Bored with naming projects after towns, dams or rivers, one hydropower developer has named about a dozen proposed projects after movies, songs and a Saturday Night Live play-dough character.
A relative newcomer to the hydro industry, Hydro Green Energy, started out in 2002 as a developer of hydrokinetic devices, which derive power from underwater river currents or ocean waves.
In fact, Hydro Green is the only company that has obtained permission from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to install and commercially operate an in-river hydrokinetic project. It did so by convincing the City of Hastings, Minnesota, to revise an existing license in 2009 to allow Hydro Green to install hydrokinetic devices downstream of the city's existing facility.
Although it recently set aside efforts to build more hydrokinetic projects, Hydro Green continues to think outside the box by seeking to license a new prototype of hydropower facilities at locks and dams owned by the US Army Corps of Engineers on the Allegheny, Ohio, Monongahela and Mississippi rivers.
As with the Hastings project, most of the work building the 46 proposed hydro projects would be done off site and would require less time than usual to install. Rather than creating reservoirs, the Hydro Green projects would use conduits with turbines that would operate in run-of-river mode.
The innovative thinking of these developers is even more evident in the names they gave their most recent set of proposed projects -- Disco Kryptonite, Mr. Bill, Killer Bee, Lone Star, Mad Max, Penguin, Octopus and Project Invincible.
Hydro Green's creativity comes from "running a small start-up company and tackling our aggressive development plan," said the Mark Stover, Hydro Green's vice president of corporate affairs.
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