New England startup seeks to tap the Mississippi for power

[jpak]

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/business/stories.nsf/manufacturingtechnology/story/FA03AA4C57AC13418625741E000B7EFF?OpenDocument

For more than a century, the Mississippi River has been one of the nation's most-important transportation corridors, a muddy, winding pathway for moving bulk commodities such as grain and coal and other goods.

Now, a New England startup company wants to harness the mighty river for a secondary purpose — generating electricity.

The company, Free Flow Power Corp., is pursuing a $3 billion plan to install thousands of small electric turbines in the river bed, reaching from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico that would collectively generate 1,600 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 1.5 million homes.

Gloucester, Mass.-based Free Flow Power is one of a number of developers of so-called hydrokinetic projects, defined as those that produce electricity from river currents or ocean waves and tides — not dams.

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[Zachstar]

1. Sounds complicated to maintain.

For 3 billion can't one install another massive solar farm in the west?

[ConcernedCanuk]

2. River currents run 24/7 - sun/cloud/ rain/snow control solar.

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There are up and coming small generators that can be put in a small stream - sorta look like a sump-pump with an alternator on top of them.

Run PVC(4"-6" diameter)upstream to a narrow spot to get the "head" for the turbine downstream and voila - ya got hydro power 24 hours a day with no dam, and pretty much non-invasive ecologically.

[Zachstar]

3. For 3 billion dollars?

LoL

[happyslug]

4. Given the size and water flow of the Mississippi, 3 billion is cheap.

Remember this would be your base load electricity, what Solar and wind and add to. My question is how many Coal and Nuclear power plants will this replace? All of them? Need more details but it is possible.

In Western Pennsylvania we have several Lock and dams build by the Corp of Engineers for transportation purposes, i.e. barges going up and down the rivers. In the 1970s these went up to any local municipality for conversion to electric generation. One municipality took a bid on all of them on the grounds it bordered the rivers and thus could make a claim on all of the river's dams. I believe this was Clariton, a run down old steel town desperate for any assistance. The story goes that it refused to carry through with the conversion do to its council members being paid off by the local Electric Company which did NOT want competition. Thus since the 1970s these dams have left they water flow through them without generating electrical power. Now this would be continuous power, for the Lock and Dams are NOT for flood prevention but to maintain pools of water for shipping. Thus if these dams are ever hooked up to electrical power it would generate a good bit of electrical power.

My point is there is a lot of power is catching water flowing downstream. It can solve a lot of our coming electrical shortage (i.e. Natural Gas shortage, leading to an Electrical Shortage). For 3 billion is might even be cheap. A billion dollar is not much anymore. Even a person who earned nothing by Minimum wage will earn 60% of a Million Dollars in their life time (And most people will earn more than a Million dollar in their lifetime). Do to inflation over the last 40 years a billion dollars is not much money any more, remember the War in Iraq has cost as 3-4 TRILLION Dollars (i.e. 3000-4000 Billion Dollars). Do not get hang up on a billion dollar it is not much given the level of power one can get from such an series of installations.

[Dead_Parrot]

5. $1.875 per watt, and (theoretically) 100% capacity?

It would be nice to know the maintenance costs and unit lifetime, but assuming they're comparable to wind turbines that's stupidly cheap.

[ConcernedCanuk]

6. No, the above unit is between $2,000 - $4,000 depending on system and options.

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By "small stream" - I mean something you can jump or walk across not much more than a regular ditch.

Definitions vary, but up here a stream runs into a creek, a creek runs into a river, stream being the smallest of the waterways.

Turbines for the Mississippi would be like submersible sump-pumps - where the whole unit would lay on the riverbed, and the hydro lines to shore would feed to main power line.

As indicated in the article, these units are fairly small, and would require thousands of such units hooked in parallel to the main grid.

In essence it IS a sump-pump in reverse

Instead of using hydro to pump water

It's using water to pump hydro!

24/7

And being constant,

would not require the huge storage(battery) systems solar does

[One_Life_To_Give]

7. Sedementation Problems?

Maybe they have some new thechnology to get around the problem. But I would think there are a whole lot of better choices than the Mississippi.