Issuance of four preliminary federal permits has launched a developer’s plans to install as many as 160,000 low-impact turbine generators on the Mississippi River to produce up to 1,600 MW of electricity without dams. Free Flow Power Inc. received the permits this month from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to study installing turbines at a Louisiana site.
The company has applied for 59 such FERC permits for sites from St. Louis to the mouth of the Mississippi. The permits give Free Flow the exclusive right to evaluate the sites for three years. After studying the sites, the company plans to apply for FERC licenses to install and operate turbine arrays, says Dan Irvin, CEO of Free Flow, Manchester, Mass.
Free Flow wants to move quickly, and Irvin hopes to halve the typical five-year time frame to license hydro facilities. The project will cost $3 billion to develop.
Wayne Krouse, CEO of Houston-based Hydro Green Energy, which has also applied for preliminary permits for six sites on the Mississippi to study installation of the low-impact, or hydrokinetic, turbines is skeptical of Free Flow’s plans, saying it appears Free Flow is trying to “site bank” and prevent others from developing the locations.
But Irvin says Free Flow fully intends to develop the sites. Doing so is the only way to recoup the high cost of going through the licensing process, he says. The project’s size also should allow Free Flow to sell its electricity at competitive rates, Irvin says. Each site is near a population center and existing power lines.
Next month, the company will take an instrumented turbine prototype to Alden Labs, Holden, Mass., to test how it works in real water conditions and to learn how to design the turbines more efficiently, says Chris Williams, Free Flow chief technology officer. Alden will modify one of its test flumes to mimic conditions up to 10 ft per second, says Greg Allen, the lead engineer for the tests.
Next, Free Flow will install the turbines at small-scale sites, such as siphons along the Mississippi River or at old mill facilities, to make sure that they operate in real-world conditions, Williams says.
“You can’t simulate algae growing or a picnic table coming down the river,” Williams says.
The prototype turbine is being designed and manufactured by a combination of in-house and outside engineers, including Springfield, N.J.-based Sigma Design Co., Malta, N.Y.-based Advanced Energy Conversion and Norwich, Vt.-based Turbo Solutions Engineering.
The turbine is a rim-driven generator, with magnets attached to the rotor and generator coils located in an outer ring. The generator uses a start-up bearing and a combination of magnetic levitation and hydrodynamic bearings. At a flow of 9 ft per second, each turbine should produce 20 kW of power.
Free Flow Power plans to place six to 12 turbines in arrays on pilings, 25 ft off the bottom of the river and at least 40 ft below the surface to stay clear of ships and boats. The exact configuration of each site has yet to be determined. The company will only use a portion of the permitted area, Irvin says.
The recently permitted site in Iberville Parish, La., would have 1,100 turbines with a capacity of up to 22 MW.
Free Flow is still interviewing companies to manufacture and install the turbines, Williams says.
