Pipes Harvest Electricity from Running Water

An ingenious new system captures energy as water flows through the city's pipes, creating hydropower without the negative environmental effects of something like a dam in Portland

If you live in Portland, your lights may now be partly powered by your drinking water. An ingenious new system capturesenergyas water flows through the city's pipes, creating hydropower without the negative environmental effects of something like a dam.

Small turbines in the pipes spin in the flowing water, and send that energy into a generator.

"It's pretty rare to find a new source of energy where there's no environmental impact," saysGregg Semler, CEO of Lucid Energy, the Portland-based startup that designed the new system. "But this is inside a pipe, so no fish or endangered species are impacted. That's what's exciting."

Forwater utilities, which use massive amounts ofelectricity, the system can make it cheaper to provide clean drinking water. Utilities can either use the power themselves or sell it to a city as a new source of revenue.

"We have a project in Riverside, California, where they're using it to power streetlights at night," Semler says. "During the day, whenelectricity pricesare high, they can use it to offset some of their operating costs."

In Portland, one of the city's main pipelines now uses Lucid's pipes to make power that's sent into the grid. Though the system can't generate enough energy for an entire city, the pipes can power individual buildings like a school or library, or help offset a city's totalenergy bill. Unlike wind or solar power, the system can generate electricity at any time of day, regardless of weather, since the pipes always have water flowing through them.

The pipes can't generate power in every location; they only work in places where water is naturally flowing downward with gravity (if water is being pumped, the system would waste energy). But they have another feature that can be used anywhere: The pipes have sensors that can monitor water, something that utilities couldn't do in the past.

"We madeelectrical infrastructurereally smart over the last 20 to 25 years, but the same hasn't happened in water," Semler says. He points to the example of a pipe that burst nearUCLAlast year, wasting a staggering 20 million gallons of water in the middle of California's crippling drought.

"They didn't really know that the pipe burst until somebody from UCLA called," Semler explains. "Our pipe can get indicators like pressure, a leading indicator for whether a pipe is leaking or not. So before it bursts and before we waste all the water, there areonboard information systemsthat water agencies can get to more precisely manage their infrastructure."

Source: FastCoExist

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• Technology
• Energy
• Pipes and Pipelines