Excerpts
SUMMARY: Hydroelectricity -- using the flow of water to generate power -- has long been a small but key source of renewable energy. How can cities around the country better harness that potential? A startup in Portland, Oregon, has developed a system that gets energy from gravity-fed drinking water pipes to produce electricity without any environmental impact. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Industrial engineer Susan Priddy takes advantage of rare sunny days in Portland to ride her Harley to work. And in her job as director of operations for Lucid Energy, she takes advantage of the regions’s abundant water supply. This small start-up has developed a new technology.
SUSAN PRIDDY, Lucid Energy: How’s it going today?
MAN: Very well.
SUSAN PRIDDY: What is our energy coming out today?
MAN: Right now, we’re running about 40 kilowatts.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Priddy and Lucid engineers were monitoring the energy generated by drinking water as it flows through turbines integrated into these pipes. Lucid has designed the first hydroelectric system designed to harness the energy in gravity-fed drinking water pipes found throughout Portland and in many municipalities around the country.
-----
GREGG SEMLER, Lucid Energy: The advantage of the Lucid pipe system is that we produce electricity all the time, around the clock, without any environmental impact. So, it’s very unusual to find sources of energy that you can produce electricity without any environmental impact in today’s world.
HARI SREENIVASAN: And how does it compare to the renewable energy sources that most of us are familiar with today, solar and wind?
GREGG SEMLER: When you compare the cost of the Lucid pipe power system with other traditional sources of renewables, like wind and solar, to generate the same amount of energy that Lucid is generating would cost three of four times more for the same amount of energy.
No comments:
Post a Comment