Portland waterworks will be turned into a mini-hydro

In most large and medium-sized cities of any country there is a centralized water supply. Pipes of sufficiently large diameter pass through a huge amount of water that residents use. At the same time, the energy of the flow of water is not used at all, and this needs to be rectified - so representatives of the American company Lucid Energy believe. It was this company that offered the authorities of the city of Portland, Oregon, a project to turn the aqueduct into a generator of electrical energy. The project was named LucidPipe Power System.

The project implementation is not too complicated : according to the plan, it is necessary to replace some parts of the pipes with sections with mini-generators that work under the influence of water. On this section of the pipe are placed four 107-cm pipe. Preliminary calculations show that the turbines do not slow down the flow of water, so that problems with reducing the throughput of the pipeline will not arise.


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As far as can be understood, the power of such a mini-hydroelectric power station, a plot with four turbines, is 200 kW. The total capacity of Portland's “pipeline power plant” after installing all the test sites will be 1,100 megawatt-hours of energy per year, which is enough to supply approximately 150 households. This is not much, but the system can be scaled. if necessary. According to representatives of the project, for the first 20 years, the profits earned from the sale of “piped energy” will go to the investment company, in part to the municipality. After 20 years, the municipality gets the right to buy the system.

Currently, a similar system operates in Riverside, USA, but the project in Portland, a much larger settlement, promises to show interesting results.