
Water in Oregon pipeline is tapped for electricity - jonbaer
http://www.pennenergy.com/articles/pennenergy/2015/01/lucid-energy-announces-portland-water-pipeline-now-producing-renewable-energy.html
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bottled_poe
Just had to post this: [http://what-if.xkcd.com/91/](http://what-
if.xkcd.com/91/)

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Animats
California has a similar, but much larger, hydroelectric plant where the
California Aqueduct reaches the Los Angeles basin.[1] It's reversible; it can
be used either for power generation and pumping. LA Water and Power usually
pumps water uphill late at night when power is cheap, then lets it down in
midafternoon when power is expensive.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castaic_Power_Plant](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castaic_Power_Plant)

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alex_duf
Wait what ?

If it is what I think it is, that would mean extracting energy from the
water's movement, movement that most likely has been created via pumping.
So... moving energy from pumping back to energy, with most likely a big loss
in the process. Anyone to explain me what I didn't get ?

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joeyo
Presumably Portland's reservoirs are located somewhere uphill (in the Cascades
even?) so this would be exploiting a natural gradient.

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meritt
The reservoirs are indeed elevated around here -- washington park, mt tabor,
powell butte -- so it's all gravity fed.

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ars
They can do this in New York as well, they get 95% of their water from gravity
fed sources - so much that they have to install periodic pressure-breaks as
the water comes down from mountains to avoid too much pressure in the system.

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therealdrag0
> "each has an individual output capacity between 20 and 100 kW"

That's a pretty good amount, yeah? Enough for a number of houses.

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pstrateman
"The project will generate approximately $2 million worth of renewable energy
capacity over the 20-year PPA period, enough electricity for more than 150
homes in Portland."

100kW * 24 * 365.25 * 20 = 17532000 kWh over it's lifetime.

$2,000,000.00/17532000 ~= $0.11/kWh.

Not bad for renewable power, absolutely terrible for hydroelectric ($0.01-0.03
/ kWh on average).

~~~
therealdrag0
And that's assuming full capacity (100kW)... That's too bad.

But I don't quite understand what you're doing with the $. You're taking how
much it'll generate in kWh vs how much they say it'll generate in worth of
energy and getting a $/kWh. But isn't the $kWh just determined by the market?

Why not: 2,000,000 / .02 (your number) = 66,666,666 kWh over the lifetime of
the 'project', not individual units, which has 4 turbines (this is a similar
value to yours x4).

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pstrateman
You're right, that's not a fair comparison.

(I'd guess the real cost of power from this is >$1.00/kWh btw since it will
almost certainly not last 20 years...)

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dang
We changed the url from [http://phys.org/news/2015-02-oregon-pipeline-
electricity.htm...](http://phys.org/news/2015-02-oregon-pipeline-
electricity.html), which points to this. If anyone can suggest a substantive
article on the subject that isn't a press release, we can change it again.

~~~
gus_massa
The same new was submitted a few days ago from a different source that has a
little more of information.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9041249](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9041249)
(2 points, 9 days ago, 0 comments)

