Word: hydros
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Wayne Krouse has a seductive idea: dam-free hydropower. In a year, his start-up, Hydro Green Energy of Houston, plans to have a pair of turbines pumping electricity from under the Mississippi River at Hastings, Minn.--a town willing to give a new idea a try. "Everybody likes a science experiment, and this is just a big science experiment," says Tom Montgomery, Hastings' public-works director. The barge-mounted turbines will be unconventional, but Krouse's design yields twice the energy of earlier versions--and doesn't require new dams, which take years to license...
...fast, Aquaman. Regulators and environmentalists want a long look at dam-free hydro. Krouse knows that what he calls the "sushi problem"--turbines slashing passing fish--will be a big concern. He says fish whacks will be minimal...
...Alternative-energy developers are studying numerous small hydro projects, mostly along the coasts. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has issued 11 three-year "preliminary permits" for hydro, with installations at locations including Puget Sound in Washington, San Francisco's Golden Gate and New York City's East River. An additional 38 applications are pending. Hydro developer Verdant Power Inc. already has fish-monitoring equipment in the East River, with plans to install two turbines in November and four more early next year...
Such coastal projects harness the tides. Krouse will dip his turbines in the Mississippi 1,000 miles from the sea to end-run the regulatory coastal maze that hydro developers face. Krouse thinks he can move quickly by piggybacking his project on the city of Hastings' existing FERC hydropower license...
...damming rivers or defacing rural landscapes. For the same output, they say, a solar panel array or wind farm would need 200-500 times as much land as an average coal or nuclear plant. Also, because wind-farm and solar outputs fluctuate, they must be backed up by coal, hydro or nuclear power...