depending on federal approvals.

Meantime, hydro advocates told the Northwest Power and Conservation Council it’s possible to add thousands of megawatts of hydropower, without harming the environment.

Andrew Munro with the National Hydropower Association pointed to the Midwest, where federal dams are changing.

Andrew Munro: “These are existing Army Corps dams that were never utilized for energy generation. And it’s bringing construction jobs and it’s bringing new renewable energy to that part of the country.”

A representative of a Washington utility said they’ve looked at 145 possible new hydro sites, but may wind up with fewer than five actual projects.

Power council staff say in the rare instances when good locations can be found, what’s called “sustainable hydro” can offer electricity at a competitive price.

Thursday, October 14, 2010, 9:16am PDT | Modified: October 14, 2010, 9:19 AM

Small hydro holds promise for Oregon by Lee van der Voo Sustainable Business Oregon

Ten days. That's how long the new Juniper Plant – a hydropower generation plant about four miles north of Bend – ran in 2010. Built by the Central Oregon Irrigation District, the $24 million plant began generating power Oct. 4 after a yearlong construction. It shuts down Thursday, marking the end of the district's irrigation season and a new landmark in power generation for the agency.

For COID, 10 days of power generation were 10 days of promise. The district's new unassuming facility off Highway 97 is a symbol of gradual efforts to use hydropower to offset the rising cost of supplying water to farms.

"The benefit is that its renewable energy and the second is that it does create an additional line of revenue for the district that helps keep our assessment rates for the district — it doesn't eliminate them, but it keeps them lower," said Steve Johnson, district manager for COID.

Small-scale hydropower projects like this one represent a largely untapped energy source for the state — Energy Trust of Oregon is probing 30 possible projects at irrigation districts alone. Not only do they offset the cost of doing business, but they also enable irrigation districts to replace ditches with pipes, leaving more water in streams and meeting expanding environmental goals and regulations.

COID supplies water to 3,600 locations across 45,000 acres along the Deschutes River. The district operates with very little power – its irrigation channels are gravity fed. It first tried hydropower as a revenue-generating option with its Siphon Power Project near Bend’s Old Mill District in 1989. That 5-megawatt hydropower plant now brings in $300,000 to $400,000 in additional revenue annually, after debt service and operating costs.

The Juniper Plant will now do the same. The 5-megawatt plant was built with $10 million in support from grants and a state tax credit. As Juniper provides power to PacificPower, Johnson expects to see the plant add another $100,000 in revenues to COID's budget next year, a sum that will grow to $300,000 after five years of debt service.

It's among a handful of hydropower projects COID plans for the future.

Jed Jorgensen, senior energy project manager at Energy Trust, is charged with helping hydropower development along as such development helps Oregon utilities meet renewable energy goals. He said Energy Trust is promoting hydropower at existing dams or at storage and flood control facilities.

"A lot of folks feel that those are low-hanging fruit to develop capacity, if they can be done in ways that would improve fish passage or other natural resource issues" he said.

Energy Trust won't consider hydropower projects that add dams to Oregon rivers and streams, Jorgensen said. Irrigation districts, however, tend to be comprised of canals where water is either falling or can be piped to fall at a vertical distance, creating a force that can easily generate power on its way to customers. Permit requirements for irrigation districts do not allow the districts to draw water just to develop hydropower, limited production to water already flowing by.

Those limits haven't stopped hydropower from being a good resource for districts looking to recover costs.

At the Swalley Irrigation District, general manager Suzanne Butterfield expects hydropower production to garner between $160,000 and $190,000 annually. That district's .75 megawatt system came online in April. All but $2 million of its $14.5 million cost was paid for with grants from conservation and other agencies. The project, which converted a 5-mile canal to a 5-mile

8 pipeline, restored about 18 million gallons of water daily to the Deschutes River, a permanent move that represents the single largest water contribution back to the river.

Jan Lee, executive director of the Northwest Hydropower Association, said hydropower has other benefits.

"Hydropower is generally stable, around the clock," she said. And environmental impacts are few when hydropower capacity is added to existing diversions. Other benefits include the added safety and security of decentralized power facilities, and the ability for local ownership and revenue generation. Hydropower facilities also have a long lifespan, from 50 to 100 years, "so if you install hydropower you know it's going to be there for a while," she said.

Lee said urban water districts can also develop hydropower facilities along pipelines. She points to Portland, which recently acquired a permit to add a hydropower plant to the Vernon Water Tower Park at Northeast 15th and Killingsworth Avenues.

Other possibilities include hydropower at reservoirs, and hydropower pump storage, which has the potential to serve as a backup for wind power.

October 15, 2010 DOE Promotes Pumped Hydro as Option for Renewable Power Storage

By JENNY MANDEL of Greenwire

When the wind howls in Denmark and energy demand is low, turbine farms can store energy in a Norwegian reservoir for use the next day.

But a hard wind in the dead of a Texas night has power companies paying customers to use electricity they don't need.

That is a waste of clean power -- something that U.S. promoters of renewable energy want to change. Among the American boosters of pumped hydro storage is Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who maintains that water-based storage could help ease the integration of renewable power into the electrical grid.

Using pumped hydro to store electricity costs less than $100 per kilowatt-hour and is highly efficient, Chu told his energy advisory board during a recent meeting. By contrast, he said, using sodium ion flow batteries -- another option for storing large amounts of power -- would cost $400 per kWh and have less than 1 percent of pumped hydro's capacity.

"Yet in the United States," he said, "[pumped hydro] has not been seriously planned or looked at -- yet."

This is how pumped hydro storage works: Excess electricity is used to pump water uphill into a reservoir. When power is needed, water is released over a turbine to generate electricity. Water can either be used on a once-through basis and allowed to flow to a river, or it can cycle endlessly in a closed loop.

There are about 40 U.S. pumped hydro facilities, most of which were built on the East Coast in the 1960s, '70s and '80s to complement nuclear plants that produced a steady stream of power around the clock, said Rick Miller, past president of the National Hydropower Association and a senior vice president with Omaha, Neb.-based hydropower consultancy HDR-DTA.

The same principles that made pumped hydro a good choice for nuclear power plants make them good for renewable energy, Miller said.

Consider how the technology is used to help both Denmark and Norway, he said.

Windy Denmark is able to shift nighttime energy resources for daytime use, while Norway -- which gets almost all its electricity from conventional hydropower -- has reservoirs behind its dams that can easily store that excess power. The arrangement helps Norway mitigate some of the risk from drought and other challenges to its hydro-heavy grid, Miller said.

For Norwegians, the system is a great money-maker as well. They pay their neighbor almost nothing for the nighttime wind energy they take on since demand is so low at that time, but charge Denmark a premium for it at peak pricing hours.

"Norway is making a killing," Miller said. "Danish people pay the highest power prices in Europe."

If U.S. utilities could add pumped hydro storage to the grid, they could potentially play both sides of that equation and save money overall by avoiding both the highs and lows of wholesale power pricing.

In addition to the negative electricity prices sometimes seen in Texas, Miller said utilities in the Pacific Northwest sometimes pay people to take power thanks to quirks in conditions on the Columbia River.

Conventional hydropower turbines on the river provide a large amount of electricity to the area's grid, Miller said, but several stakeholders on the river have a say in how they operate. There are no reservoirs to store water behind the dams there, so pumped hydro is not an option, and certain minimum and maximum amounts of water must continually flow over the dams to support fish populations in the river and to keep it navigable for watercraft.

As a result, Miller said, Columbia River hydropower is a "must-run" resource that cannot be throttled down when electricity demand is low. Sometimes, the result is negative pricing.

Miller said situations like these could increase as more utilities face renewable energy portfolio standards, mandates requiring that a certain percentage of electricity be generated using wind, solar and other renewable sources.

Environmental impacts

Advocates say that closed-loop pumped hydro technology is easier on the environment than conventional hydropower projects. Those can drastically change water levels downstream, and if reservoirs are included, they often flood habitats above the dam as well.

Boosters point to the Eagle Mountain project, a closed-loop system proposed for construction near Palm Springs, Calif., by Eagle Crest Energy Co., that is awaiting a permitting decision by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Eagle Mountain is sited to take advantage of two abandoned iron ore quarries that would be connected with an underground tunnel. Water would be pumped to the higher quarry when

11 power is plentiful and would drop over turbines to the lower one to generate an expected 1,300 megawatts of power, roughly enough to serve 1.3 million homes.

Because the quarries are abandoned and the system would continuously recycle nonpotable water, the project's environmental impacts are projected to be minimal and its cost low, planners say.

With California under a state mandate to generate 33 percent of its power from renewables by 2020, Eagle Mountain could be a valuable resource for balancing the grid.

The environmental group American Rivers has campaigned against conventional hydropower projects and for the removal of dams on rivers. But the group is not opposed to pumped hydro storage when built off-river in closed-loop systems, according to John Seebach, who runs the organization's Hydropower Reform Initiative.

"Closed-loop systems have the promise of not causing the ecological harm to rivers that you see in traditional hydropower [and] traditional pumped storage projects," he said, provided it is done with appropriate environmental reviews and safeguards.

"I don't think people are really talking about building new on-river projects. Once you move something on-river ... you're going to introduce a lot of harm," he added, pointing out that pumping water for an on-river system can require that the water flow backward -- wreaking havoc on the ecosystem.

'Certainty in pricing'

The complication: While pumped hydro is technically simple, it is expensive to build.

For a typical 1,000 megawatt facility, DOE estimates the cost at between $1 billion and $2 billion. That makes pumped hydro cheaper on a per-megawatt basis than any other large-scale storage option except for one, a strategy that stores compressed air in naturally occurring cave formations. But pumped storage, while flexible and relatively inexpensive, still costs too much for any but the biggest utilities to finance on their own.

Today, pumped-hydro projects take five years to permit and five years to build, comparable to what is needed for a nuclear plant.

A major hurdle for stored-hydro projects, according to the Hydropower Association's Miller, lies with regulations and pricing around the grid services that storage provides.

"The industry understands the physics of it, but the markets don't have an ability today to monetize the benefits of pumped storage," he said.

Grid services like load shifting and reliability are difficult to price into electricity rate structures. Regulated utilities do not have a good way to charge for them, and deregulated utilities have little incentive to raise prices to fund capital-intensive projects that won't be completed for years.

Energy regulators view pumped storage as a transmission tool, while the technology shows up on utility maps as an energy sink because it spools out slightly less energy than is fed into it.

Many of the questions over how pumped hydro is priced come back to rules set by FERC.

Miller said reworking those rules to recognize the contribution that storage makes would be the biggest help for the industry. "The industry is not looking for tax handouts; they're looking for certainty in pricing so they can get project financing," he said.

But if storage technologies were to become eligible for an investment tax credit, or ITC, he said, pumped storage should be included. "An ITC alone is not going to be enough, alone, to get financing," he added. "But a more certain market, alone, would be enough to get financing."

The regulation of carbon emissions would also help, Miller said.

Without such regulations, utilities often opt to build new natural gas plants to add power that can be provided as needed to balance the less-than-steady supply from renewables.

But it is unclear, Miller said, which option is cheaper long term for utilities, and the answer depends in part on the price of natural gas. A price on carbon, he said, would likely weigh in favor of hydropower.

DOE as a catalyst

Energy Secretary Chu's stated interest in hydropower can help the technology move forward, but DOE's abilities there are limited.

Jacques Beaudry-Losique, manager of DOE's Wind and Water Power Program, which includes hydropower, said the program convened a stakeholder workshop earlier this month in Washington, D.C., to help it put together a playbook, due out later this year.

One thing slowing DOE down is that in 2006, its own hydropower program was shut down.

Beaudry-Losique said that with budgets tight, it was argued that hydropower was already commercial, so it did not need a research program. Then about 18 months ago, the program was restarted, with storage technologies as a focus.

The budget for pumped storage is about $2 million a year, Beaudry-Losique said, as compared with between $15 million and $20 million per year for the conventional hydropower program.

One request from participants at the recent workshop, according to Beaudry-Losique, was to get pumped hydro projects included in DOE's loan guarantee program. Discussions around that are under way.

He said DOE can also play a "catalyst role" by working with FERC to address permitting and other regulatory issues.

A DOE-funded study by the Electric Power Research Institute will examine what grid services pumped hydro provides, potentially contributing to structural market changes. FERC "Chairman [Jon] Wellinghoff has been very supportive of pumped hydro storage," Beaudry-Losique added.

The department is also providing technical assistance to the industry.

DOE is working with the Interior Department and the Army Corps of Engineers to publish a report on technical development, cost and site development models that could help project planners move faster, thus trimming cost. Beaudry-Losique said DOE can help shave a year off the permitting and a year off the construction phases.

The department is also assessing "every single stream in the country," he said, for conventional and pumped hydro storage.

As renewable portfolios are put in place, the need for power storage solutions will grow.

"Now is about the time" to focus on it, Chu told his advisory board, "because when you're at 1 percent, 2 percent of the electric supply system you don't really care. But when you're at 10 percent, you care."

For more news on energy and the environment, visit www.greenwire.com. Greenwire is published by Environment & Energy Publishing. Read More »

Canada Cashing In on Hydropower Potential October 20, 2010

Canada is already the world’s second-largest hydropower producer behind China.

But Canada is bent on producing more, driven by its vast potential for hydropower generation and demands for more clean energy in the U.S.

It’s a major element of Canada’s plan to boost its economy, as lawmakers attempt to wean the country off coal-fired power through landmark legislation that encourages the development of renewable energy, especially hydropower.

“The federal government is intending to introduce legislation to reduce emissions pretty significantly from coal-fired plants,” said Colin Clark, chairman of the Canadian Hydropower Association. “I think that creates an opportunity for hydropower.”

In the U.S., where restrictions on carbon emissions are anticipated and demand is growing, there’s a big market for Canada’s hydropower resources. A handful of deals to export that power to the U.S. have already been made and more are looming.

“The U.S. is constrained in how it can develop its own generation systems because of uncertainty around carbon,” said Dan McCarthy, president and chief executive officer of Black & Veatch Water. “Canadian hydro companies have an opportunity to take advantage of that uncertainty and get some power purchase agreements in place.”

Hydro-Quebec recently reached long-term agreements to export hydropower supplies to Vermont and New England.

Hydro-Quebec and Public Service of New Hampshire plan to build a 140-mile transmission line that will bring up to 1,200 MW of Canadian hydropower to central New Hampshire. In another

agreement, Hydro-Quebec will provide up to 225 MW of hydropower to two Vermont utilities, Central Vermont Public Service and Green Mountain Power, for 26 years beginning in 2012.

Canada, home to about 475 hydroelectric plants with a capacity of 70,000 MW, produces about 355 terawatt-hours of hydropower each year. But Canada’s untapped potential is far greater.

According to a study commissioned by the Canadian Hydropower Association, Canada has 163,000 MW of untapped hydropower potential, more than twice the country’s existing hydropower capacity.

Already, hydropower accounts for 60 percent of Canada’s electricity consumption. That number is sure to rise as construction of several new hydropower plants near completion while more coal-fired plants are shuttered in the name of clean air.

There has been “a very significant increase in the number of references to hydropower by the federal government,” Clark said. “It shows that the politicians are strongly supportive of the hydropower development in Canada and policies that will encourage development.”

Earlier this year, British Columbia approved an aggressive plan known as the Clean Energy Act to create jobs and reduce carbon emissions through the development and export of new hydropower capacity.

Among other things, the measure establishes a goal of energy self-sufficiency by 2016, requires the province to generate a whopping 93 percent of its power from renewable resources such as hydro, and raises the standard for meeting incremental power demand through conservation and efficiency improvements from 50 percent to 66 percent by 2020.

In addition, the bill authorizes significant public investments in expansions at BC Hydro’s Mica and Revelstoke projects.

Another chief objective of the act is to make BC Hydro a net exporter of electricity. Under the measure, BC Hydro will be able to secure long-term export power sales contracts with other jurisdictions, something that was prohibited before the law was passed.

“We want British Columbia to become a leading North American supplier of clean, reliable, low- carbon electricity and technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions while strengthening our economy in every region,” said British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell.

In Ontario, the Green Energy Act has led to a surge of new interest in building renewable energy projects throughout the province.

The act includes a feed-in-tariff (FIT) program, which provides price supports for renewable- energy producers serving Ontario. The FIT program is a major part of the province’s aggressive plan to eliminate coal-fired power.

Under the FIT program, the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) has offered contracts to 184 projects with a capacity exceeding 500 kW each. Altogether, those projects are expected to add nearly 2,500 MW of new capacity. Of the 184 projects, 46 are hydropower projects.

“Coal-fired generation will be eliminated in Ontario by the end of 2014,” said Colin Anderson, chief executive officer of OPA.

For details on hydropower project activity in Canada, be sure to read the November issue of Hydro Review.

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2010/10/canada-cashing-in-on- hydropower-potential?cmpid=rss

Clean energy industry looks ahead

By Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson Washington Post Staff Writers Sunday, October 24, 2010; A3

The billions in federal stimulus dollars spent on expanding "green energy" industries and creating "green jobs" have provided a lifeline for U.S. wind and solar companies, but renewable- energy executives are worried that the future will not be as promising.

President Obama frequently points to these wave-of-the-future jobs as one of the substantial achievements of his administration, and wind and solar executives say that the economic stimulus bill turned 2009 into a banner year instead of a catastrophic one for their businesses.

But limited funding in one area, a slow ramp-up in another, prolonged negotiations over loan guarantees and the continuing economic slump have made it difficult for the industry to make the kind of progress Obama and many others had hoped for and imagined. As a result, the president does not appear to have gotten much political credit for new green jobs, despite his many visits to battery, solar and wind facilities aided by the stimulus package.

Adding to the uncertainty, industry officials say their businesses could contract sharply unless a key tax subsidy, set to expire at the end of the year, is extended.

"In the short term, did this recovery program make new jobs in the clean energy sector? I think the answer is yes," said Joshua Freed, director of the clean energy program at the think tank Third Way. "What does that mean when we look back in two or three years? It takes awhile to figure out the conclusion of this story."

The White House, however, has already declared the program an unqualified success. The Council of Economic Advisers issued a report in July that found the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's more than $90 billion in total spending and future tax breaks produced 190,000 "clean energy" jobs in the first quarter of 2010. A recent Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study found that the act's $5.4 billion in investment tax credits have created or saved 50,000 jobs in the renewable sector.

Critics say that the same money could have been used to create more jobs or to produce them faster, but Obama administration officials say the clean energy positions are not the same as other jobs, such as road work.

"The recovery act was a diversified portfolio of actions. Some items were designed to be faster but didn't have as much bang for the buck," said Jason Furman, deputy director of the National Economic Council. "These are the types of jobs where they tend to be higher paying. They tend to be longer lasting."

Success rates

The effectiveness of the stimulus money for energy has varied widely from one basket of money to another.

One highly touted program in the Energy Department's portfolio - a loan guarantee program for renewable energy projects - has shrunk from $6 billion to $2.4 billion. The White House directed 60 percent of the funding to unrelated areas, such as an education measure and the "Cash for Clunkers" incentive for people to replace old vehicles.

The Energy Department also needed time to gear up; the $32.7 billion it was charged with handing out is substantially more than its previous annual budgets. With spending deadlines approaching, the department has picked up its pace of grant- and loan-making, shoveling $8.2 billion out the door in September, according to department officials, much of it to state and local governments for energy efficiency programs.

Before the recovery act, the Energy Department did not have a loan guarantee office. It has hired 200 employees and contractors. But Rhone A. Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said that many companies have waited 19 months for decisions.

By contrast, a program that provides wind and solar projects with cash instead of tax credits has been a huge success. Before the economic slump in late 2008, financial institutions provided most of the capital for those projects and used the tax credits worth 30 percent of costs. Now wind farm developers, who often don't have the earnings to offset the tax credits, have been turning to the Treasury for grants of equal value as allowed under the recovery act.

Large and small firms have benefited. The program steered $975 million to Iberdrola Renewables, based in Spain, for 13 wind projects operating in nine states. It also funneled $15,964 to the Grumpy Troll Brewery, Restaurant and Pizzeria in Mount Horeb, Wis., so the brewpub could install 38 solar panels on its roof.

Don Furman, Iberdrola's senior vice president, said the decision to offer companies the option of a cash payment rather than a tax credit kept it from shutting down several operations in the United States.

"This literally saved the industry," Furman said, adding that wind producers could no longer sell their tax credits on Wall Street as they had in the past.

NextEra Energy, the nation's largest wind developer, used the grant program, or convertible investment tax credit, for 93 percent of the 985 megawatts of wind power it built in 2009.

"It's difficult to put an exact number on how many more megawatts we built as a result," said company spokesman Randolph Clerihue, "but we definitely put more steel in the ground than we would have without it."

The program helped wind projects continue apace in 2009 and has led to a significant increase in solar installations over the next two years. But the U.S. wind industry is contracting this year and is expected to be slow in 2011, Furman said, "partly because nobody knows what's going to happen when this program expires."

Without legislation mandating a national renewable energy standard for utilities or limits on greenhouse gases, experts say, it remains unclear whether wind and solar energy will make meaningful inroads into the nation's energy market.

Nonetheless, as Obama has campaigned in recent weeks, he has touted these programs as one of the main ways he is helping Americans get back to work. When asked in Des Moines what his policies will do in the next year to help an unemployed church congregant "secure a job and have that American dream again," the president cited a wind turbine maker in Fort Madison, Iowa, that had received stimulus funds. Noting that the business had converted a shuttered factory, Obama said it had "just hired several hundred people and were looking at hiring several hundred more because they are seeing some certainty in the renewable energy industry."

Last week, he told a Seattle resident during one of his backyard chats that because of the recovery act's investment in advanced car battery technology, the U.S. global share of this high- tech market should rise from 2 percent to 40 percent by 2015.

"That shows you how fast we can turn things around if we're making good, smart, strategic investments," Obama said.

The list of recipients varies.

Cree of Durham, N.C., the leading U.S. manufacturer of solid state lighting, received $39 million under the advanced energy manufacturing tax credit to expand capacity and lower production costs for LED chips use in lights. The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center received $24.7 million from the Energy Department to construct a facility capable of testing wind blades up to 90 meters in length; blades that long can only be tested overseas now.

And several large companies, including Florida's NextEra and CenterPoint Energy of Houston, have received $200 million each to install smart meters.

More than one way

Critics of the stimulus, however, question whether the money was the most effective way to create jobs. Andrew Morris, a University of Alabama law professor and senior fellow at the Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center, said neither side of the debate has proved whether this sort of federal spending does or does not sustain long-term employment.

"We don't have any studies, they don't have any studies, so I'd say we don't spend a hundred billion before we have any studies," Morris said, adding that it's not a surprise that stimulus funds had created jobs. "The question is, what else would have happened to the money? How many jobs would have been created otherwise?"

But the administration sees it differently. "What it's proving is clean energy investments are ready for prime time," said Cathy Zoi, assistant secretary for the Energy Department's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. "This is the single largest investment in clean energy this country's ever had. It is a critical down payment on a transition to a clean energy economy."

Staff researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.

New York Power Authority Further Woos Verizon with Offer of Hydropower Daniel Robison (2010-10-26)

SOMERSET (wned) - The New York Power Authority approved 25 megawatts of low-cost hydropower Tuesday for a potential Verizon data center in Niagara County. Local officials hope the incentive will convince the communications company to locate a data center in Niagara County. But Verizon was looking for a more generous offer.

The agreement would hinge on Verizon creating 145 jobs within four years. The deal also assumes Verizon would invest more than $1.1 billion in the area during that time frame.

But each megawatt of highly-sought-after hydropower would create less than six jobs, a near historical low for any project awarded electricity from the Niagara Falls Power Project.

"Right now we have to look at how we can create jobs no matter what it takes. Some of the old formulas and ratios don't work in this difficult economy. And we're committed to trying to create jobs no matter how creative we have to be," said Richard Kessel, president of the New York Power Authority.

Under the deal, Verizon would pay around a penny a kilowatt, about one-tenth of what residential customers pay for their electricity. Senator George Maziarz says he expects Verizon to come to Somerset, despite the fact NYPA's offer was less than they requested.

"They were asking for 30 [megawatts]. Ultimately they may get 30 but right now 25 is a great start," Masiarz said.

"Obviously if NYPA can give them more [hydropower], it would have been a better benefit. They would have liked to have all hydropower," said Richard Meyers, Somerset Town Supervisor.

He says Verizon is waiting 30 to 60 days to make its decision based on what local officials can do to move away obstacles. Recently the Somerset Town Board rezoned a 150 acre plot of land Verizon is eyeing.

"Well I think Verizon has this giant puzzle and they're looking for all the pieces to fit right in the puzzle. And this is probably one of the last pieces that needed to go in there," Myers said.

The Niagara County Industrial Development must first seek approval for tax deal for Verizon, which would keep the communications giant from paying its full load of taxes for two decades. A public hearing on that incentives package will be November 3rd.

The company is also considering other sites across the country. Verizon already has 250 data centers in the United States, including more than 20 in New York State.

Small-scale Hydro Gets BIG

Will regulatory changes allow developers to push out projects faster and more efficiently than before?

By Lindsay Morris, Associate Editor

A small hydro plant has been churning on the Kansas River since 1874. Having withstood over a century of production on a river that could be dubbed a prairie stream, the Bowersock Mills & Power Co. hydro plant has been as much a part of the history of Lawrence, Kan. as the Kansas River itself. In the 21st century, owners Sarah Hill-Nelson, the great-great-granddaughter of the original owner, and her father Stephen Hill, have set their sights on expansion. The plan is to build a 4.85 MW powerhouse on the north side of the river. And the original 2.2 MW plant isn’t going anywhere. The original generators circa 1925 and the switchboard from the 1920s all are still operating, proof that this small hydro plant was built to last. (See the Bowersock Mill postcard, opposite, postmarked 1911).

A Bowersock Mill postcard postmarked July 27, 1911. The plant originally started production in 1874. Courtesy Bowersock Mills & Power Co.

But it never hurts to make a good thing even better. That’s the mentality of these descendants of Justin D. Bowersock, the original owner. If the Hills’ expansion plans are any gauge of the small-scale hydro sector, then small is about to go big.

Hydropower makes up 6 to 7 percent of the nation’s electricity consumption and almost 75 percent of its installed renewable power capacity, according to the Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Energy. In September 2009, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the hydro industry could add 70,000 MW of capacity by installing more efficient turbines at existing dams, increasing the use of pumped-storage projects and encouraging the use of run-of-the-river turbines. That capacity is equivalent to 70 nuclear plants or 100 coal-fired plants.

Instead of producers attempting to build Hoover Dam 2, the focus has been on reviving small scale. Thanks to new tax credits, grants and initiatives to reduce gas emissions for small-scale hydro plants, requests to build projects are flooding into the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the principal federal permitting agency.

Of Regulations and Power

Small hydro developers had an opportunity to present concerns before FERC during a technical conference in December 2009. Attendees’ fundamental question: Why should a 500 kW project with no environmental issues follow the same regulatory process used for a 500 MW project? Why should the waiting process be as long and the fees as high? FERC has been responding to the inquiry through simplifying approval processes state-by-state.

On Aug. 25, Colorado became the fifth state to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with FERC on a hydrokinetic project. The purpose of an MOU is to simplify procedures authorizing the development of small-scale hydro projects. Other states with MOUs are California, Maine, Washington and Oregon.

FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff said that through MOUs and other approaches, small hydro permitting costs are decreasing. “We want to do whatever we can to lower those transactional costs so that we can facilitate as much small hydro development as possible.” (See graph of “Increased Interest in Small Hydro”).

Wellinghoff said that if companies have done their homework before approaching FERC, the regulatory process can be expedited. “They can look at our requirements and have as much material developed before they come in for that pre-licensing meeting.”

With so many processes, it can be difficult for small hydro developers to know which route to choose. Wellinghoff said the first step for developers should be a visit to the checklist of regulation requirements at ferc.gov.

Nancy Skancke, co-chair of the National Hydropower Association’s (NHA’s) Small Hydro Council, said small hydro developers proposing a project can choose among three FERC processes. The first, known as the alternative licensing process (ALP), requires the applicant to

discuss the proposed license with federal and state resources agencies and other potential stakeholders before filing an application for a license with FERC.

Under the integrated licensing process (ILP), FERC becomes involved in the process before the license application is filed and works with federal and state resource agencies, stakeholders and the company.

The traditional licensing process (TLP) is distinguished from the other two processes because consultation with the resource agencies and stakeholders generally takes place after the application is filed with FERC. While the developer can choose between these three processes, the ILP is the default process used by FERC. That means the developer must obtain prior approval from FERC to use either the TLP or the ALP.

Skancke said every project is different and the process selection is important. “If you choose the correct process, licensing can proceed most efficiently.”

The approval process for projects that add incremental power production to an existing licensed hydro project involve an amendment to that existing license, which can “generally be more expeditious than a full licensing or relicensing under the ALP, ILP or TLP,” Skancke said.

Wellinghoff said Colorado is now the state with the highest number of small hydro applications to FERC. The small-hydro boom in Colorado stems from the state’s renewable energy standard signed by Gov. Bill Ritter on March 22, which requires investor-owned utilities to obtain 30 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020. Ritter also backed efforts to develop more than a dozen small hydro sites out of 200 potential locations in the state.

Revitalizing Dams

Many of Colorado’s small hydro sites are slated to use existing dams and irrigation ditches, a relatively untapped infrastructure resource. Currently, 3 percent of the nation’s more than 82,000 dams include equipment to generate electricity, according to the NHA.

Kleinschmidt, a regulatory consulting and engineering firm, is assisting clients add small hydro to existing facilities. The largest of these “small” hydro developments are at two sites in Illinois: the Brandon Road and Dresden Island Locks and Dams. These are existing, Army Corps of Engineer navigation projects where Northern Illinois Hydropower proposes to develop hydroelectric facilities.

The Brandon Road Lock and Dam is on the Des Plaines River south of Joliet, Ill. With an estimated 10.2 MW capacity, the project will have an annual production of around 52,000 MWh. The Dresden Island Lock & Dam on the Illinois River near Morris, Ill. has a slightly greater capacity and is estimated to have an annual production of 66,000 MWh. Both projects are in the final stages of licensing and design with project completion and first power generation anticipated in late 2012.

Another proposed project is the Crooked River Project, being pursued by Portland General Electric in the Pacific Northwest. The project would be located at the Arthur R. Bowman dam outside the city of Prineville in Crook County, Ore. The dam, constructed in 1961, currently has no generation facilities, but could host a capacity of close to 6 MW upon project licensing and construction. Additionally, Kleinschmidt recently completed a number of feasibility analyses and licensing and design work of several other smaller projects on irrigation systems and water supply projects in California and Pennsylvania, among other states.

Kleinschmidt senior regulatory adviser Jay Maher said that in many cases the process to license small hydro under 1 MW in size is just as difficult as licensing a project 10 MW in size or larger. Maher said he hopes that recent initiatives by NHA’s small hydro committee as well as independent actions, such as the recent MOU between Colorado and FERC, is a sign of that small hydro licensing processes might be simplified.

“Small hydro is an amazing resource that begs to be developed, especially when we are talking about retrofitting existing facilities,” Maher said. “The development of this resource should be a no-brainer.”

Canada’s Hydro Deluge

Hydro power has never been so vibrant in Canada, where hydro generates 60 percent of the nation’s power. The National Energy Board projects that percentage will increase to 65 percent by 2015. Jacob Irving, president of the Canadian Hydropower Association (CHA), said that

Canada has 74,000 MW of current installed hydro capacity, which includes storage and run of river facilities. CHA studies show that hydropower’s technical potential is 163,000 MW. In terms of capacity generation, Canada ranks No. 3 in the world, trailing China and Brazil, and leading No. 4-ranked the United States.

“We generate more from our hydro than the U.S. because we have the storage capacity from large hydro,” Irving said.

While storage is typically a function of large hydro facilities, Irving said small-scale hydro is also increasing in Canada, particularly in the leading hydro provinces of British Columbia, Manitoba and Quebec. Each of these provinces generates 90 percent of their power from hydro.

“There is now greater recognition that it [small hydro] is such a strong long-term investment,” Irving said.

British Columbia, with its wealth of natural resources such as a mountainous terrain and an average annual rainfall of 236 inches, is a prime hydropower environment. However, according to the Independent Power Producers Association of British Columbia (IPPBC), the province has been a net importer of power from both the U.S. and Alberta over the past seven years. The IPPBC has declared British Columbia on the path toward energy self-sufficiency by 2016, with much of that generation expected to come from hydro. BC Hydro, the utility serving 94 percent of British Columbia’s population, has implemented a power acquisition program that accepts regulatory-permitted small hydro developments up to 10 MW. That soon could be extended to include 15 to 20 MW projects as well.

Iain Cuthbert, president of British Columbia-based Barkley Project Group, a management consulting firm for hydro projects under 50 MW, said the benefit to BC Hydro’s power acquisition program is that a small hydro project is processed separately from larger projects.

“Regulators are getting hit with a large group of projects at the same time, but with small hydro, you’re not forced into an imposed deadline,” he said.

Cuthbert said there are time and financial benefits to choosing small hydro in comparison to a larger project.

Brett Bauer, Canyon Creek Hydro’s chief design engineer, and Loren Sweitzer, a Canyon manufacturing supervisor, inspect the Pelton runner and turbine housing for the Tyson Creek Project at the company’s manufacturing facility prior to shipping. This unit develops about 10 MW. Photo courtesy Canyon Creek Hydro.

“You have more certainty in the earlier stages of development; it’s easier to raise the investment required. If you’re in the larger process, you don’t know how many years you may have to wait to get the opportunity to bid your project.”

Even after bidding a large project, Cuthbert said, there is no certainty that a producer will obtain an electricity purchase agreement until the projects are quite well advanced.

Currently, more than 25 small privately-owned hydroelectric facilities (10 MW or less) supply energy to the British Columbia hydro system, some of which have been operating for nearly 20 years. While most of these small plants feed energy into BC Hydro’s main distribution and transmission systems, a small number of them provide clean electricity to remote communities like Atlin, Dease Lake, Sandspit and Bella Bella that would otherwise depend on diesel generation.

The Barkley Project, along with Amnis Engineering and Hazelwood Construction One, worked with Victaulic, a manufacturer of mechanical pipe joining solutions have developed a small hydro plant for one such remote community. The plant, Canoe Creek Hydro, is a 5.5 MW run-of- river hydroelectric facility on Vancouver Island. The facility is locally owned and operated by the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation and located in the heart of the Nation’s Tribal Parkland. Canoe Creek Hydro was built to help the island become more energy self-sufficient, and less reliant on mainland power. Construction started in May 2009 and ended in May 2010. The plant went into service in June. (See the photo on page 116 illustrating the Canoe Creek penstock elevation.)

The Canoe Creek Hydro plant on Vancouver Island operates by diverting stream flow into a penstock at a high elevation – up to 84 percent grade – intake. The grade increase of the penstock is illustrated in this photo. Photo courtesy Victaulic

Canoe Creek Hydro operates by diverting stream flow into a penstock at a high elevation—up to 84 percent grade—intake. This made construction a challenge, as did the facility’s location in the Pacific Rim Rainforest, where annual precipitation is among the heaviest in the world, particularly in the winter months when construction took place.

Constructing the 4 km penstock line in these conditions through welding would have proven difficult. The companies replaced mechanical welding on the penstock with the use of mechanical couplings. In the field, the couplings proved advantageous in many ways. The couplings could be installed in any weather condition with no special requirements. Crews could assemble the joints even in downpours and snow showers. This also reduced the amount of excavation, bell holing and dewatering that would be common with welding.

The use of couplings also improved site safety. As the pipe was already on site, Hazelwood grooved and re-coated the pipe prior to sending it up the single-lane logging road to be assembled. In addition, the replacement of welding with mechanical joints allowed for a reduction in the number of laborers required on the job site. Canoe Creek also employed local laborers, which Cuthbert said is one of the benefits of developing small hydro.

“On the smaller scale, you’re usually able to get your project done relying on local resources, which helps integrate your business with the local community.”

The Concepcion HPP hydro plant in Panama. Two 5 MW Mavel Francis Turbines are installed at this location. Photos Courtesy Mavel

Environmental benefits were also gained by replacing welded joints with mechanical joints. Welding 1 km of straight-run 36-inch pipe produces about 40,338 kg of CO2 emissions using a diesel-powered machine and 9,463 kg of CO2 emissions using an electric-powered machine. Grooving and coupling that same run of pipe produces 62 kg of CO2 emissions. The use of couplings also reduced the amount of X-raying required on site, reducing radiation emission. Particulate emissions, CO2 and radiation were reduced, as well as electrical energy use.

Big ‘Small’ U.S. Developments

In U.S. small hydro technological breakthroughs, turbine manufacturer Hydro Green Energy (HGE) became the first hydrokinetic project to be approved by FERC in December of 2008 and began operations in August of 2009. A 100 kW turbine power station was installed at a 4.4 MW run-of-river hydropower project at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Lock & Dam No. 2 in Hastings, Minn. When complete, the barge-mounted project will have two turbines. The second turbine is expected to be installed in 2011.

The Hastings project features Hydro Green’s Hydro+ system, which reinforces the output of the existing facility in a manner that does not create back pressure on the existing facility. The Hydro+ system has been proven to be fish-friendly, having undergone a study by Normandeau Associates. At the time of the study, Normandeau’s patented methodology had been utilized by nearly 50 conventional hydro projects and by the Department of Energy, but never on a hydrokinetic turbine.

This methodology used a controlled experiment approach to produce statistically reliable and verifiable results on injury and survival of fish passed through a turbine, spillway or over falls. During the study, 402 fish swam through HGE’s hydrokinetic turbine, which rotates at 21 revolutions per minute. Pre-installation computer modeling performed by HGE, which relied on

models created by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Energy, revealed a 97 percent fish survival rating for the turbine, HGE reported.

Vice President Mark Stover said that industry interest in low-head/small hydro in the U.S. is at its highest since the 1980s, but that most of the boom is occurring only on paper. Hundreds of projects have been proposed to FERC, Stover said, but few are actually coming on-line.

“I think the tide is about to turn, however, and we will see significant new hydropower development over the next decade from the conventional and new technology sectors.”

Stover said there is a “tremendous growth market waiting to be captured” for small-scale hydro, particularly from utilities and others who are interested in buying renewable power and/or new renewable power projects.

Some technology developers aren’t as confident about a small-scale hydro “boom.” Daniel A. New, president of Canyon Hydro, has been in the hydro business for 35 years. While he has experienced ups and downs in the industry, New said that overall, “it’s been a pretty steady climb” and he predicts small hydro to continue growing at a slow pace.

Canyon Hydro develops turbines for grid-connected customers in municipalities and also specializes in providing equipment to communities that are not grid-connected. In December 2009, Canyon headed the installation of a Pelton turbine for Tyson Creek, a 9.3 MW hydro plant in British Columbia operated by Renewable Power Corp. Tyson Creek is grid-tied, but is also stand-alone, perched on 865 meters gross head with a flow of 1.3 cubic meters per second, making it one of the highest head projects in North America.

That 865 meters of gross head converts to more than 1,200 pounds per square inch (psi) at the turbine, causing Renewable Power to become concerned that a traditional Pelton design would disintegrate under such a load. Likewise, operating in islanded mode creates a new set of concerns relating to load compensation and frequency control. Canyon Hydro was able to design and fabricate a heavily gusseted Pelton turbine that met the specifications of the Tyson Creek project.

“When the grid is down, they’re able to run quite a section of that community with this plant in an islanded condition,” New said.

Islanded operation requires control systems that are common on larger hydro systems, but is unusual for a 10 MW project. Canyon prepared for sudden changes in load by implementing a jet deflector shield, which adjusts to deflect more or less of the water jet to the turbine runner.

Is the U.S. Measuring Up Internationally?

Jeanne Hilsinger, president of Mavel Americas Inc., a unit of Czech Republic-based turbine manufacturer Mavel, a.s, said Europe has developed 17 percent of its economically feasible small hydro potential. By comparison, the U.S. has developed 14 percent. In 1940, hydropower

accounted for 40 percent of the electricity produced in the U.S. That number is 6 to 7 percent today.

Europe has 17,571 small hydro plants, while the U.S. has 2,346, Hilsinger said. She attributed this gap to a lack of public awareness, as well as the rigor of U.S. regulation requirements.

“If you ask a child to draw a wind turbine or a solar panel, chances are they will get it right. But if you ask a child or even an adult to draw a small hydro plant or a water turbine, chances are pretty good they will get it wrong,” Hilsinger said.

In regards to regulation requirements, Hilsinger said the time invested to obtain the necessary licenses in the U.S. is almost always longer than the time needed to build a small hydro plant. “While the FERC permitting process is getting more efficient each year, the time required for permitting in the U.S. and the investment that must be made is daunting.”

In addition, she said, the capital invested in the legislative process can sometimes exceed the funds needed to purchase the generating equipment. This is especially true for smaller hydro facilities, Hilsinger said.

Skancke of NHA said that hydro is different from other renewables in that new development has a more rigorous regulatory approval process and, therefore, potentially higher start-up costs. Due to these regulatory requirements, “it’s not clear whether the financial industry will grab on to the benefits of small hydro and provide the financing that is necessary for a build out of hydro to its maximum potential.” However, hydro has a record of “consistent and sustainable power production for the long-term, as well as environmental and other benefits,” Skancke said.

Cuthbert of the Barkley Project Group said that small hydro produces a business model that most power companies cannot duplicate with another resource.

“For a company that’s looking at the triple bottom line with social, environmental, and economic values all built in, these projects are attractive from that perspective.”

For now, producers keep falling back on the reliability and longevity of small hydro as motivation for moving forward.

“The overall cost of generating power is very low, the equipment life is very long: 50 years or longer,” said Hilsinger. “The environmental impact is minimal and the generation is relatively stable as opposed to other intermittent renewable resources.”

Potential resounds for small hydro, from existing, non-generating dams that could be enlivened with hydropower, to increasing interest from utilities in buying renewable projects. And with FERC and Canadian small hydro regulations processes being simplified, it appears that small hydro will only continue to grow bigger.

OPM News Micro Projects Seek To Harness Existing Hydropower Sources

Rob Manning | November 8, 2010 | Gresham, OR

On this drizzly fall day, Gresham’s environmental services director, David Rouse is looking through a fence at a future energy project. It happens to be where treated wastewater enters the Columbia.

David Rouse: “Well, the project that we’re out looking at today would be to install a micro- hydro turbine in our wastewater treatment outfall line.”

Rouse says the idea is to take advantage of the treated wastewater as it flows into the river.

David Rouse: “We have about 13-million gallons a day of effluent that goes through that line, and it’s moving at a fairly rapid pace, so sticking a hydro turbine in that line, we’re able to capture the energy usage out of that effluent flow.”

It’s an $820,000 project with a goal of producing 50 kilowatts – the equivalent of seven percent of the treatment plant’s needs.

This is one of more than a dozen relatively small hydro projects to seek state energy tax credits since 2007. Most of them would harness energy from existing dams or pipes.

That’s a dramatic increase in the number of hydro proposals. In the previous 17 years, there were only four.

Andrew Munro with the National Hydropower Association says the potential is even bigger. Munro spoke at the most recent Northwest Power and Conservation Council meeting.

Andrew Munro: “In the next fifteen years, a study shows there’s an opportunity to develop 60,000 megawatts of new capacity, supporting up to one-point-four million American jobs.”

That’s the equivalent of building 60 more Bonneville Dams – though it’s an estimate that some Northwest experts say is quote “deliberately optimistic.”

Jessica Matlock is with the Snohomish Public Utility District in Washington. Her utility’s study found 145 potential sites nearby. But Matlock says ecological factors – like fish-bearing streams – cut that number down.

Jessica Matlock: “We also looked at any federal or state protected areas, and obviously economically infeasible sites. So of the 145 potential sites, we got down to 12 possible sites.”

After non-profits, government agencies, and tribes weighed in, 12 sites shrank to two actual projects.

Sometimes the site is not the problem. For years, utility exec, Greg Booth had his eye on a 350- foot dam in Idaho. The Arrowrock Dam was built almost a century ago for irrigation, with no electric turbine.

Booth says engineers struggled since the 1980s with regulators and Congress over how to put 60- megawatts worth of turbines on it. Booth helped shrink the Arrowrock project down to 20 megawatts to address environmental concerns. He says smaller is also more efficient.

Greg Booth: “When you look at putting in a much larger project, there’s a great deal more capital cost, including the modification of the dam. There’s only so much water you can bring out, so you’re … trying to harness more kilowatt hours from a more limited amount of water.”

Back on the Columbia River, Gresham’s project would be less than one percent of the size of even the scaled-down Arrowrock. But really small doesn’t mean really simple. Environmental services director, Dave Rouse says the federal permitting process is still tough.

David Rouse: “Since it’s going out into the Columbia River, they treat it like a dam. So, the permitting process has been extensive. We’ve probably been over a year and a half in the permitting.”

Gresham has a sustainability strategy to add more renewable energy all over the city. But Rouse says with the limited sites and all the regulatory hoops for hydro, he doesn’t expect to see many more turbines, like the one he hopes to install here on the Columbia.

Renewable Energy Generates Jobs, New York State Utility Executive Says Submitted by Editor on Wed, 11/10/2010 - 8:55pm

Published Nov. 10, 2010

At a recent energy conference, New York Power Authority President Richard M. Kessel cited the importance of clean-energy development and transmission upgrades for ensuring a reliable electric power system and creating new construction and manufacturing jobs in New York state.

“We ought to dedicate ourselves to making 2011 the year of the ‘green’ job,” Mr. Kessel said, referring to the significant economic development benefits of renewable energy technologies for creating jobs and contributing to the state’s manufacturing base.

“The addition of new wind and solar power installations and transmission upgrades to replace aging infrastructure with facilities that use ‘smart grid’ technologies are among the necessary strategies for reliably meeting electricity demand in New York in the coming decades,” Mr. Kessel said, according to a news release from the power authority. “These are hallmarks of Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo’s ‘Power NY’ energy plan, which will provide great benefits for New York state. In addition to diversifying energy supplies and combating greenhouse gas emissions, clean energy makes great sense from an economic development perspective since investment in new labor-intensive energy technologies has the potential for creating thousands of jobs at hundreds of businesses interested in fabricating parts and components.”

The power authority’s chief executive spoke as a panelist and luncheon speaker at the Advanced Energy 2010 Conference at the New York Hilton in New York City, where he and other energy leaders highlighted the importance of collaborative efforts by businesses, government and academia to further energy research and commercialize new technologies. The New York Power Authority is the nation’s largest state public power organization.

The Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center at Stony Brook, whose mission is to promote innovative energy research, education and technology deployment, produced the Nov. 8-9 conference, marking the fourth year the event has been held. The power authority is one of the sponsors and also has provided key financial support for the energy center, whose focus includes energy efficiency, renewable energy and nanotechnology applications.

Mr. Kessel said the New York Power Authority expects to select proposals from renewable energy developers by early next year for a statewide 100-megawatt power project that would triple the current amount of installed photovoltaic capacity in the state. It also expects to select from proposals next year for an offshore wind project of up to 500 megawatts in the Great Lakes for the possible development of the nation’s first freshwater wind farm.

The statewide public power utility generates nearly 80 percent of its electricity from nonpolluting hydropower. It also has invested heavily in energy efficiency initiatives at public facilities throughout the state, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 800,000 tons a year, while providing annual savings on utility bills of approximately $125 million.

This year, NYPA has financed approximately $145 million in improvements, working closely with various energy efficiency contractors, including New York companies. It expects to invest more than $1 billion over the next several years in such efforts in support of New York’s “45 by 15” Plan for 45 percent of the state’s electricity needs to be met from improved energy efficiency and renewable energy by the year 2015.

Mr. Kessel also noted at the Advanced Energy Conference that NYPA has been exploring the potential for improving the capability and flexibility of the state’s transmission system to deliver lower cost hydropower from Canada and upstate wind power.

“We have a Thruway but not an ‘electric thruway.’ We need to break up transmission congestion points to secure a clean-energy future. Some of New York state’s transmission lines are 50 to 60 years old and need to be replaced. Investment in new energy infrastructure is crucial for meeting the power needs of a 21st-century economy,” he said.

“Energy, the environment and economic development – what I call the ‘three Es’ – are all intertwined,” Mr. Kessel added. In citing the power authority’s progress toward furthering the development of new clean-energy supplies, he also noted the emphasis that the statewide public power utility has given to utilizing its renewable low-cost hydropower for creating new jobs, including those in high-tech and ‘green’ energy industries.

“We need to utilize lower-cost energy resources to create jobs, especially in regions upstate that have suffered the most economically, and that’s what we’re doing with our clean hydropower,” Mr. Kessel said.

Lecturer touts hydro power as key to Quebec’s growth

By jpoulin November 17, 2010

The University of Maine’s Canadian-American Center wrapped up Canada Week Monday, Nov. 15, with a lecture describing the history of hydroelectric power in Quebec.

David Massell, a professor of Canadian history at the University of Vermont, delivered a speech titled “A question of power: A brief history of hydroelectricity in Quebec” at the Buchanan Alumni House.

“Quebec’s hydro-rich landscape has proven to be an extraordinary gift to the province,” Massell said, adding that locals refer to the abundant rivers and water sources in the province as “white coal.”

Broken down into three sections, his presentation focused on the landscape of Canada’s province of Quebec and the history of hydroelectricity in the area. Massell talked about the early stages of constructing hydroelectric infrastructure and the local workforce involved. He concluded with a discussion about the politics and policy surrounding the advancement of hydroelectric power in the area.

Massell pointed out that HydroQuebec, a major hydropower company, produces three-and-a-half times more energy than New York City consumes at its peak rate and also provides 10 percent of New England’s electric need.

With such an abundance of hydroelectricity produced in the province, Quebec has become one of the leading regions worldwide for businesses that require massive amounts of energy, such as aluminum production facilities. Massell said this is reshaping the face of the province.

“Hydroelectricity has become the leading agent of change in the area,” Massell said.

Massell spoke about reform in Quebec’s government policies toward American businessmen who are making massive profits and discussed the reactions of native tribes in the area.

He also talked of the titanic construction projects required to build the dams necessary to produce this form of power and the effect they have upon the surrounding land and the occupying tribes.

Massell focused on the Cree, a tribe that previously occupied land affected by the damming of rivers. Up through the 1970s, the tribe was allowed no say in dam construction and “were not paid a penny for a single dam,” Massell said.

The tribe successfully sued HydroQuebec, resulting in a payout for members of the tribe in addition to legal rights to hunting grounds and government subsidies.

“A simple act of regulation forged many other services for the natives,” Massell said.

Massell has researched the politics and policy of hydroelectricity in the province of Quebec extensively due to a rising demand for energy in the United States. He earned a doctorate degree in Canadian-American history at Duke University. He won a Fulbright scholarship for his graduate work, as well as government grants and private grants from assorted corporations.

Massell’s book, “Amassing Power: J.B. Duke and the Saguenay River, 1897-1927,” focuses on the subject of hydroelectricity in the Quebec region. Massell is in the process of writing a second book that will expand on the first book. The second book’s working title is “Quebec Hydropolitics: The Peribonka Concessions of World War [1] Two.”

The lecture was sponsored by the Canadian-American Center as part of Canada Week. The center also helps to support a major research library about Canada while promoting cross-border research.

Located next to the Buchanan Alumni House on College Avenue, the Canadian-American Center is a founding member of the Northeast National Resource Center on Canada.

URL of article: http://mainecampus.com/2010/11/17/lecturer-touts-hydro-power-as-key-to- quebec%e2%80%99s-growth/

URLs in this post:

[1] War: http://mainecampus.com/tag/war

Rediscovering Hydropower

Posted on 11/22/2010

In downtown Minneapolis, workers are putting the finishing touches on a new 10-MW hydroelectric project that will begin generating power early next year for customers of Xcel Energy.

The site next to the Lower Saint Anthony Falls Lock and Dam on the Mississippi River hasn’t been used to generate power since 1987, when a turn-of-the-century powerhouse failed due to sandstone erosion. Efforts to resume hydropower production with conventional technologies were deserted because the economics and technology were deemed unpractical.

Twenty-three years later, a new powerhouse equipped with 16 turbines designed for low-head sites will soon be up and running, thanks to state and federal incentives created to boost the use of renewable power.

Scores of similar projects are being pursued throughout North America, as power producers revive and revamp vintage sites originally identified for hydropower production. New tax credits, grants, and initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have prompted power producers to evaluate the potential for boosting hydropower capacity.

In 2008 and 2009, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued more than 500 permits for the construction of hydropower projects in the U.S. During the previous two years, the agency issued 122 permits.

According to FERC, the agency has issued licenses to 100 new hydropower projects since the end of 2005.

“We’ve seen over the last two or three years about a 30-percent increase in the number of projects proposing new capacity,” said Ed Abrams, deputy director of the Office of Hydropower Licensing. “A lot of these are at existing federal dams.

“That’s a far cry from only a few years ago, when most of our workload was based on the relicensing of existing projects,” Abrams said.

About 130,000 sites in the U.S. could be tapped to produce another 30,000 MW of hydropower, according to a Department of Energy (DOE) study. More than half of that potential could be added to existing U.S. dams, the study found.

A study by the Electric Power Research Institute estimates that 23,000 MW, including 5,000 MW of conventional hydropower at existing non-powered dams, could be developed by 2025.

The technical potential is much greater, said Andrew Munro, president of the National Hydropower

Association.

“There is about 63,000 MW of untapped technical potential at about 37,000 dams that don’t generate power in the U.S.,” Munro said. “The opportunity to double capacity is real.”

In Canada, where hydropower accounts for 60 percent of the nation’s electricity, about 50 hydropower projects are in some stage of development, including a 1,550-MW hydropower complex under construction on the Romaine River, according to the Canadian Hydropower Association. The La Romaine project along Quebec’s Lower North Shore is expected to be up and running by 2020.

Meanwhile, the Lower Saint Anthony Falls project in downtown Minneapolis will generate 63,000 MWh of clean power each year, enough to power 7,500 homes. Construction began in April 2009, helped by incentive payments from Xcel Energy’s Renewable Development Fund and tax credits under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

“This is an excellent example of how federal stimulus dollars can benefit from a multiplier effect when state and local partners are part of the equation,” said Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak.

The $35 million project, owned and operated by Brookfield Renewable Power, includes 16 StraflowMatrix turbine generators manufactured by Andritz Hydro. The StraflowMatrix technology is designed to generate hydropower at low-head sites using the existing dam and gate structures.

Conventional turbine technology was neither practical nor economically viable, officials said. The StraflowMatrix technology coupled with federal and state incentives improved the economics and justified construction.

The new facility will channel about 6,200 cubic feet per second of water from the Mississippi River through the 16 turbine-generators to produce power. The project created 35 jobs at the peak of construction.

Hartford Business.com CT Energy Standards Tough To Meet

By Brad Kane [email protected]

11/22/10

With New England long on ideals and limited in resources, Connecticut’s electricity suppliers will have a difficult — if not impossible — challenge meeting the state’s requirements calling for a percentage of the energy supply to come from sources

such as solar, wind and landfill gas in the years ahead.

Because renewable energy projects take a long time to build and the standards become increasingly stringent with each passing year, officials at a Nov. 5 conference in Boston urged the industry to embrace and link into the current slate of renewable projects mostly utilizing wind in the region and Canada. The Canadian officials also urged New England to reverse its thinking about high-wattage hydropower as a possible renewable power resource.

As the state and region struggle to meet these standards in the coming years, the end result will be higher electricity prices and more money going to state-sponsored programs designed to boost renewable generation.

“It will be very challenging to meet those goals,” said James Robb, Northeast Utilities senior vice president for enterprise planning and development. “There are projects to be built, but they are not very economical.”

To help Connecticut come closer to meeting its renewable goal, the state’s utilities must figure out a way to more reliably transmit renewable power from areas where the resources are strong, such as Maine and New Hampshire, to load centers of Hartford and southwest Connecticut.

Each of the six New England states has a renewable portfolio standard, which says a certain percentage of the power supply must come from designated renewable resources. The amounts vary by state, but the cumulative effect is that 25 percent of New England’s power supply in 2025 must come from Class I renewables, the strictest level of resource such as solar, wind and landfill gas.

This year, New England has 32,000 megawatts of generating capacity with 1,100 megawatts — 3.4 percent — coming from renewables. To meet state standards, energy suppliers must import renewable power into the region.

Connecticut’s standard for 2010 calls for 14 percent of electricity to be generated by renewables, including 7 percent from Class I. Over the next 10 years, the standard increases to 27 percent, including 20 percent from Class I.

All 77 of Connecticut’s active energy supplies met or exceeded the 14 and 7 percent renewable power goals this year. That doesn’t necessarily mean that 14 percent of Connecticut’s energy supply in 2010 came from renewable sources because the state allows electricity suppliers to buy renewable energy credits to offset any shortages in reaching their goals.

“It’s kind of one hand washing the other to encourage the development and use of renewable resources,” said Phil Dukes, spokesman for the Department of Public Utility Control.

The real problems will arise in 10-15 years as the collective New England standard calls for a high volume of Class I renewables. Right now, New England has 2,960 megawatts of Class I renewable projects underway — 99 percent of which is wind — and that isn’t enough to meet 25 percent of today’s energy demands, much less the expected 8-10 percent growth in demand over the next decade.

Connecticut has almost no in-state sources of Class I renewables; the largest approved Class I generator in the state is the 450-megawatt landfill methane gas facility in Bridgeport. The majority of the others are fuel cells of less than 1 megawatt, meaning state energy suppliers will have to get the bulk of their renewable needs outside Connecticut.

If Connecticut’s standard were modified to be in line with the proposed national standard, then the state would have a much easier time meeting the goals. Under the American Power Act proposed by Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-CT, and Sen. John Kerry, D-MA, energy suppliers would have been given credit for nuclear and hydroelectric power, since they are zero-carbon-emission sources of generation. Hydro and nuclear weren’t considered renewables under the legislation

that ultimately failed to pass into law, but suppliers didn’t have to meet the percentages for the portion of their energy portfolio coming from those two sources.

Nuclear is Connecticut’s largest source of generation with the two reactors at the Millstone Nuclear Power Station in Waterford generating more than 2,100 megawatts daily. While nuclear generates no carbon pollution, the reactors produce spent nuclear waste. That nuclear waste can be recycled; but the current national nuclear waste disposal plan calls for it to be temporarily stored onsite while a new national plan is developed — a decision that has been delayed since 1998.

Because of the spent waste issue, Connecticut’s legislators have never proposed or even considered giving renewable credit to nuclear power, Dukes said.

In some instances, Connecticut allows for hydro power to be classified as a renewable, even Class I, but it must be less than 5 megawatts, not significantly alter the course of a river and meet a variety of other conditions. That rules out the majority of New England’s 1,700 megawatts of hydropower and the new hydroelectric system Northeast Utilities and NStar are spending $1.1 billion to tap into in Quebec.

Hydro-Quebec has 42,000 megawatts of generating capacity from its dams in Canada and is adding 5,000 more megawatts in the next few years. Half of the power that is exported from Quebec goes to New England, an amount that will only increase when the $1.1 billion Northern Pass transmission line is complete.

“It is probably the single biggest project that will help cut CO2 emissions,” Robb said.

At the Nov. 5 energy conference in Boston, officials from Canada urged the United States to accept hydro as a renewable power. A main concern regarding hydro is that the flooding resulting from dams causes leaves and other foliage to decompose, emitting methane, one of the worst greenhouse gases. The Canadian officials argued that the water in their provinces is so cold that the leaves don’t decompose.

“I’m struggling here in New England with how New England is going to meet its renewable requirements. Without Quebec and Newfoundland & Labrador, you will struggle to hit that,” said Ed Martin, president and CEO of Nalcor Energy, which is based in the hydro- and wind-rich Newfoundland & Labrador. “Hydro is part of the mix that has to happen if you are going to meet the goals in New England.”

Unlike other renewables, hydro is sold at market price, so the region doesn’t get the electricity prices that will inevitably come as more of the supply has to come from Class I generation, Robb said.

To get more Class I renewable projects off the ground, Northeast Utilities, NStar and other utilities such as United Illuminating and National Grid are considering teaming on a large transmission project in northern Maine and New Hampshire, areas which have the resources for large-scale wind projects, Robb said.

A reason renewable projects have such a hard time getting started is the developers need a way to move their power into the high-demand centers of Hartford, southwest Connecticut and Boston. By building a transmission line, those large-scale wind projects in Maine and New Hampshire would be more economical to build, Robb said.

If the energy suppliers fail to meet the renewable portfolio standard in the coming years, they must make alternative compliance payments to make up the difference. In this state, those payments will go to the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund, which has programs to bolster the use of renewable, but the state legislature could redirect those funds anywhere.

Connecticut has more than 300 Class I, II and III projects either approved or awaiting approval from the DPUC. Many of the unfinished ones have been delayed for regulatory or economic reasons, but a decrease in overall electricity demand due to the recession has helped the state stay ahead of the curve in meeting its renewable portfolio standard.

“We expected to be a lot further behind, and we’re not,” Dukes said.

Friday, November 26, 2010 - Page updated at 07:15 AM Tapping into tides for electricity

By Bob Drogin

Los Angeles Times

COBSCOOK BAY, Maine

Moored in the channel, the little gray barge strains against a raging morning tide. The torrent soon will drain nearby rocky inlets and fishing harbors by 20 feet â€” as high as a two-story house â€” only to flood them again six hours later.

Tucked under the stern, horizontal turbines spin in the swirling current. The huge mechanism looks like an old lawnmower reel, but it is America's most ambitious effort yet to produce electricity by harnessing the gravitational pull of the moon and sun on the sea.

"This is cutting-edge," engineer Ryan Beaumont said as he monitored the turbines from a control room on the barge. "No one has done tidal energy like this before."

"We call this the Kitty Hawk of tidal energy," said John Ferland, vice president at Ocean Renewable Power, owner of the project.

The startup company aims to link a larger turbine system to eastern Maine's power grid next fall in the country's first small-scale commercial use of tidal energy.

Tapping the tides is the latest niche in the search for affordable, renewable energy. Widespread use may be years off, but advocates say tides and other hydrokinetic systems, from ocean waves to free-flowing rivers, ultimately could meet up to 10 percent of America's electricity needs, more than hydropower dams now supply.

Pilot projects or studies are under way in Washington's Puget Sound, in Alaska's Cook Inlet, off the coasts of Florida, California, Oregon and Hawaii, in New York's East River, along the Mississippi River and elsewhere.

"These are coastal resources, and most people live along the coasts," said Hoyt Battey, a water- power expert at the Department of Energy (DOE).

"When you're talking about providing half the power of Alaska or Hawaii, or half the power of New York, that's significant."

For now, the technology for marine and hydrokinetic power remains in its infancy, and costs are prohibitively high. Ireland, Denmark, Portugal, South Korea, China, Australia and other nations have been testing the waters for years. Commercial operations are rare.

"Basically, it's much more difficult to do things underwater than on dry land," said Robert Thresher, research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a federal facility in Golden, Colo. "The water tears stuff apart. There's fish, rust, fouling ... all kinds of problems."

Canada may be closest to finding solutions. The country is investing $75 million for three pilot projects in the upper Bay of Fundy, home to the world's highest tides. The first test turbine weighs 400 tons, has a peak capacity of one megawatt and looks like a sunken windmill.

"I believe if we can do it in Fundy, you can do it anywhere," said John Woods, who heads the authority that runs the projects. He hopes to gather enough data by 2015 to determine whether tidal power is technically feasible, environmentally safe and economically viable.

In theory, the U.S. resource is immense. Waves and currents are relatively reliable in some areas, and tides ebb and flood twice a day like clockwork. As a result, they are more predictable resources than wind or solar power.

Unlike wind, however, tides with sufficient range and velocity run only in the nation's northeastern and northwestern corners, mostly Maine and Washington, plus Alaska. Waves are consistently high only on the Pacific coast north of Point Conception, Calif., and in Hawaii.

Several developments suggest a surge of U.S. interest, however.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission reported this month that it has issued 140 hydrokinetic preliminary permits for proposals to tap tides, waves or river currents, up from a handful a few years ago. In many cases, officials said, applicants are staking claims in case the technology takes off.

In September, the DOE awarded $37 million in matching grants for the first time to companies with the most promising prototypes or that appeared close to commercial service. Several states and the military also have provided support.

Working with the Navy, for example, Ocean Power Technologies last month connected a small test buoy in the swells off Oahu to the power grid that serves the Marine Corps Base Hawaii, marking a first for a wave-energy device in U.S. waters.

"We have demonstrated that our technology works, that it can survive in harsh ocean conditions and can deliver high-quality power to the grid," said Robert Lurie, a vice president of Ocean Power, based in Pennington, N.J.

The company next spring plans to anchor a larger power buoy in the waves off Reedsport, Ore., for further tests. The ultimate goal, Lurie said, is to build "multibuoy wave farms" generating enough power to light 50,000 homes.

The industry has struggled to gain a foothold in California. Pacific Gas & Electric last month suspended a proposed $50 million pilot project for wave energy near Eureka, citing the difficulty of obtaining permits and the high cost of development.

"It was a substantial investment for an unproven technology," PG&E spokesman Brian Swanson said.

He said the utility still was considering a 100-megawatt project in the seas off Vandenberg Air Force Base, near Santa Barbara.

"We are very committed to wave energy," Swanson said.

Proposals to exploit the colossal currents under the Golden Gate Bridge have hit the rocks, however.

"There is a great dispute over whether it's feasible because of the huge vortexes and turbulence," said Roger Bedard, former head of ocean energy at the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry think tank in Palo Alto. "The whole watershed of Northern California flows through this one-mile gap."

Tides in Maine's rugged Cobscook Bay, at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, flow as fast as the average man can run. Fishing boats in Eastport, the easternmost town in the United States, rise and fall like toys in a bathtub. Currents create a giant whirlpool, called the Old Sow, that is treacherous for small boats. Vast tidal flats and seaweed-draped boulders emerge or vanish every few hours.

In 1935, at the height of the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt backed a plan to build tidal dikes in the bay to impound the seas for electric power. Roosevelt had spent summers on nearby Campobello Island in Canada.

But Congress soon canceled the project. All that remains is a tabletop model in the town museum, and an old March of Time newsreel with grainy footage of what the announcer called "a monument to disappointment."

Ocean Renewable Power, based in Portland, Maine, launched its first cross-flow turbine at Eastport in 2007. The helix-shaped design, with foils modeled like twisted airplane wings, was small and tethered to a former fish-farm barge. But it worked.

The company built a bigger unit, with two sets of foils, and a high-tech barge, for $2.5 million. Both went in the water last spring, then came out for more tweaking. Testing resumed Oct. 1 in a fast-flowing channel flanked by wooded hills and rocky cliffs.

"They've put Maine on the map for tidal power," said Betsy Biemann, president of the nonprofit Maine Technology Institute, which supports emerging technologies that can benefit the state.

The environmental impact still isn't clear. University of Maine researchers are trying to assess risks to fish, diving seabirds, seals and other creatures in a pristine ecosystem.

"We still have to show the turbines aren't a fish chopper or whale thumper," said Bob Lewis, who heads Ocean Renewable Power's on-site operations.

The goal is to deploy a turbine unit twice as big on the seafloor next fall. It will have a rated capacity of 150 kilowatts, enough to light 50 to 75 homes, and feed into the Bangor Hydro Electric grid.

If all goes well, four more turbines will be added a year later. Total estimated cost: $21 million, half from federal and state grants, the rest from private investors. The company hopes the turning tides can supply most of the region's electricity in six years.

"We're not going to replace nuclear-power plants," Lewis said. "But we can help. We can be part of the solution."

Snohomish County explores tidal power

After being burned by market manipulations that sent electricity prices soaring a decade ago, the Snohomish County Public Utility District is exploring alternative energy sources, including plans to install two large turbines to gather tidal data one-half mile offshore and 200 feet deep in Admiralty Inlet.

The turbines, rising about 20 meters from the seabed, would be installed next year. The project is small, likely to produce less than 1 megawatt of power, or enough to power 700 homes, but could be expanded.

"We would hope to operate for three years and then make a decision on whether to expand," said Craig Collar, project manager.

Los Angeles Times and Seattle Times archives

BLOOMBERG Energy Credits Prove Inflated With Green Claims Seen as Hot Air

By Ben Elgin - Dec 7, 2010 12:01 AM ET Tue Dec 07 05:01:01 GMT 2010 Bloomberg Markets Magazine

Duncan Broatch, owner of Summit Hydropower Inc., stands on Wyre Wynd hydro project on the Quinebaug River in Connecticut. Photographer: Shawn Henry/Bloomberg Markets

Along the steel-gray Quinebaug River in eastern Connecticut, Duncan Broatch is tinkering with machinery that will keep one of his two hydroelectric plants cranking out clean energy. The U.S. needs Broatch’s Summit Hydropower Inc. and other green power providers to make a dent in the 35 percent of the country’s global-warming pollution that comes from burning fossil fuels to make electricity.

Broatch was hoping to build more hydro plants. He planned to get the money partly from selling renewable energy credits, widely used tools championed by businesses, conservationists and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

RECs allow renewable-energy developers to sell something beyond their electricity: the right to claim that power’s environmental benefits. Corporations buy the RECs, and some then say that the credits reduce their environmental footprint; green power producers gain enough revenue to expand -- at least in theory, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Trouble is, some of the RECs Broatch sells fetch $1 to $2 apiece, he says, which is a fraction of the $40 or more he receives for the corresponding electricity and nowhere near what he needs to build more hydro plants.

“I get a check in the mail; it’s barely worth the paper it’s written on,” says Broatch, 55, who has spent the past 27 years revamping hydropower plants along Connecticut’s rivers.

Twenty other renewable-energy developers interviewed by Bloomberg News say their RECs aren’t adding green energy to the power grid either.

‘Spreadsheet Mumbo Jumbo’

“Nobody is going to make a decision to build more renewable energy based on selling voluntary credits,” says Mark Isaacson, vice president of Miller Hydro Group in Lisbon Falls, Maine.

“RECs have not worked out like we thought they would,” Isaacson says. “It has been a big disappointment.”

Companies buying RECs like those Broatch sells are a lot happier. Cisco Systems Inc., Dell Inc., Intel Corp., Whole Foods Market Inc. and more than 57,000 other firms, towns and agencies are using RECs to burnish their environmental halos. Some brag they’ve trimmed or even eliminated their carbon footprints altogether -- thanks in part to RECs.

“It’s spreadsheet mumbo jumbo,” says Kim Sheehan, a University of Oregon advertising professor and a founder of Greenwashing Index, which rates environmental claims. “Companies show their emissions are reduced, but overall emissions to the environment aren’t changed.”

Becoming Carbon Neutral

Intel, the world’s biggest maker of computer chips, heralds itself as the largest U.S. purchaser of green energy. The company says it cut global-warming emissions by more than 45 percent, or 1.9 million metric tons, from the end of fiscal 2007 in December through fiscal 2009 with the help of RECs.

Take RECs out of the equation and Santa Clara, California- based Intel reduced carbon emissions by a more modest 13 percent, according to its filings with London-based Carbon Disclosure Project, which tracks corporate emissions.

Cisco, the top maker of networking gear, announced in its 2009 corporate responsibility report that it had cut its global- warming emissions by 40 percent from the end of fiscal 2007 in July through fiscal 2009, surpassing its goal of a 25 percent reduction by 2012 three years ahead of time.

Without factoring in RECs, emissions climbed 3 percent during those years, according to data in the San Jose, California, company’s report.

‘PR Credit’

Computer maker Dell says it became carbon neutral in 2008 with the help of RECs; not counting them, emissions per volume of sales increased 4 percent since 2008 at the Round Rock, Texas, company. Spokeswoman Michelle Mosmeyer says the rise is because of Dell’s 2009 acquisition of Perot Systems Corp. and that the company will continue to focus on cutting energy use.

“It isn’t reasonable to say that purchasing a REC is equivalent to not polluting,” says Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington and author of the Climate Progress blog, which covers climate-change science and politics.

“Some companies are just trying to get a certain amount of PR credit while not transforming their company.”

At least one large REC buyer is scaling back because it’s concerned the claims may not be credible. Nike Inc., the world’s largest sporting goods supplier, was the 24th-biggest corporate purchaser of RECs in 2008, the EPA says. Nike trimmed purchases by 68 percent in 2009.

“There is a lot of scrutiny about RECs and whether they’re helping to launch projects,” says Sarah Severn, director of corporate responsibility at Beaverton, Oregon-based Nike. “It might not be something we’d want to be associated with.” (Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, says it purchased 155,000 RECs for 2010.)

Green-Power Quotas

The idea of splitting renewable energy into two products -- electricity and environmental benefits -- emerged in the 1990s. Environmentalists hoped the credits would help reverse a dire trend.

Nonpolluting sources of electricity have been shrinking as a percentage of the U.S. power supply. In 2008, 11 percent of non-nuclear power came from renewable supplies, down from 15 percent in 1990 and 20 percent in 1960, the Department of Energy says. Sixty-nine percent of U.S. electricity is made by burning fossil fuels, mostly coal and natural gas.

RECs have proven successful in programs in the District of Columbia and 29 states with green- power quotas.

Utilities that can’t generate enough renewable electrons can make up the difference by buying credits. States set rules about how much green energy is required, where it must be made and the types of generators that can sell RECs. In New Jersey, a mandate that some power be from the sun drove the value of solar RECs to $640 to $660 apiece in November, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, more than 10 times the electricity’s value.

No Binding Regulations

World Resources Institute, a Washington-based environmental advocate, teamed up with Alcoa Inc., DuPont Co. and seven other big companies in 2003 to promote voluntary RECs. As in state markets, this type of REC represents the environmental benefits associated with 1 megawatt- hour -- enough to power about 700 houses for 60 minutes.

Unlike state programs, there are no binding regulations. About 62 percent of the voluntary market chooses to be certified by the Center for Resource Solutions, a San Francisco-based organization that ensures credits aren’t sold more than once and that the corresponding electricity was actually produced. Voluntary purchases of RECs soared 253 percent from 2005 through 2009, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.

Midddlemen

“Developers are trying to pull together every possible source of revenue to get these projects to work,” says Alex Perera, a co-director of business engagement at World Resources Institute.

Perera says it’s impossible to gauge how much green power REC-related efforts have generated. He declined to comment on whether the program is sparking new projects, saying that voluntary RECs have provided some financial support.

If there are winners in the REC world besides companies that claim environmental virtue, they’re the middlemen who buy and sell the credits. These intermediaries often wind up with more money than green-power developers, according to 35 contracts obtained through publicrecord requests.

Sterling Planet

Sterling Planet Inc. in Norcross, Georgia, has built a profitable business dealing in RECs. The privately held company estimated revenue of $25 million in 2010, with $2 million in net profit, according to a projection submitted to the Connecticut Department of Public Utility Control in March.

Sterling Planet orchestrated a REC transaction 6 miles (10 kilometers) from Broatch’s plant along the banks of the Quinebaug. Here, the Shetucket River travels a valley where maples, ashes and sycamores are mostly bare limbed on a November day. Near Occum, the river enters a dam and runs through turbines, shooting out about 10 feet (3 meters) below.

Inside a red-brick building, the power is corralled and sent to Norwich, a city of 38,000. Power from this and two other hydro projects accounts for 5 percent of Norwich’s electricity.

The Occum plant and two similar operations owned by Norwich generate about 12,000 RECs per year. The Connecticut Municipal Electric Energy Cooperative sold these credits to Sterling Planet. Sterling paid $1.25 apiece in 2009 and $1.20 in 2010, according to contracts obtained by Bloomberg. Sterling sold 6,139 credits -- 2,352 from Occum -- for $12.90 apiece in 2009, a more than 10-fold markup.

‘Needed Revenue’

Bette Trevillion, Sterling Planet’s director of marketing and communications, says it’s misleading to focus on what the company pays one source. The hydro credits are blended and sold along with other, more expensive ones, and prices vary based on the type of renewable energy, the age of the power plant and other factors, Trevillion says.

“Our contracts with renewable generators bring them needed revenue,” she says. “Sterling Planet’s existing REC contracts with suppliers will ultimately have delivered tens of millions of dollars to them when they are fulfilled.”

The REC money hasn’t led to any hydro projects being built or expanded in Norwich, says Jeff Brining, energy services manager at Norwich Public Utilities.

Instead, REC sales provide about 10 percent of the budget for a fund that pays for small, renewable-energy pilot projects in the Norwich area. For 2011, the fund is buying solar panels for a local middle school. The amount of power the panels will generate is less than 1 percent of what the hydro plants put out.

200,000 Cars

“You cannot really claim that because you buy voluntary RECs, more renewable energy is or will be produced,” says Anja Kollmuss, a scientist at the Somerville, Massachusetts, office of the Stockholm Environment Institute, which researches sustainable development.

Even so, the federal government is promoting RECs. The EPA provides a handy online Green Power Equivalency Calculator that helps companies convert RECs into environmental boasting rights. Intel cited the EPA’s calculations in a January 2010 press release that said the chipmaker’s market-leading purchase of 1.4 million credits had the same impact as taking almost 200,000 cars off the road or not powering 134,000 homes for a year.

Government agencies themselves are buying RECs to reduce carbon emissions and meet a 2005 law that required them to get 5 percent of their electricity from renewable sources in 2010. NASA, the Air Force and the departments of Agriculture and the Interior purchased RECs supplied by the Rocky Reach hydroelectric project near Wenatchee in central Washington.

Not Significant

At the plant, the waters of the Columbia River power turbines that have been making electricity since 1961. Chelan County, home to 72,000 people, fixed up the plant in 2006 to produce 2 percent more power. On Dec. 18, 2008, the county sold 66,000 RECs to Sterling Planet for $1 each, contracts show.

That same day, Sterling Planet began a sale of more than 65,000 of the credits to the four government agencies for $3.23 apiece -- a 223 percent markup.

The $1 per megawatt-hour that went to Chelan County paled in comparison to the $59 per megawatt-hour that the plant fetched for electricity. Even though it was a small sum, Rocky Reach didn’t turn down the money.

“RECs aren’t factored into the economics of our decision making,” says Melissa Lyons, power resource analyst at the Chelan County Public Utility District. “It isn’t significant compared to our multi-million-dollar power deals.”

‘Clear Signal’

Companies that buy RECs say the credits fit into their wide-ranging environmental strategies.

“It sends a clear signal to the market that we want cleaner energy,” says Andy Smith, Cisco’s global sustainability manager.

At Intel, Marty Sedler, director of global utilities and infrastructure, says RECs are more valuable than critics make them out to be.

“It’s a positive thing,” he says. “Any RECs you buy absolutely help get more generation built. How much? It’s very hard to determine.”

Intel first bought credits in 2008 and since then has purchased a total of 4 million. Sedler won’t disclose how much Intel paid or which green producers sold the RECs. Sterling Planet handled the transactions.

RECs are just part of Intel’s environmental commitment, Sedler says. The company has spent $35 million since 2001 on cleaner-burning lighting for its chip plants and other eco- improvements. In January 2010, Intel announced it was putting solar panels on eight buildings.

Big Accolades

All the same, Intel is getting big accolades for buying its 1.4 million RECs in 2010. The company says it’s now cutting 1 million tons of carbon emissions from its environmental- footprint calculations. In October, Newsweek magazine named Intel one of the five greenest U.S. businesses. The same month, the EPA awarded Intel a third consecutive Green Power Leadership Award, which recognizes “exceptional achievement” in supporting renewable energy. The EPA gave 10 organizations awards for purchasing green power in 2010.

“We could put in 1 megawatt of solar, but it wouldn’t be a game changer,” Sedler says. For roughly the same price, Intel can say 1.4 million RECs cut about 1 million tons of carbon emissions compared with about 1,000 tons for solar.

The EPA says companies buying RECs are making a difference.

“This added revenue helps developers recover costs, pay off debt and help reduce project risk,” says Allison Dennis, communications manager for the EPA’s Green Power Partnership, which hands out the awards.

Sedler says Intel’s main goal is to spark more companies to follow its lead in promoting renewable energy; making a sizable cut in its own emissions calculations is a fringe benefit.

“The last thing we want to do is try to do something good and end up harming our reputation,” he says.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ben Elgin in San Francisco at [email protected]

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Gary Putka at [email protected] Or Michael Serrill at [email protected]

Study shows dam improvements help fish Last updated: December 23rd, 2010 08:42 PM (PST)

Improvements at all eight federal Snake and lower Columbia River dams boosted the safe migration of juvenile salmon and steelhead last year, according to a federal study.

Army Corps of Engineers officials said completion of passage improvements such as spillway weirs, also called fish slides, help speed young fish downstream past dams by keeping them near the water surface, where they naturally migrate.

For example, tests at Little Goose Dam on the Snake River found that 99.4 percent of yearling chinook, 99.8 percent of steelhead and 95.2 percent of sub-yearling chinook passed the dam safely.

"Almost all of the fish are coming through the dam safely now and we're on track to meet passage standards at all of the other projects," said Corps official Witt Anderson.

The assessment report says in-river survival of juvenile Snake River steelhead migrating to the ocean in 2009 reached its highest level in 12 years, a sign the fish are benefiting from improved surface passage.

The report describes the second year of progress by the Corps, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and Bonneville Power Administration in implementing NOAA-Fisheries' biological opinion for the federal Columbia River power system. The so-called bi-op outlines protections for fish affected by the federal dams.

According to the assessment, the agencies in 2009 reopened nearly 265 miles of spawning and other salmon and steelhead habitat that had been blocked by impassible culverts, diversions or other obstacles. Since 2005 the agencies have restored access to a total of 845 miles of habitat.

"Fish are returning in numbers we haven't seen in decades and to places they haven't been for decades," said Lorri Bodi of the Bonneville Power Administration.

The report also says the agencies in 2009 restored water to salmon and steelhead streams that otherwise dwindle or run dry when fish are returning to spawn.

The 190 cubic feet per second of flow restored to streams in the Columbia River Basin last year exceeds the average amount of water consumed by Portland and nearby cities, and the amount of water restored since 2005 totals more than three times the average water use of Seattle and Portland combined.

The report also says efforts to redistribute a large colony of Caspian terns in the Columbia River estuary helped reduce their predation on juvenile salmon and steelhead from about 15 million fish in 1999 to 6.4 million in 2009.

However, it says double-crested cormorant predation on the fish is a growing concern. Together cormorants and terns ate 17.5 million juvenile salmon and steelhead in 2009, about 15 percent of all those that reached the estuary.

2011 Hydropower Outlook By Russell Ray, Senior Associate Editor, Hydro Review | January 3, 2011 In the U.S., several federal and state agencies have pledged to support the licensing and development of new hydropower projects in joint agreements to streamline the process. One of the largest deployments of new hydropower generation in the U.S. is well underway and is expected to move much closer to commercial production in 2011.

Three of six run-of-river hydroelectric plants are under construction at existing dams on the Ohio River. American Municipal Power is building the projects to increase its use of renewable power and decrease its dependency on the volatile wholesale power market.

A run-of-river facility generates power from the natural flow and elevation of a river and does not require a large impoundment of water. Altogether, the six run-of-river projects will generate up to 350 MW of clean energy.

"The Ohio River dams represent a valuable, largely untapped resource of renewable power," said Marc Gerken, president and chief executive officer of AMP. "We're proud of these projects and glad to be starting construction on the third facility."

In September, AMP began construction of the 72 MW Smithland project, which is expected to begin commercial production in 2014. The $400 million project will create between 200 and 400 jobs during construction.

The other five run-of-river projects are: 105 MW Meldahl, 48 MW Robert C. Byrd, 35 MW Willow Island, 84 MW Cannelton and 49.5 MW Pike Island.

Construction of Cannelton began in July 2009. Officials broke ground on Meldahl, the largest of the six projects, in May 2010. Voith Hydro will supply turbines and generators for the first four run-of-river facilities under a $420 million contract.

Technology

By the end of 2011, hydropower producers should know more about the results of new research into the design of turbines that provide safer passage for fish. Ambitious innovations in fish- friendly turbine designs are being pursued in joint efforts between industry and government.

For example, the U.S. Corps of Engineers recently awarded a $10.9 million contract to Voith Hydro for the design and manufacture of a new runner for an aging turbine at Ice Harbor Lock and Dam on the Snake River.

Engineers from Voith and the Corps will collaborate on the design process, using computer modeling and tests with physical models to evaluate water flow and pressures. The benefits of their work will extend beyond Ice Harbor, as more than two dozen turbines at dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers will need to be replaced soon, according to the Corps.

"We want to take advantage of technology that wasn't around when the dams were constructed and design the most advanced runner available to help improve fish passage in the region," said Witt Anderson, director of programs for the Corps' Northwestern Division.

The contract is supported by a memorandum of understanding between the Departments of Energy and Interior to invest in clean, renewable hydropower projects with few environmental impacts.

"Our designs minimize the gaps between rotating and stationary parts where fish could get pinched," said Mark Garner, president and chief executive officer of Voith.

Also, Alden Research Laboratory is developing a new fish-friendly turbine that could lead to significant improvements in fish survival without a loss of generation.

The Electric Power Research Institute is funding the continued development with an award from DOE. A final engineering design and report should be completed in the first quarter of 2011.

Policy

A national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) that recognizes hydropower, incentives for the development of pumped-storage plants and tax credit parity for hydropower will continue to be chief objectives of the National Hydropower Association (NHA) in 2011.

Right now, incremental hydropower receives a production tax credit of 1 cent per kWh while producers of solar, wind, and biomass receive 2 cents per kWh.

"There are some bills in Congress that work to address the issue that hydro only receives half of the credit of other technologies," said Jeff Leahey, senior manager of government affairs for NHA. "These bills would take the existing tax structure and bump up the credit from 1 cent to 2 cents."

There are no incentives for the development of pumped-storage plants in the U.S., a form of energy deemed important to the future development of wind and solar power. Congress may adopt an investment tax credit to support such development.

"There are a couple of bills that would provide a 20 percent credit on the cost of development," Leahey said.

Also, the hydropower industry will be working hard in 2011 to get lawmakers on Capitol Hill to recognize hydro in a national RES. Some lawmakers contend hydro should not be used by utilities to meet the requirements of a national standard for renewable electricity because an RES

is designed to support new development and hydropower plants do not require support to continue operating. What's more, if hydro were allowed to count toward a national standard, it may discourage the development of other technologies.

"The other renewable energy industries are concerned that if all hydro was included, then you would be wiping out market share in certain areas of the country," Leahey said. "We certainly would in the Northwest, where there is 70 percent to 80 percent hydro."

One option calls for excluding existing hydropower capacity from an RES and including new capacity added to existing facilities, hydrokinetic power and small projects that don't require a dam.

Hydro: 411

The U.S. has seen a decline in hydro electricity production over the last couple of decades. The industry hopes to change that not by focusing on large-scale power plants, but on smaller projects and incremental improvements to existing facilities. Hydro advocates say that an additional 30 to 70 GW could be added to the electricity mix in the next decade with such a strategy. However, the big hold-up in hydro is the long, expensive permitting process. If the federal government doesn't streamline permitting for developers, it's unlikely that the U.S. will come close to adding that much capacity.

Canada, the second-largest producer of hydropower in the world, is also looking to expand the sector and continue exporting electricity to the U.S. Canada gets 60 percent of its electricity from hydro. But experts estimate that there is still over 160 GW of untapped potential in the country. Provinces like Ontario and British Columbia have expressed their intent in harnessing those resources in the coming years.

Much of the innovation in hydropower will come from companies developing wave, tidal and in- stream hydrokinetic devices. These technologies could provide tens of thousands of MW to coastal areas. But progress in this sector will be fairly slow; companies are running into serious technical and financial challenges. Most of the installations in 2011 will be small commercial or demonstration-scale, not utility-sized projects.

- Stephen Lacey, RenewableEnergyWorld.com.

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/01/2011-hydropower-outlook

Hydropower Study Targets Irrigation Canals January 6, 2011

Hydropower advocates spend a lot of time talking about the industry’s untapped potential.

They often point to the United States’ vast network of irrigation canals, and rightfully so.

Consider this: More than 60 million acres of crops, orchards and vineyards are irrigated by thousands of miles of irrigation canals in the United States.

But these are low-head sites and, until recently, the technology to feasibly extract grid-scale power from small volumes of flowing water didn’t exist.

Researchers, though, have made significant progress in the development of low-head turbine technologies. Today, several companies are experimenting with technologies capable of generating power from small amounts of water that drop as little as five feet.

These improvements mean the rushing water in irrigation canals can now be used to produce anywhere from 100 kW to 2 MW of clean energy.

Colorado has 3 million acres of irrigated land and is the nation’s third largest irrigation state, using more than 12 trillion gallons of water a day for irrigation, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The potential power that could be wrung from the state’s irrigation canals is being studied by Colorado State University and engineering firm Applegate Group Inc.

The study, funded by a $50,000 grant from the Colorado Department of Agriculture, will identify turbines that could generate power from irrigation water that drops between five feet and 30 feet. The study calls for a survey of roughly 250 ditch companies and individual ditch operators in Colorado.

“We’re identifying where hydropower could be applied in those irrigation channels,” said Dan Zimmerie, a mechanical engineering professor at CSU. “There are good places in the irrigation system that will generate significant amounts of power. But we need to explore this issue with utilities, the approval process, interconnection standards and potential revenue.”

Power producers and lawmakers are interested in expanding the use of hydropower and other renewable energy resources amid growing concern about climate change and efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, Colorado and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission agreed to a Memorandum of Understanding that will streamline the permitting process for small hydropower projects in Colorado.

The Colorado study is expected to tell us exactly how much power can be produced using low- head turbines in the state’s irrigation canals, said Lindsay George, a water resource engineer at Applegate.

“New low-head technologies have potential at sites previously considered unfeasible for hydro development because of a lack of significant elevation drop,” George said. “Irrigation canal drop and check structures, as well as existing diversion dams and outflows, may provide the drop necessary to implement these new low-head hydro technologies.”

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2011/01/hydropower-study-targets- irrigation-canals

Columbia Basin Herald

NHA president Munro plans new year

National Hydropower Association/courtesy photo Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., speaks in April during the National Hydropower Association's Hydropower Rally in Washington, D.C. The association's president, Andrew Munro, is standing in the background.

Posted: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 9:00 am | Updated: 12:53 pm, Mon Jan 10, 2011.

By Lynne Lynch Herald staff writer | 0 comments

EPHRATA - National Hydropower Association President Andrew Munro discussed the association's hydropower goals and what the new Republican majority Congress means to the association Friday.

Munro is currently serving his second term as the association's president.

He is also employed with Grant County PUD as the district's external affairs director.

This year, the association's external goals involve positioning hydropower as a preferred and renewable resource and to double hydropower capacity and jobs in the next 20 years, he said.

Munro also wants to advance a smarter licensing and permitting process to expand hydropower capacity.

"I call this a two-year process that is in line with a typical timeline for other resources a utility or entity would want to develop," he explained.

Within that timeline, there would be no need to change laws such as the Endangered Species Act or Clean Water Act.

The NHA is asking the government to function more effectively.

Smarter licensing permitting is going to be a big effort this year, he says.

"We've been doing the steps leading up to this," he said. "My first goal, the doubling of hydropower, there is a big opportunity here. The second goal, in order to help us achieve that, is asking for government and all players to work smarter."

The association's third external goal is to have a sustained, strategic communications effort.

"If you read the Wall Street Journal and talk to decision makers in DC, hydropower may not be the first thing they think of," he said. "We want to change that."

The NHA strives to provide facts and information to the public, so they can appreciate hydropower.

To do so, the association is about to launch a new Web site.

The NHA is also hiring an employee to handle communications in-house after several years of contracting the work.

He mentioned the Hydropower Improvement Act of 2010, which was jointly introduced by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., with four other co-sponsors.

Based on this year's new makeup of Congress, the NHA is evaluating the priority issues in that act, which was introduced in 2010.

NHA is considering whether or not to try to get the bill introduced in the House and the Senate, as the House passed an energy bill last year.

Munro also responded to the change in the Republican control of the House and the new leadership role of Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., as the Natural Resources Committee's chairman.

"This is excellent news for Grant County, Eastern Washington and all of the region," Munro said.

The Natural Resources Committee has jurisdiction over energy, future energy and natural resources the NHA is working to protect, he said.

"We're happy and pleased he's been selected as chairman," Munro commented. "It's a good opportunity for Eastern Washington that's going to benefit the interest of our customers and utility. He's been one of the strongest supporters of hydropower in the U.S. Congress."

Munro cited an example of Hastings' help in passing the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Munro also called Hastings well-respected by his peers in Washington, D.C. and very effective in hydropower issues.

ABC NEWS Bill Would Count Existing Dams as Renewable Energy

Montana legislators consider expanding renewable energy standard to include existing dams The Associated Press Post a Comment

By MATT VOLZ Associated Press

HELENA, Mont. January 11, 2011 (AP)

State lawmakers are considering a bill that would make it easier for utilities to meet the standard for renewable energy production, a proposal that conservationists say would make the standard meaningless.

The measure sponsored by Republican Sen. Debby Barrett, of Dillon, would allow electricity produced by large hydroelectric facilities to count toward state renewable resource requirements.

Montana utilities are required to procure 10 percent of their retail electricity sales from renewable resources. That jumps to 15 percent in 2015.

State law now counts only smaller hydroelectric facilities of 10 megawatts or less toward those requirements. Barrett's bill would make all existing dams and hydroelectric facilities eligible renewable energy resources, as long as they are not federal facilities.

About 40 percent of Montana's electricity comes from hydroelectric power, and the proposal would add approximately 1 gigawatt of existing power to the state renewable energy standard, said Kyla Wiens, an energy advocate for the Montana Environmental Information Center

The bill would add so much hydroelectric power that companies required to comply with the standard would not have to develop any new resources for the next 20 years, she said.

"This bill would essentially make the existing renewable energy standard meaningless," Wiens said. "If all this hydro power is added, there's no need to get any new renewable energy."

Barrett said the intent of the bill is to recognize that water is a renewable resource, and the measure should not be a disincentive to developing wind power or other renewable resources in the state.

"If Northwestern (Energy) or anybody else can afford to develop it on a level playing field, they should go ahead," Barrett said. "I would like a product produced economically so we can purchase it economically."

Barrett said she believes the incremental increases in the renewable energy standard are "smoke and mirrors" that ensures certain companies can make money while the taxpayers subsidize their renewable energy initiatives. Northwestern Energy, the state's largest utility, did not immediately return a call for comment.

The Senate Energy and Telecommunications Committee planned to hold a hearing on the bill Tuesday afternoon.